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A Life Guided by Reason

In #2281, I explain how Veritula helps you make rational decisions – in other words, how to live rationally, ie, a life guided by reason. (I use the words ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ synonymously. The same goes for ‘unreason’ and ‘irrationality’.)

A life guided by reason defies the dominant, Kantian philosophy of our age. Ayn Rand summarized that philosophy as, “Be rational, except when you don’t feel like it.”¹ In other words, it says to mix reason and unreason; to stray from rationality arbitrarily; to be rational only sometimes. It claims that there is a necessary clash between reason and emotion. It is an attack on reason, an attempt to do the impossible – and it leads to dissatisfaction with yourself and conflict with others.

If you are rational only sometimes, if you stray from rationality arbitrarily, then you are irrational. There is no third option. This conclusion can be proven easily: if you tried to stray from rationality non-arbitrarily, ie, if you tried to come up with a considered argument for straying from rationality, you could only do so by following the steps in #2281. And those steps are the application of rationality again.

So it’s impossible to stray from rationality rationally. There is no gray area between reason and unreason. Rationality has an all-or-nothing character. This does not mean that reason has to snuff out all emotion. On the contrary: there is no necessary clash between rationality on the one hand and emotion on the other. Rationality means finding unanimous consent between emotion, explicit thought, inexplicit thought, and any other kind of idea.

If you follow the steps in #2281 consistently, then you are always rational. A life worth living is one guided exclusively by reason. Consistent application of rationality may be difficult at first, but with practice, it will get easier. Master it, and you will have a fighting chance of becoming what David Deutsch calls a beginning of infinity.

What is wrong with Pokemon? 😂

Marie Kondo says everything should have a home.

I think part of the problem is that I don’t have a dedicated final place where everything lives. I think creating and designating these spaces would go a long way, as I wouldn’t need to work out a place to put every item each time.

I think part of the problem is that I don’t have a dedicated final place where everything lives. I think creating and designating these spaces would go a long way, as I wouldn’t need to work out a place to put every item each time.

I think part of the problem is that I don’t have a dedicated finally place where everything lives. I think creating and designating these spaces would go a long way, as I wouldn’t need to work out a place to put every item each time.

It may be the case that food and dopaminergic substances decrease my threshold for what problems I feel are interesting enough to tackle at a given moment, including tidying up.

It may be that case that food and dopaminergic substances decrease my threshold for what problems I feel are interesting enough to tackle at a given moment, including tidying up.

This leads me to believe that my untidiness may have to do with physiological lethargy, and that increasing availability of biological energy may contribute to a solution it.

I notice that I tend to work harder at being tidy when I am well fed, or have consumed dopaminergic substances like nicotine.

I’ve noticed that I have no problem keeping shared spaces tidy, which I suspect is driven by inexplicit ideas related to maintaining relationships, rather than understanding the underlying value in maintaining a tidy space.

I struggle keeping my private spaces as tidy as I would like.

The Open Society

This is the political philosophy of Critical Rationalism, detailed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. An open society is one in which each individual is largely enabled to make their own personal decisions, as opposed to a tribal or collectivist society. It replaces the justificationist political question, "Who should rule?", with the fallibilist question: "How can we structure our institutions so that we can remove bad rulers and bad policies without violence?". In this view, democracy is not "rule by the people" (an essentialist definition) but is valued as the only known institutional mechanism for error-correction and leadership change without bloodshed.

The Open Society

This is the political philosophy of Critical Rationalism, detailed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. An open society is one in which each individual is confronted with their own personal decisions, as opposed to a tribal or collectivist society. It replaces the justificationist political question, "Who should rule?", with the fallibilist question: "How can we structure our institutions so that we can remove bad rulers and bad policies without violence?". In this view, democracy is not "rule by the people" (an essentialist definition) but is valued as the only known institutional mechanism for error-correction and leadership change without bloodshed.

Fallibilism

This is the philosophical position that all human knowledge—every belief, theory, and observation—is conjectural, incomplete, and potentially mistaken. It holds that there is no conclusive justification and no rational certainty for any belief. Fallibilism is distinct from skepticism. Skepticism argues that because certainty is impossible, knowledge is impossible. Fallibilism agrees that certainty is impossible but denies that this invalidates knowledge. Fallibilism holds that people can and do possess real, objective knowledge, and that people can improve it through a process of error correction.

The Open Society

This is the political philosophy of Critical Rationalism, detailed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. It is defined as a society "in which an individual is confronted with personal decisions," as opposed to a closed, "tribal or collectivist society". It replaces the justificationist political question, "Who should rule?", with the "fallibilist" question: "How can we structure our institutions so that we can remove bad rulers and bad policies without violence?". In this view, democracy is not "rule by the people" (an essentialist definition) but is valued as the only known institutional mechanism for error-correction and leadership change without bloodshed.

Justificationism

The mistaken philosophical tradition holding that knowledge must be "justified" (i.e., proven, supported, or made probable) by appealing to an ultimate, infallible authority. Critical Rationalism identifies this entire approach as logically untenable, as any demand for justification leads to an inescapable logical trap known as the Münchhausen Trilemma: either an infinite regress (every justification needs a justification), circularity (the belief justifies itself), or dogmatism (the justification stops at a "self-evident" belief). Critical Rationalism is a non-justificationist philosophy; it rejects the entire quest for justified, certain foundations and replaces it with an emphasis on criticism and error correction.

Political Holism

Synonymous with large-scale social engineering, this is the political program that follows from Historicism. It is the attempt to remodel an entire society from a central blueprint, based on a historicist prophecy of an "ideal" state. Popper argued this program is both violent and irrational. It is violent because it requires the suppression of all dissent to enact the central plan, and it is irrational because when an entire system is changed at once, it becomes impossible to trace the consequences of any single action, making it impossible to learn from mistakes.

Historicism

The mistaken belief that history is governed by discoverable, large-scale "laws of history" or "powerful historical trends". This belief leads to the idea of unconditional historical prophecy, which is anti-rational and politically disastrous, as seen in the philosophies of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. It is contrasted with the "piecemeal" method of making specific, conditional predictions.

The mistaken belief that history is governed by discoverable, large-scale "laws of history" or "powerful historical trends". This belief leads to the idea of unconditional historical prophecy, which is anti-rational and politically disastrous, as seen in the philosophies of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. It is contrasted with the "piecemeal" method of making specific, conditional predictions.

This could lead to a cool knowledge graph feature down the line, where users could see how ideas might relate across discussions, and which ideas are referred to the most.

Idea: Links within Veritula could be made bidirectional. While viewing an idea, users could see all the ideas that refer to it. This could be displayed as a list of backlinks at the bottom of the idea’s page.

The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.

This is how relating discussions works currently. For instance, if I start a discussion on Bitcoin, I might want to connect it to the existing discussion on Zcash. At present, the only way to achieve this is by adding a link to the Zcash discussion within my new Bitcoin discussion.

I suspect you would agree with me that this approach to how discussions interact isn’t really an issue. I also think it wouldn’t be an issue for independently published ideas, for the same reasons.

Note: This has lead me to the idea that links within Veritula could be bidirectional. Each idea could have an option to display all other ideas that refer to it. I will submit this as a top-level idea in this thread.

The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.

This is how relating discussions works currently. For instance, if I start a discussion on Bitcoin, I might want to connect it to the existing discussion on Zcash. At present, the only way to achieve this is by adding a link to the Zcash discussion within my new Bitcoin discussion.

I suspect you would agree with me that this approach to how discussions interact isn’t really an issue. I also think it wouldn’t be an issue for independently published ideas, for the same reasons.