Search Ideas

Then people could occasionally check the search page 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.

Some people work in professions where sharing certain opinions puts them at risk of being fired.

Also, there are people living under repressive regimes.

Some reputational concerns are legitimate, and Veritula should accommodate them to promote free speech.

People could use Veritula to establish that intellectual presence and put their name (real or not) behind their ideas.

Would it be any harder than verifying someone’s name? It’s not like I check people’s ID.

There are ways. For example, they could use an established account to reach out.

That could be hard to verify.

What if someone uses a well-established pseudonym/online identity? That can still carry a lot of weight.

Another reason I want people to use their true names is that I want Veritula to be a place for serious intellectuals, not yet another social network where people just screw around. Part of being a serious intellectual is public advocacy of one’s ideas and public updates on changed positions.

When people use their true names, I expect higher quality contributions, less rudeness, fewer trolls, that kind of thing. More accountability generally means higher quality.

But that doesn’t address the part about public advocacy of one’s ideas and public updates on changed positions in the sense that you put your own name behind your ideas.

See #4071: if a trusted member vouches for them, I can infer they’re not here to screw around.

When a trusted member vouches for someone new, they’ll probably meet those expectations.

@dennis-hackethal Please share your reasoning for your request that Veritula users use their true names.

Now that there are user profiles (#408), the search page can have an option to filter ideas by user. That way, we can see that user’s uncontroversial ideas, meaning ideas of his that he can rationally hold, and controversial ones, meaning ideas of his that he cannot rationally hold.

No need for new tabs. This feature could be integrated with the search page by filtering ideas by user. That page already has filters for problematic vs unproblematic ideas.

As I wrote in #4051, it doesn’t matter to me whether replication is necessary for evolution to take place. I’m open to the idea that it isn’t. But what I’d like instead is some argument why it couldn’t figure in the evolution that happens in the mind.

3) From what I’ve seen, the attempt to remove replication from evolution doesn’t actually remove it.

If you take some string of information and vary it, then by definition, only parts of it become different. Other parts are preserved. Even if you vary the string several times, the parts that didn’t change were still instantiated at each stage. So they still replicated. (As I recall, this is how Richard Dawkins defines what a gene is, in his book The Selfish Gene.)

Also, just by thinking about the string of information and how to vary it, you’ve already replicated the information. It now exists in its original medium and in your mind.

2) We can explain more if we use replicators. For example, memory and the origin of creativity just ‘fall out’ of the neo-Darwinian approach. Ideas in a single mind may have static vs dynamic replication strategies. All of that is lost without the notion of replication.

My response has always been that I don’t care whether replication is a necessary component of evolution, but that, 1), in the Popperian spirit, we shouldn’t break with other evolutionary theories unnecessarily. Genes and memes both replicate.

Some people (most notably Ella Hoeppner) have argued that replication isn’t necessary for evolution to take place. All you need is variation and selection.

My neo-Darwinian approach to the mind suggests that minds evolve knowledge through the imperfect replication of ideas.

Ah, but I can reproduce when I manually make the selection by clicking and dragging to cover the entire quote (and only the quote, nothing above or below).

There’s a way to get what you want: if you select some text in an idea before hitting its criticize or comment button, the selected text should always be inserted as a box quote.

Archiving this criticism for now, but if you’re still seeing any issues, let me know and I’ll take another look.

When you copy text for an inline quote, you wouldn’t want the box-quote formatting.

Done as of 19009b2. Discussions now have a link to search ideas, which points to the search page with that discussion already preselected in a new discussion dropdown.