Search Ideas

This proposal would count that person as rejecting an idea without pending criticisms.

Only superficially, since a mod could just ask them about it. They can then voice that they have an inexplicit criticism.

I reply:

The purpose of demarcation was to delineate science from non-science. That’s different from a criterion of rationality.

For such a criterion, Popper proposes measures of corroboration and verisimilitude. And he get pretty technical in defining those.

Neil Hudson says Popper’s criterion of demarcation doesn’t give us a way to form rational preferences. He implies: so why should HTV?

Neil Hudson asks:

A fallible procedure can still be making the stronger claim that every admissible pair is algorithmically rankable. Why should HTV- or rationality generally - be required to supply that [such an algorithmic ranking]?

I reply:

The task would actually be *harder* to program if we constrained it to work only for some ideas and not others.

I reply:

Rational decision-making (involving HTV or not) is a computational task. We can’t claim to have understood such a task unless we’ve programmed it.

I reply:

Because it’s better for error correction. If you want your life to be a beginning of infinity, if you want to make sustained progress, you need to be rational. To be rational, you need to be able to tell when you’re being irrational. So you need a criterion of rationality. The more inputs it works for, the better. Universal is best.

Neil Hudson asks, “Why should HTV- or rationality generally - be required to supply” an algorithmic ranking?

Like most people, he’s confused about the purpose of HTV. My blog post linked in #3069 already explains.

Neil Hudson says, in short, that there’s a difference between a constraint on criticism and a ranking procedure. He says HTV is meant as a constraint, not a ranking procedure.

That’s why I said it’s fine to prompt the user for creative input if necessary, within reason. #5439

That’s why I said it’s fine to prompt the user for creative input if necessary, within reason.

Neil replies:

Programming syntactic variations is easy. The problem is conjecturing which variations are explanatorily relevant given the problem and our background explanatory knowledge. The epistemological work includes conjecturing the relevant search space itself. Otherwise I can generate billions of mutations without discovering whether changing some feature destroys the explanation or merely changes its wording.

This new proposal would punish irrationality itself…

The purpose of the rule wouldn’t be to punish anyone but to protect our time, associate with good people, and keep our ability to make progress.

#4460 says moderation aims to preserve productive, truth-seeking discussion. Being free to avoid someone does not show that excluding them helps that goal. A valuable contributor might advocate elsewhere an idea that has pending criticisms on Veritula, without affecting Veritula or its members. Banning them would sacrifice useful contributions without protecting any discussion. Off-platform conduct should count only when it burdens Veritula or its members.

The proposal does not say whether conduct from before the rule is adopted can count as an offence for existing members. Without a prospective effective date, members could be warned or banned for conduct that was not covered by this rule when it occurred.

The proposal should require the statement and claimed match to be recorded and open to criticism before they can support a warning.

#5471 and #5472 defend this proposal as applying when someone participated in the relevant discussion or was directly shown the relevant ideas and then repeatedly ignored them. The proposal itself only says “when they should know better”. That could cover much more. If actual notice is the intended threshold, should an occurrence count only after the person has been shown the particular idea and its pending criticism?

You say users who have been told about Veritula’s standard can be held to it. If Veritula becomes widely used, most new users will not initially be Popperians. They may understand “known to be false,” “objectively wrong,” and “rationally adoptable” in their ordinary senses rather than Veritula’s technical, fallibilist senses.

What must someone have been told and understood before they count as someone who “should know better”? Should the rule require clear notice about how Veritula uses these terms, and a chance to understand and criticise that epistemology, before someone’s off-platform statements can count as an offence?

The revised rule about inexplicit criticism says that a person should treat their inexplicit criticism as pending and not act on the parent idea, but normally should not post a placeholder if doing so would block others. In that case, the idea remains publicly uncriticized while it is not rationally adoptable for that person. This proposal would count that person as rejecting an idea without pending criticisms. Someone could therefore follow the inexplicit-criticism rule and still commit an offence under this rule. How should that case be handled?

Proposal for new rule

TL;DR: repeat irrationality (as defined below) should be a bannable offense.

Since Popper seemed so agreeable, I mentioned that one of his former students had accused him of not tolerating criticism of his own ideas. Popper's eyes blazed. “It is completely untrue! I was happy when I got criticism! Of course, not when I would answer the criticism… and the person would still go on with it. That is the thing which I found uninteresting and would not tolerate.” In that case, Popper would throw the student out of his class.

… so long as the proponents of our best theories … have to expend their intellectual energies in futile refutation and re-refutation of theories long known to be false, the state of our deepest knowledge cannot improve.

Our forum rules (#4460) include a rule against “Behavior that is intended, or likely, to sabotage debate or prevent progress…” In light of recent, mostly off-platform discussions, I’m thinking about extending it. Or maybe it already applies to the behavior I’m about to describe.

Veritula is built to help people seek truth by criticizing ideas and addressing criticism. More generally, it’s meant to help people live a life guided by reason (#2844) and make progress. That includes the rejection of ideas with pending criticisms.

