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How Does Veritula Work?

Veritula (Latin for ‘a bit of truth’) can help you live a life guided exclusively by reason.

To reason, within any well-defined epistemology, means to follow and apply that epistemology. Unreason, or whim, is an undue departure from it. Epistemology is the study of knowledge – basically, the study of what helps knowledge grow, what hinders its growth, and related questions.

Veritula follows, and helps you apply, Karl Popper’s epistemology, Critical Rationalism. It’s a continuation of the Athenian tradition of criticism and the only known epistemology without major flaws.¹

Critical Rationalism says that ideas are assumed true until refuted. This approach leaves us free to make bold guesses and use the full arsenal at our disposal to criticize these guesses in order to solve problems, correct errors, and seek truth. It’s a creative and critical approach. Critical Rationalism is a fallibilist philosophy: it states that there is no criterion of truth to determine with certainty whether some idea is true or false. We all make mistakes, and by an effort, we can correct them to get a little closer to the truth. Rejecting all forms of mysticism and the supernatural, Veritula recognizes that progress is both possible and desirable, and that rational means are the only way to make progress.

Veritula is a programmatic implementation of Popper’s epistemology.

Veritula provides an objective, partly automated way to tentatively determine whether a given idea is problematic. It does not tell you what to think – it teaches you how to think.

Consider an idea I:

              I

Since it has no criticisms, we tentatively consider I unproblematic. It is rational to adopt it and act in accordance with it. Conversely, it would generally be irrational to reject it, consider it problematic, or act counter to it.

Next, someone submits a criticism C1:

              I
              |
              C1

The idea I is now considered problematic so long as criticism C1 is not addressed. How do you address it? You can revise I so that C1 doesn’t apply anymore, which restores the previous state with just the standalone I (now called I2 to indicate the revision):

                   Revise
              I ------------> I2
              |
              C1

To track changes, Veritula offers beautiful diffing and version control for ideas.

If you cannot think of a way to revise I, you can counter-criticize C1, thereby neutralizing it with a new criticism, C2:

              I
              |
              C1
              |
              C2

Now, I is considered unproblematic again, since C1 is problematic and thus can’t be a decisive criticism anymore.

If you can think of neither a revision of I nor counter-criticism to C1, your only option is to accept that I has been (tentatively) defeated. You should therefore abandon it, which means: stop acting in accordance with it, considering it to be unproblematic, etc.

Since there can be many criticisms (which are also just ideas) and deeply nested counter-criticisms, the result is a tree structure. For example, as a discussion progresses, one of its trees might look like this:

              I
           /  |  \
         C11 C12 C13
         / \       \
       C21 C22     C23
                   / \
                 C31 C32

In this tree, I is considered problematic. Although C11 has been neutralized by C21 and C22, C12 still needs to be addressed. In addition, C23 would have neutralized C13, but C31 and C32 make C23 problematic, so C13 makes I problematic as well.

You don’t need to keep track of these relationships manually. Veritula marks ideas accordingly, automatically.

Because decision-making is a special case of, ie follows the same logic as, truth-seeking, such trees can be used for decision-making, too. When you’re planning your next move but can’t decide on a city, say, Veritula helps you criticize your ideas and make a rational decision – meaning a decision you’ll be happy with. Again, it’s rational to act in accordance with ideas that have no pending criticisms.

All ideas, including criticisms, should be formulated as concisely as possible, and separate ideas should be submitted separately, even if they’re related. Otherwise, you run the risk of receiving ‘bulk’ criticisms, where a single criticism seems to apply to more content than it actually does.

Again, criticisms are also just ideas, so the same is true for criticisms. Submitting each criticism separately has the benefit of requiring the proponent of an idea to address each criticism individually, not in bulk. If he fails to address even a single criticism, the idea remains problematic and should be rejected.

The more you discuss a given topic, the deeper and wider the tree grows. Some criticisms can apply to multiple ideas in the tree, but that needs to be made explicit by submitting them repeatedly.

Comments that aren’t criticisms – eg follow-up questions or otherwise neutral comments – are considered ancillary ideas. Unlike criticisms, ancillary ideas do not invert their respective parents’ statuses. They are neutral.

