Search Ideas

This means that we can't be certain about anything, because we don't have a criterion of truth.

First sentence already implies this.

Fallibilism is the view that there is no criterion to say with certainty what’s true and what’s false. As a result, we inevitably make mistakes and all of our knowledge is tentative in nature. Nothing is obvious but depends on what one understands about reality. It also means that no knowledge is beyond revision, even if it claims to be. This means that we can't be certain about anything, because we don't have a criterion of truth. Knowledge grows by addressing problems in our knowledge. We solve problems by guessing solutions and testing them. This also means we should always be careful not to destroy or even slow down the things and ideas that correct errors and thereby create knowledge. Some of those ideas are freedom, privacy, and free markets. We are also never the passive recipients of our knowledge; we are the creators.

This view is mainly influenced by Popper, and errors are my own.

I’ve made dozens of pizzas by now. I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

Ingredients

• Store-bought dough (312g)
• Tomato sauce (70g, low sodium)
• Mozzarella (whole milk, 100g – fresh will taste better but will also make the dough less crispy due to juices)
• 2g extra virgin olive oil (optional)
• Semolina flour

Then, for garnish:

• Oregano
• Fresh basil leaves
• A dash of salt

Steps

1. Preheat oven for 1 hour. Ends up somewhere around 450°F.
2. Preheat pizza steel for 30 min on top rack underneath broiler, reaches about 650°F.
3. In the meantime, rest dough on counter top until it reaches room temperature.
4. Grate cheese and measure tomato sauce.
5. Dust counter with semolina flour and stretch the dough. Make it thin so it gets crispy.
6. Add tomato sauce.
7. Place dough on peel.
8. Place dough on steel; still on top rack with the broiler still on.
9. Bake for 2 minutes.
10. Take out to add cheese and oregano.
11. Bake for another 1.5 minutes on top rack; again, the broiler is still on. Can turn it off halfway through if the pizza is burning on top but the center of the dough needs more time to bake.
12. Optional: take out steel and let pizza rest on steel for another minute to make the bottom crispy.
13. Optional: in the meantime, apply small amount of olive oil to the outer crust and sprinkle salt on outer crust. (Kind of overrated, not really worth the extra calories.)
14. Remove from steel and serve.

My Conjecture

Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.

Picture a smoker who wants to give up smoking but also really enjoys smoking. Those preferences conflict.

If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let the smoker give up smoking. He will become a chain smoker.

Solutions for the conflict may need to be found creatively, case by case. It depends on the nature of the particular entrenchment and the preferences involved. A more overarching answer for how to cure addiction might involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.

I don’t think animals are sentient.

I realize this view sounds outlandish to most but it’s a considered, researched conclusion.

There’s lots of evidence of insentience in the way animals behave. If they were sentient, they would not behave the way they do: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/evidence-of-animal-insentience

Additional reasoning:
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-faq
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/konrad-lorenz-hacked-animals
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-discussion-tree
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/the-animal-rights-community-is-based-on-fear-a

…the only known institutional mechanism for error-correction…

Not totally clear what error correction means in this context. Leadership change is only one example of error correction in politics. Maybe mention policy change as well?

"How can we structure our institutions so that we can remove bad rulers and bad policies without violence?".

The period at the end seems unnecessary.

It replaces…

What does ‘it’ refer to here? The concept of an open society? An open society itself? Subordination? The group? Grammatically, any of these could work!

It holds that there is no conclusive justification and no rational certainty for any belief.

First you speak of “every belief, theory, and observation”, then you speak only of belief. Some people may accidentally conclude that there can be rational certainty for theories and observations, just not for beliefs.

[Fallibilism] is the philosophical position that all human knowledge … is … incomplete …

That doesn’t sound right. Potentially incomplete maybe. But you can reach perfection in some fields. You just can’t know with certainty that you’ve reached it.

https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/don-t-take-fallibilism-too-far

That would be irrational and self-coercive.

How did you conclude that the criticisms aren’t good? You need counter-criticisms to arrive at that conclusion in the first place.

Say the thought of adopting some idea with no criticisms bothers you. Then you can always try to be the first to suggest criticisms, which will then give you a rational reason not to adopt the idea. If instead you fail to come up with criticisms, why not adopt it?

Say the thought of adopting some idea with no criticisms bothers you. Then you can always try to be the first to suggest criticisms, which will then give you a rational reason not to adopt the idea.