One of the core insights of Veritula is that people should not rely on memory to decide whether to adopt an idea (#4471). They shouldn’t rely on memory to recall the outcome of a discussion. They shouldn’t track the outcome of a discussion manually (unless they’ve practiced that skill extensively). They should instead feed ideas into Veritula, put them in the proper relationship with each other, and then simply look up which ideas they should adopt or reject. Or, if the discussion has already happened, then they should simply look up its current state instead of duplicating it. (The list of discussions and search function should help with that.) Any idea with a red label showing a count of pending criticisms should be abandoned; any idea without that label should be adopted.

This way, people can avoid having the same discussions over and over again. But some people aren’t willing to do the required work even once and change their mind. They’d rather repeat the same discussions, and repeatedly advocate the same mistaken ideas, like those Easter Islanders who kept building hideous statues with no purpose.

I think members on Veritula should be expected to follow through and update their stances when they’re shown to be wrong. After all, Veritula offers them a way to tell objectively that they’re wrong. We have a criterion of rationality, so why not use it? And if they can’t remember what their updated stance should be, they should get in the habit of simply looking it up. If their old stance has pending criticisms, they should stop advocating it.

But people conveniently ‘forget’ discussion outcomes they view as unfavorable, let a few months pass (at which point they think nobody could reasonably blame them for forgetting), and then go right back to advocating a stance that’s already known to be false.

Mistakes happen; again, memory isn’t perfect. Or sometimes we have a nagging feeling that something about the outcome of a discussion just isn’t quite right, but we can’t put our finger on it. In such a situation, when asked about one’s stance, it’s rational to say something like: ‘Although I personally disagree, at the current state of the discussion, idea X (link to the idea on V) is (or is not) rationally adoptable.’

A good example of how to do this right in a similar situation is @dirk-meulenbelt’s recent post on X:

I wrote a proof/argument on my blog that the challenge is impossible for "two strings" alone, though Dennis has [since] clarified that it's OK to have more than just two strings, and a person may be prompted within reason.

The specific content isn’t important here. What matters is that Dirk shared an objection and then immediately explained why it wasn’t valid anymore. That’s honest. It’s unlike so many dishonest interlocutors who would only mention the objection but not that it’s been addressed already.

As I’ve written before:

The catalog of ideas can be vast – much too big for any one man to hold in his mind. Memory is error-prone. We should not rely on memory to see which ideas we should adopt or reject. We should look them up, dispassionately, in the database [on Veritula], the way a judge would look up a law in a legal text. Rationality is an impersonal thing. Advocacy and rejection of ideas is impersonal as well.

A judge preparing a verdict may personally disagree with a law. For example, he may think it’s too strict or not strict enough. In his ruling, he may even personally distance himself from a specific law. But that doesn’t mean he can just ignore it and act on whim instead.

Yet that is essentially how people treat the advocacy and rejection of ideas more generally. They do it based on whim. If such people participate on Veritula long-term, they will duplicate ideas or even entire discussions. But maintaining discussion trees is no simple task; it takes care and effort. If there are no consequences for such people, one would have to refute and re-refute ideas long known to be false. And that’s time we could spend advocating and improving ideas not known to be false. In short, such people sabotage progress.

Therefore, I suggest that members who are repeatedly found to advocate ideas with pending criticisms, or reject ideas without pending criticisms, or to have duplicate discussions due to undue reversals to previous, mistaken stances – in short, members who act irrationally in this way, on or off-platform, when they should know better – be given warnings. If it happens once, it’s no big deal. If it happens twice, it may warrant a warning. Members may be asked to explain how they plan to avoid this outcome in the future (eg see #5176). They could run a bounty that will charge their card a small but non-negligible amount if they don’t address a criticism. If it happens a third time, especially if it’s about the same topic as before, their account may be temporarily locked or banned permanently. More leeway can be given if a lot of time passes between offenses or due to other extenuating circumstances, case by case.

Non-members who wish to join Veritula, but who’ve been found to act irrationally in this way off-platform, will need to make a convincing case that they want to improve. Evidence that they’ve changed their mind on some issue, eg some written public record of that change, including some evidence that they remember that change over time, would be a good start.

I want people who take ideas, reason, and progress seriously. Others can go goof off on other platforms, there’s plenty of those around. People who take reason seriously need a way to protect their time against people who don’t.

There’s a better Popper quote on https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/the-paradox-of-karl-popper/

Should it have been submitted as a criticism of #4460?

I don’t think so, no, since it reads more like a suggestion/extension than anything wrong with #4460.

(Have I misunderstood that part of #4460?)

Slightly, yes. I had in mind a scenario where someone violates a rule and then submits a criticism of #4460 so he can claim to have disabled it with a pending criticism. As in: people can’t conveniently criticize #4460 only because they have reason to personally take issue with it.

A new rule could help set expectations. I don’t think the general public would view repeatedly forgetting the outcome of a discussion as bad faith, for example.

I think this is already covered by #5460:

… sometimes we have a nagging feeling that something about the outcome of a discussion just isn’t quite right, but we can’t put our finger on it. In such a situation, when asked about one’s stance, it’s rational to say something like: ‘Although I personally disagree, at the current state of the discussion, idea X (link to the idea on V) is (or is not) rationally adoptable.’