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It does. Preference formation is the point of the program.
I don't think preference formation requires the program to always select exactly one variant.
If several variants are equally hard to vary given everything I currently know, then “equally hard to vary” is itself the result of the comparison. I don't currently have a rational reason from HTV to prefer one over the others.
I don't think the program should invent a preference when the current problem situation doesn't give us one. The variants can remain competing possibilities until we learn something that differentiates them.
Fair, I didn't mean to imply that #5531 says different people getting different results is itself a problem. I was explaining why I think disagreement about what counts as a variation is okay, even when that disagreement leads to different results.
The user can correct this by rerunning the program with the corrected inputs. I think the UX can be improved by adding add/edit/delete functionality, as discussed in #5559 and #5560, but the basic functionality of the MVP still holds.
Being hard to vary also doesn't guarantee that an explanation is true.
Agreed, but I’m not asking for a guarantee. I’m basically saying preference formation using HTV should help us find truth. The Pop-Tart example seems to be a case where HTV is unrelated to finding truth.
@jadelmourad be sure to submit separate criticisms separately. You benefit because it means I need to address each criticism individually, not in ‘bulk’. (See #5546, keyword ‘bulk’.)
I don't think those are genuine variations, so I wouldn't input them when running the program. But someone else might genuinely think they are.
The program can't decide which of us is right without itself understanding the explanation and the problem situation—in other words, without being a general intelligence. That's the point I just made in #5572, and more generally in #5553 and #5557.
At the current stage, without AGI, I think any work that requires that kind of understanding and creative judgment necessarily has to be outsourced to the user. The program then operates on the judgments the user supplies.
One could run the program again with corrected inputs but as I noted in #5533, that approach won’t scale.
Jad originally replied in #5559. I’ve extracted his reply to avoid bulk criticism:
If the user later changes their mind about one of those judgments, then yes, the current minimal CLI requires them to run it again with the corrected input. I agree that wouldn't be good UX for a full application, but that's not what I'm trying to build here. Adding the ability to add, edit, or delete variations and immediately recalculate the ranking is straightforward and doesn't change the decision procedure being demonstrated.
I think the program already gets this through human input.
The prompt isn't asking the user to enter arbitrary changes. It specifically asks:
“Enter variations of this explanation that would still work to explain the same thing.”
So by entering a variation, the user is making the judgment that it still accounts for what the original explanation was supposed to account for. That's intentionally a human judgment, just like the other judgments I've discussed in #5553.
I don't think the program needs to choose one of the surviving variants if our current knowledge gives us no reason to choose.
It does. Preference formation is the point of the program.
Sometimes the rational state really is that we don't yet know which variant is right. We can continue developing and testing them until we find something that differentiates them.
Then we’d need to find a way to feed the results of the tests back into the program. Tests would somehow need to be formally tied to HTV. The program has to at least be able to tell the user which preference to form (short of the user not typing in the variant he’s already decided he doesn’t want, eg because of a negative test case).
I think the program does expose it, given inputs that reflect the user's genuine understanding of the explanations.
If I genuinely regard “axial tilt while I wear one green hat,” “axial tilt while I wear two green hats,” etc. as distinct working variations of the axial-tilt explanation, then I've told the program that the hat count is part of the explanation and can be varied freely. In that case, I think it's completely fair for HTV to judge the explanation easier to vary.
If I instead understand the hat as an irrelevant fact that has nothing to do with the axial-tilt explanation, then I shouldn't submit changes in my hat count as variations of that explanation in the first place.
The program can't accept my judgment that these are genuine variations and then independently override that judgment because it “knows” they're actually irrelevant. Doing that would require the program itself to understand what is doing explanatory work. That's precisely the part I'm outsourcing to the user.
So I don't think this example shows that the program fails to expose easy-to-varyness. It shows that the result depends on which changes the user genuinely judges to be variations of the explanation—which is the same point I made in #5553 and #5555.
But suppose grass really did cure the disease and we actually understood how. Maybe a particular compound in the grass interacts with some biological mechanism, and a certain concentration is required for the effect. The explanation might allow a whole range of effective dosages rather than one exact number, but that range would itself be explained and constrained by the mechanism.
That assumes the cure works: then I agree there’s a reason for the specific range, and that range will be part of the one working variant. Your program would then accurately prefer it over a rival.
But the program also needs to account for cases where the cure doesn’t work. Then we can’t refer to a range anymore because there’s no reason to constrain the explanation to that range. And then we’re left with the situation described in #5549.
I don’t think this response addresses the part from #5531 that says “nor is the user given an opportunity to correct any mistakes to that effect.”
So I don't think different people getting different results is necessarily a problem.
#5531 doesn’t say that.
But I don't think adding “while I wear one green hat,” “while I wear two green hats,” etc. to the axial-tilt explanation necessarily varies the explanation at all.
If you don’t think those are genuine variations, the program should either reject them or, in light of #5553, it should give users a way to resolve disagreement about what makes a genuine variation, because such a resolution would presumably itself involve some measure of HTV and so is part of the problem of making HTV work.
As the bounty states, human input is fine within reason. It’s beginning to look like your program does relatively little compared to the amount of work it expects its users to do.
I would consider that a problem with the explanation, not with the HTV comparison. It's exactly the kind of arbitrariness that HTV is supposed to expose.
