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Core Moral Virtues (influenced by Ayn Rand and CR)

• Rationality: The commitment to the ongoing deliberate use of conjecture and criticism.

• Honesty: A refusal to evade one's thoughts, a commitment to searching for one's own errors, and a refusal to fake reality to others.

• Integrity: The refusal to permit a breach between one's best ideas and one's actions.

• Independence: The acceptance of one's own mind as the first and final executor of rationality within their own lives.

• Justice: The application of rationality in judging ideas, people, and actions and acting on those evaluations proportionately.

• Productiveness: The application of rationality to sustaining and improving one's life and circumstances.

• Pride: An insatiable drive to find and fix errors in one's character, knowledge, and creations. “Moral Ambitiousness” as Ayn Rand puts it.

Need a search form per discussion.

Please add a ‘first, previous, next, last’ navigation thing to the top of the activity feed page and similar pages. Currently I need to scroll to the bottom to go to a different page.

The Open Society

The concept of an 'Open Society' is central to the political philosophy of Critical Rationalism, detailed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. An open society is characterized by individualism, where personal choice and responsibility are paramount, in contrast to a closed society (e.g., tribal or collectivist) which demands the subordination of the individual to the group. The theory 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 changing policy and leadership without violence.

Fallibilism

This is the philosophical position that all human knowledge—every belief, theory, and observation—is conjectural, tentative, potentially incomplete, and potentially mistaken. It holds that there cannot be any conclusive justification or rational certainty for anything we might believe to be true (including observations).

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.

This functionality is pretty standard across apps. You can be removed from Discord servers, Telegram channels, etc without warning or reason at any time. People generally know and accept this. If they still put in effort, that’s on them.

That depends on a bunch of factors, including their relationship with the discussion owner, into which Veritula has no visibility.

But then invitees might not put as much effort into those discussions.

That risk could be clearly communicated in the UI.

But that sucks. Maybe someone works hard and submits a bunch of ideas only to lose access to them all.

Maybe you remove them because you don’t even want them to be able to see anything.

There’d probably be a bunch of edge cases with this approach. For example, others would still be able to comment on those ideas, and the comments would have to be hidden from OPs. Which begs the question of how that impacts the displayed criticism count… And so on.

If you later realize that adding someone was a mistake, you should be able to correct that mistake.

Permanent access: once added, you can’t remove them.

They could keep read-only access to the discussion but can’t add new ideas or change existing ideas.

They could keep access to their own ideas but not see others’.

There could be hard cutoff: they lose access to everything, including their own ideas in that discussion.

What happens if you add a user to a private discussion, they submit a bunch of ideas, and then you remove them?

My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.

Deutsch says that one should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change without impacting their ability to explain what they claim to explain. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to figure out which is hardest to change.

A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.

So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.

You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable

My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.

He says one should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change while still explaining what they claim to explain. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to figure out which is hardest to change.

A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.

So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.

You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable

My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.

He says people should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to do that.

A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.

So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.

You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable

My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.

He says people should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But doesn’t say how to do that.

This decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.

So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.

You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable

Could this feature be unified with #2811 somehow?

Could this feature be unified with #2669 somehow?

Then people could occasionally check the second tab for ideas they think they can rationally hold but actually can’t. And then they can work on addressing criticisms. A kind of ‘mental housekeeping’ to ensure they never accidentally accept problematic ideas as true.