Search Ideas

Finding quiet places in a city is indeed doable, but it's hard to even come close to guaranteeing success. There's no way to sample an apartment for 24 hours before moving in. It comes down to scoping it out, reading reviews, interviewing other residents if you can, then signing the lease and hoping for the best. If it's a bad fit, moving again is a huge, costly hassle.

I would not say I care for rural America. It sounds nice on the one hand, but conflicts with my anti-hermit hangup (I don't want to be isolated from society, at least not too much...). My vague ideal has always been: "big city in the near distance." Agreed that too quiet is a problem but that's trivial to solve compared to too loud.

I do not have a consistent 9am obligation now, no. But my implicit hope here is to find lasting solutions. I expect to have morning obligations again one day, maybe very soon.

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.

From #1497, emphasis mine:

Discussion title: problem
Top-level ideas in the discussion: proposed solutions
Nested ideas: criticisms, counter-criticisms, and further solutions

This is what I was going off. Did I misunderstand #1497?

#1497

Would it be better to make them all root ideas?

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:
https://libertythroughreason.com/experimental-controls-arent-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?

They are separate ideas, and the latter ideas depend on their formers. If there is a flaw in former ideas, they apply to latter ideas, but if there is a flaw in latter ideas, they don’t necessarily apply to the former. So arranging them like this was intentional, to respect that hierarchy.

They are seperate ideas, and the latter ideas depend on the former. If there is a flaw in former ideas, they apply to latter ideas, but if there is a flaw in latter ideas, they don’t necessarily apply to the former. So arranging them like this was intentional, to respect that hierarchy.

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.

Progress does not require a complete ranking of every live explanation. If B has a fatal flaw while no fatal flaw is currently known in A or C, the flaw in B is enough to reject B while A and C both remain live. There does not need to be one property that all three explanations possess to different degrees.

Related: #4902, #5114

Take the same explanation in two possible realities. The explanation has the same content and the same HTV in both, but it can correspond to one reality and fail to correspond to the other. HTV alone therefore cannot determine correspondence.

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.

An explanation can be harder to vary than a rival and still contain a fatal flaw of another kind. Unless every possible fatal flaw is itself a form of ETV, HTV cannot comprehensively determine which explanation should be rejected.

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.)