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Not to be nitpicky, especially since you ended up agreeing, but #5234 now has a pending criticism (yours), yet you acted on the idea. (Or rather, on the suggestion implied by it.) Acting on an idea with pending criticisms is technically the definition of irrationality on V.
I’m purposely not marking this a criticism so the flags don’t flip.
Idea: rational discussion graph with recursive criticism evaluation, like Veritula does now. Except the ideas are programs, not natural-language text. And they execute when they have no pending criticisms.
I tried this for a few days recently. By day three or four I went to bed at around 6am and woke up at 2pm. Didn’t feel great the rest of the day. Went back to a more regular sleep schedule after that and feeling better now.
You can structure discussions any way you like as long as you make sure the structure won’t break criticism chains.
Comments are for commentary or criticism, not elaborations on the same idea. The same idea shouldn’t be spread over multiple posts. That breaks criticism chains.
Veritula threads don’t work like Twitter/X threads, where people post elaborations on the same idea in comments. They used to have to do that because Twitter enforced a character limit. Now they still do it by tradition. And I’m guessing it’s an adjustment coming to Veritula.
If you realize you need to add more info to an existing idea, put it in a revision, not a comment. Again, #5250 seems like a revision of #5249. The revision of #5249 would then be a combination of both.
Possibly yeah. It doesn’t look like you were going off that. #5246 isn’t a proposed solution. Neither is #5250. That’s an elaboration on #5249.
But the UI won’t reflect that automatically. Now you have to remember which threads have this structure and which don’t. Will you remember that, say, six months from now?
Experimental Controls Aren’t What You Think:
This approach breaks search functions, where the system only goes off the ‘Criticized’ flag. Now the system shows some ideas as rationally adoptable even though they aren’t.
But the UI won’t reflect that automatically. Now you have to remember which threads have structure and which don’t. Will you remember that, say, six months from now?
There’s no need to single out corroboration or verisimilitude as special kinds of criticism.
Preference formation using either can easily be reduced to the method of counting pending criticisms:
Idea A fails to survive two tests.
Idea B fails to survive only one of the two.
Idea C says: I have only A and B; I don’t have time to create another; although both are false, I have to act; so for now I prefer B since at least it passes a test A doesn’t.
If idea C has no pending criticisms, then we should adopt it. (And thus ‘transitively’ adopt B.)
We can rationally prefer A over B if A has no pending criticisms whereas B has at least one.
The property you mention is the existence of pending criticisms.
You can still prefer A over B if neither has pending criticisms. The “if and only if” is too strict.
There’s a risk in posting follow-up thoughts as nested comments. The risk is that criticism chains won’t bubble up far enough.
If you want to add more information to an idea, I suggest revising it.
We can rationally prefer A over B if and only if A has no pending criticisms whereas B has at least one.
The property you mention is the existence of pending criticisms.
Preference formation is a computational task. (#5255) To claim we’ve understood a computational task, we must have programmed it (Deutsch). Popper never programmed it, so he didn’t understand it.
(To his credit though, he got pretty technical in defining verisimilitude, logical vs. empirical content, etc.)
Consider that preference formation is an engineering problem:
And if it is, consider also that maybe it’s worth staying away from concepts like HTV, which we have no idea how to program:
The task is to write an algorithm that takes two ideas (eg in the form of strings of characters) and returns the preferable one.
How would one go about writing that?
I think it’d be fine to start with obviously wrong answers to that question and then incrementally correct errors. For example, an algorithm that favors the idea with fewer words. (A bit like Occam’s razor.) That’d be fine as long as one wrote working code.
Pavel Tichý and David Miller independently proved in 1974 that Popper’s definition of verisimilitude leads to a contradiction. Explanation:
Let us suppose that A and B are both false, and that A’s truth content exceeds B’s. Let a be a true sentence entailed by A but not by B. Let f be any falsehood entailed by A. Since A entails both a and f the conjunction, a&f is a falsehood entailed by A, and so part of A’s falsity content. If a&f were also part of B’s falsity content B would entail both a and f. But then it would entail a contrary to the assumption. Hence a&f is in A’s falsity content and not in B’s. So A’s truth content cannot exceeds B’s without A’s falsity content also exceeding B’s.
Suppose now that B’s falsity content exceeds A’s. Let g be some falsehood entailed by B but not by A, and let f, as before, be some falsehood entailed by A. The sentence f→g is a truth, and since it is entailed by g, is in B’s truth content. If it were also in A’s then both f and f→g would be consequences of A and hence so would g, contrary to the assumption. Thus A’s truth content lacks a sentence, f→g, which is in B’s. So B’s falsity content cannot exceeds A’s without B’s truth content also exceeding A’s. The relationship depicted in Diagram 4 simply cannot obtain: in this sense, that picture is an “impossible” one, like those in Escher’s famous drawings.
Popper says to prefer ideas that are better corroborated, more truthlike. I wrote about this recently, pasting it here:
Corroboration was meant to help us form rational preferences between ideas. From The Logic of Scientific Discovery (pp. 281-282):
We can sometimes rationally justify the preference for a theory in the light of its corroboration, that is, of the present state of the critical discussion of the competing theories, which are critically discussed and compared from the point of view of assessing their nearness to the truth (verisimilitude). The current state of this discussion may, in principle, be reported in the form of their degrees of corroboration.
Specifically, corroboration helps you form a rational preference between two theories that have both been shown to be false while there are no known alternatives. From Conjectures and Refutations (p. 318):
… even after t2 has been refuted in its turn, we can still say that it is better than t1, for although both have been shown to be false, the fact that t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass may be a good indication that the falsity-content of t1 exceeds that of t2 while its truth-content does not. Thus we may still give preference to t2, even after its falsification, because we have reason to think that it agrees better with the facts than did t1.
That “t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass” means t2 is better corroborated than t1.
The idea ‘I’m located in a hemisphere’ is ‘easy to vary’ as to which hemisphere but it’s true, meaning it corresponds to reality.
HTV and correspondence are orthogonal.
That said I still think you should go see a sleep doctor, Tyler.
Found this article illuminating (emphasis mine):
The gradual loss of energy during the day produces a drive to sleep in order to restore that energy. This is known as the homeostatic sleep drive. If the homeostatic process were the only one involved, a person would wake up fully energized and then gradually wind down over the course of the day, like a battery losing power. This would mean an uneven level of alertness during the day, with dangerously low alertness in the afternoon and evening. To counterbalance this, the SCN also regulates alertness by what is known as the circadian process. As the day goes on, and energy winds down, the SCN compensates for this by sending a stronger alertness signal to the brain and body. This alertness signal reaches a peak in the two hours just before bedtime. This zone of maximum alertness is known as the “forbidden zone for sleep” since the alertness signal makes sleep nearly impossible during that zone. When the usual bedtime is reached, the SCN begins to turn down its alertness signal to allow the body to sleep.
The article is on “Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder”. I’m obviously no doctor so don’t take anything I say as advice or diagnosis. But from what you’ve said, I wonder if you have that. I think I have the same issue.
The article goes into several causes you could look into. For example, it says exposure to blue light in the morning can help reset one’s internal clock. But that requires a special type of cell on the retina. If those cells don’t work properly, then as far as your internal clock is concerned, you’re effectively blind.