One of the main benefits of Veritula is that the status of any idea in a discussion can be seen at a glance. If you are new to a much-discussed topic, adopt the displayed status of the ideas involved: if they are marked problematic, reject them; if they are not, adopt them.

Therefore, Veritula acts as a dictionary for ideas.

One of the problems of our age is that people have same discussions over and over again. Part of the reason is widespread irrationality, expressed in the unwillingness to change one’s mind; another is that it’s simply difficult to remember or know what’s true and what isn’t. Discussion trees can get complex, so people shouldn’t blindly trust their judgment of whether some idea is true or problematic, whether nested criticisms have been neutralized or not. Going off of memory is too error prone.

Veritula solves this problem: it makes discussion trees explicit so you don’t have to remember each idea and its relation to other ideas. Veritula therefore also enables you to hold irrational people accountable: if an idea has pending criticisms, the rational approach is to either abandon it or to save it by revising it or addressing all pending criticisms.

Many people don’t like to concede an argument. But with Veritula, no concessions are necessary. The site just shows you who’s right.

Using Veritula, we may discover a bit of truth.

To reason, within any epistemology, means to follow and apply that epistemology.

Some epistemologies are defined too poorly to be able to tell when you’re following or straying from it.

I notice that when I amend a criticism I have made, I’m not able to see what I am criticising. It would be good if the edit screen showed the comment I am disagreeing with similar to how it does when I first go to write a criticism.

I notice that when I amend a criticism I have made, I’m not able to see what I am criticising. It would be good if the edit screen showed the comment I am disagreeing with similar to how it does when I first go to write a criticism.

Why not some other cryptocurrency that also has those features?
For example, why not an existing or future fork of Zcash?

“[Insert favoured cryptocurrency] will become the next money” is an extremely easy to vary statement.

Why not some other cryptocurrency that also has those features?
For example, why not an existing or future fork of Zcash?

Utility is not a necessary aspect of money.

Money without other use cases only holds value to the degree it can continuously win a Keynesian Beauty Contest in the market.

In other words, it has no underlying value.

The price of a commodity and the quantity of it in use don’t strictly correlate in the way you suggest here. 50% of gold being tied up in industry, jewellery, etc. does not mean the price floor is at 50% of the current price.

By the standard you have set here, you have implicitly disqualified Bitcoin and Zcash. If gold is not good enough because it could fall to its price floor (your claim being 50%), then Bitcoin and Zcash are even worse because they have no floor at all. It might be more precise to say the floor is zero.

Thanks. Do you think the aim in abstract fields (such as mathematics) is correspondence as well? (As Deutsch seems to argue with the idea of perfect propositions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ-opI-jghs).

…you only think we need it to explain progress in science.

No, I think progress in science is explained by error correction. The aim of science is correspondence. There’s a difference between aims and means.

The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is that the commodity has other utility aside from being used as money. This sets a floor on the price, making it a store of value.

Utility is not a necessary aspect of money. Only 5-10% of gold's value is tied to its industrial use (https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-industry-sectorshare/#:~:text=The%20jewelry%20industry%20accounted%20for,China%2C%20Russia%2C%20and%20Australia). Another 40% is used for jewellery.

This floor is not so reassuring if the asset were to plummet 50%. Other commodities, such as silver, have a greater industrial utility. That makes it less suitable as money since its value becomes tied to commodity cycles.

The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is mainly due to its scarcity, which puts a limit on money creation (done through fractional reserve banking).

Are you asking if there can be correspondence between two abstractions? Or between a physical object and an abstraction?

Only 5-10% of gold's value is tied to its industrial use (per chatgpt).

ChatGPT is notoriously unreliable and known for making stuff up. I recommend using a different, human-made source. Should be easy to find one using your search engine of choice.

In a gold standard society, gold doesn't need to be backed by anything. The same would be true for Bitcoin and Zcash. The US Federal Reserve Notes used to be backed by gold to prevent excessive money creation, gold itself, Bitcoin and ZCash won't need to be backed by anything due to their inherent scarcity.

The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is that the commodity has other utility aside from being used as money. This sets a floor on the price, making it a store of value.

It looks like you were trying to quote the parent idea. Be sure to use either quotation marks or, for blockquotes, start each paragraph with a > sign. That’s the markdown way to specify a blockquote so it gets the red border on the left.