Yes but if the program is an accurate representation/use of HTV, then the program should expose it. The program asks the user for variations in service of exposing it. But that doesn’t work in this case. I think that’s a problem.
I think the Pop-Tarts example mixes together two different things: acquiring new knowledge and forming a preference between explanations. Looking up why Pop-Tarts were actually given their name gives us new knowledge; it doesn't by itself show that the preference formation between explanations isn't HTV.
As I argued in #5553, the program operates on the user's current understanding of the problem and explanations. The user is comparing explanations and variations they currently judge to work. So everything they already know, including criticisms they're aware of, is part of that judgment.
In the Pop-Tarts example, say the three explanations are equally hard to vary given what I currently know. That's fine. I currently have no reason to prefer one over another.
Now suppose I look it up and find historical evidence saying the name was chosen for reason X. I've gained new knowledge, and that changes the problem situation. I'm no longer just asking why they're called Pop-Tarts; I'm asking why they're called Pop-Tarts given that I also know this historical evidence says X.
I could still maintain that the real reason was something else. Maybe the company was lying or the historical source was wrong. But then I have to explain that too. If I just say “the real reason is that they pop out of the toaster, and for some unrelated reason the company says X,” I've added another arbitrary factor to preserve my explanation. That seems like exactly the kind of thing that would expose it as easy to vary.
So I don't see acquiring new knowledge as something that sits outside the process and simply overrides the HTV result. New knowledge changes the problem situation and therefore changes what a working explanation now has to account for. We can then compare the explanations again in light of that new problem situation.
Being hard to vary also doesn't guarantee that an explanation is true. Newton's theory of gravity was a good explanation and remains good enough for many engineering problem situations, even though we later learned that it isn't the full story. As new problems and observations came up that Newton couldn't adequately account for, the problem situation changed and we needed a better explanation.
So I don't think every act of acquiring knowledge or finding a criticism itself needs to take the form of thinking about variants. Those things change the problem situation and affect which explanations and variations we consider to still work.
But that's different from saying the preference formation itself isn't HTV. Once our current knowledge and criticisms are taken into account, HTV can still operate on the explanations that still work and give us a preference—or sometimes tell us that, given what we currently know, they're equally good.
I don't think it follows that a competing explanation would also have uncountably many working variants just because it involves continuous quantities.
The grass example is easy to vary precisely because there's no explanation for why the amount should be 1kg rather than 0.9kg, 0.95kg, etc. If 1kg doesn't work, I can just keep changing the number. Nothing in the explanatory argument constrains it.
But suppose grass really did cure the disease and we actually understood how. Maybe a particular compound in the grass interacts with some biological mechanism, and a certain concentration is required for the effect. The explanation might allow a whole range of effective dosages rather than one exact number, but that range would itself be explained and constrained by the mechanism.
I wouldn't consider every possible dosage within that range a different variation of the explanation. They're different cases covered by the same explanation. Saying “this mechanism works within this dosage range” is one explanatory claim, even if there are infinitely many numerical values inside the range.
So I think there's a difference between an explanation containing a continuous variable and an explanation whose parameters can be changed arbitrarily without explanatory reason. The first can be perfectly constrained by the explanatory structure. The second is exactly what I understand easy-to-vary to mean.
This also comes back to the point I made in #5553: the program relies on the user's understanding of the explanatory argument. A knowledgeable user wouldn't enter 0.9kg, 0.9001kg, 0.90001kg, etc. as infinitely many distinct explanatory variations if they understand them as instances of one explained dosage range.
I agree that HTV has to stand on its own. My argument isn't “Veritula has this problem too, therefore it's okay for HTV to have it.”
The reason I've been comparing the two is narrower: to show that outsourcing the parts requiring creativity and judgment to the user doesn't prevent us from having an executable decision procedure built on top of those inputs.
On revisability specifically, I agree that the result should be tentative and able to change when the user's judgments change. As I explained in #5559, this can technically already be done by rerunning the program with the updated inputs. The current CLI is only a minimal demonstration, so that's obviously not ideal UX. Letting the user add, edit, or delete variations and immediately recalculate the result would be straightforward and wouldn't change the decision procedure.
I think the program already gets this through human input.
The prompt isn't asking the user to enter arbitrary changes. It specifically asks:
“Enter variations of this explanation that would still work to explain the same thing.”
So by entering a variation, the user is making the judgment that it still accounts for what the original explanation was supposed to account for. That's intentionally a human judgment, just like the other judgments I've discussed in #5553.
If the user later changes their mind about one of those judgments, then yes, the current minimal CLI requires them to run it again with the corrected input. I agree that wouldn't be good UX for a full application, but that's not what I'm trying to build here. Adding the ability to add, edit, or delete variations and immediately recalculate the ranking is straightforward and doesn't change the decision procedure being demonstrated.
I don't think the program needs to choose one of the surviving variants if our current knowledge gives us no reason to choose.
If several variants of the better explanation still work and we currently have nothing that differentiates them, then I think it's fine for them to remain competing possibilities. In fact, my guess is that this is exactly how different research programs can get started: people can follow the different explanatory threads until further criticism, experiments, observations, or other new knowledge gives us a reason to distinguish them.
So I don't think the program should invent a preference between variants when our current problem situation and knowledge don't provide one. Sometimes the rational state really is that we don't yet know which variant is right. We can continue developing and testing them until we find something that differentiates them.