How did you conclude that the criticisms aren’t good in the first place? You need counter-criticisms to arrive at that conclusion in the first place.

How did you conclude that the criticisms aren’t good in the first place?

Only temporarily at best, since ‘nuh-uh’ would be criticized for lacking substance right away.

What counts as ‘addressing’ a criticism? If I write ‘nuh-uh’ as a counter-criticism, does that neutralize the original?

Pasting #2079 here as it’s since been hidden in a resolved child thread and should have applied directly to #2074 in the first place.

My current view is that the only meaningful dichotomy is good vs. bad.

You say yourself in #2071 that one should “always avoid positive arguments.” Calling a theory “good” would be a positive argument.

As I say in #2065, Popperian epistemology has no room for ‘good’ or any other justification. I’m not aware that anyone has successfully proposed a way to measure the ‘hard-to-varyiness’ of theories anyway. We can criticize theories for being arbitrary (which is another word for ‘easy to vary’). That’d be fine. But Popper wouldn’t give them points for not being arbitrary. And arbitrariness isn’t the only type of criticism a theory might receive anyway.

If we follow Popper and get rid of justification, we can’t use ‘good vs bad’ because we can’t use ‘good’. The only dichotomy left standing is ‘has some bad’ vs ‘has no bad’. Another word for ‘pointing out some bad’ is ‘criticism’. So this dichotomy can be rephrased as: ‘has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’, or ‘has reasons to be rejected’ vs ‘has no reasons to be rejected’. Note that there’s a difference: if you think some idea is bad, you submit a criticism. If you think it’s good, you can still submit a criticism because it might not yet be as good as you want it to be. So regardless of how good a theory might be, it can still have pending criticisms, and thus reasons to reject it. Think of Newtonian physics, which (I’m told) is a superb theory, but it’s false and (as I understand it) has plenty of pending criticisms.

‘Has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’ is directly comparable whereas ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t directly comparable. And ‘has n pending criticisms’ vs ‘has m’ or ‘has 0 pending criticisms’ are even numerically comparable.

Veritula does not implement Deutsch’s epistemology of good vs bad explanations. It implements Popper’s epistemology and TCS’s notion of unanimous consent.

(As an aside, I’m not sure how I could implement Deutsch’s epistemology even if I wanted to. Would I give each idea a slider where people can say how ‘good’ the idea is? What values would I give the slider? Would the worst value be -1,000 and the best +1,000? How would users know to assign 500 vs 550? Would a ‘weak’ criticism get a score of 500 and a ‘strong’ one 1,000? What if tomorrow somebody finds an even ‘stronger’ one, does that mean I’d need to extend the slider beyond 1,000? Do I include arbitrary decimal/real numbers? Is an idea’s score reduced by the sum of its criticisms’ scores? If an idea has score 0, what does that mean – undecided? If it has -500, does that mean I should reject it ‘more strongly’ than if it had only -100? And so on. Deutsch says you haven’t understood something if you can’t program it, and I don’t think he could program his epistemology.)

I think part of the problem is that I don’t have a dedicated final place where everything lives.

Yeah, it would be difficult getting a place ready only to leave it again soon. Your subconscious might be asking, ‘What’s the point?’

Maybe another way to state the same thing is that every object in a space should have a purpose. And that, once a purpose is defined for an object, the proper place for it falls out naturally from its purpose.

You (presumably) buy something to put in your home in order to solve some problem you couldn’t solve without it.

I noticed today that things in my shared spaces have better defined homes than the things in my private spaces, in the sense of #2840. ‘Relationship maintenance’ may only be a trivial factor compared to what I describe in #2840.

I’ll test giving everything in my private spaces a dedicated home. From there it should be easier to understand how important ‘relationship maintenance’ is as a factor in my unconscious and inexplicit motivations for tidying up.

#3014 fixes this. Implemented as of c3247d5.

For all ideas, the total number of pending criticisms (if any) should always be shown, even if they are not all being rendered. For filtered parents, I could put an asterisk behind the count. On hover, explain that some pending criticisms may be hidden due to filtering.

A Society Guided by Reason

The same logic explained in #2281 and #2844 applies to ideas across people as well. A free market or free society, by definition, is one where all interactions are based on unanimous consent.

One difference between the market and individuals is freedom of association. For example, when people disagree, they can just go their separate ways. But a single man cannot do that when parts of him disagree; a single man cannot dissociate from himself.

This difference does not change the overall desirability of unanimous consent both within and across minds. It’s an ‘implementation detail’.