For example, if you type:

> this will appear as a blockquote

…it will turn into:

this will appear as a blockquote

Check the preview to correct errors as you draft a reply.

The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is that the commodity has other utility aside from being used as money. This sets a floor on the price, making it a store of value.

• Utility is not a necessary aspect of money. Only 5-10% of gold's value is tied to its industrial use (per chatgpt). This floor is not so reassuring then if the asset would plummet 90-95%. Other commodities, such as silver, have a greater industrial utility. That makes it less suitable as money since its value becomes tied to commodity cycles.

The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is mainly due to its scarcity, which puts a limit on money creation (done through fractional reserve bankning).

The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is that the commodity has other utility aside from being used as money. This sets a floor on the price, making it a store of value.

Bitcoin and Zcash have no utility beyond their transferability. The only way either would ever be money is if a government made it their legal tender, forcing transactions to be done with it exclusively.

To use US Dollar as an example again, the only reason it is money is that it has the alternative utility function of being the only thing the government will accept for tax payments. In that sense it is the only currency that keeps you out jail if you use it in its designated geographical area (!). If that weren’t the case then people would quickly swap to using something else—something that isn’t being manipulated by the government.

(To prevent any confusion, please understand that I believe governments should be completely agnostic to how people carry out their transactions, including allowing them to use any currency and even old-school barter if they wish.)

TL;DR The only way for the US Dollar, or Bitcoin, or Zcash (or any other unbacked currencies) to be useful as money is if a government makes them legal tender, and prohibits anything else being used in transactions.

You misunderstood my criticism. I said the US Federal Reserve Notes used to be backed by gold, not that the gold itself was backed by something.

Thanks. Do you think there's correspondence for abstractions as well (such as mathematics, as DD seems to suggest)? As I understood, you only think we need it to explain progress in science.

In a gold standard society, gold doesn't need to be backed by anything. The same would be true for Bitcoin and Zcash.

See here. Lucas had asked:

Can you say more about why we need correspondence to make sense of the concept of self-similarity? I don't see why. And it seems to me that self-similarity is all we need to make sense of the universality of computation.

My response below. For others reading this, Erik has also since started a dedicated discussion on the topic of correspondence: https://veritula.com/discussions/is-correspondence-true-in-cr

The FoR glossary entry on self-similarity from chapter 4 reads:

self-similarity Some parts of physical reality (such as symbols, pictures or human thoughts) resemble other parts. The resemblance may be concrete, as when the images in a planetarium resemble the night sky; more importantly, it may be abstract, as when a statement in quantum theory printed in a book correctly explains an aspect of the structure of the multiverse.

The way I read that, it means the images in the planetarium correspond to the night sky. Otherwise we wouldn’t consider them similar.

From chapter 6, on the universality of computation and how “various parts of reality can resemble one another”:

The set of all behaviours and responses of that one object exactly mirrors the set of all behaviours and responses of all other physically possible objects and processes.

That means there is one-to-one correspondence between the behaviors and responses of the first object and those of all the other objects. This is basically another way to describe the self-similarity property of the universe.

From chapter 10, in the context of mathematics (italics mine):

… the physical behaviour of the symbols corresponds to the behaviour of the abstractions they denote.

(The same is true of the physical parts of a Turing machine harnessing the self-similarity property of the universe to correspond to other physical objects.)

From chapter 14, in the context of the creation of scientific knowledge (which, AFAIK, DD views as increasing correspondence):

The creation of useful knowledge by science … must be understood as the emergence of the self-similarity that is mandated by a principle of physics, the Turing principle.

It’s been ages since I read FoR so I’m relying on word searches in the ebook but it’s full of these links between self-similarity and correspondence.

a knowledge

I don’t think it’s correct to use the word ‘knowledge’ with an indeterminate article (meaning ‘a’ or ‘an’).

You could say ‘Finding problems that some knowledge addresses…’

Superseded by #2395.

At the same time, there is a notion that I want to address that flows from fallibilism, and the reason decentralized 'things' tend to be more truth seeking. Even though a given knowledge has solved problems we haven't yet discovered, we still got that solution by solving a problem we encountered, and we can't solve problems we haven't encountered. When we try to solve a problem, we might find out that we've already solved it, but that only happens after we have looked at the problem.