Search Ideas

Brett Hall responds to the contradiction between HTV and ‘if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it’: https://x.com/ToKTeacher/status/2090780593739243793

He agrees we can’t program HTV but says even if we don’t know how or why an explanation is HTV, we still know that it’s HTV.

Since you agree that a revision was necessary, I’ve submitted a counter-criticism of #5292 so that this branch of the discussion tree is consistent (#5323). Ideas are immutable; opening a new branch won’t automatically fix broken branches.

The branch now reflects that your action was rational.

Generally speaking, when a revision addresses a criticism, we don’t submit a counter-criticism.

Let me stress ahead of time that this kind of housekeeping may not seem the most fun, but is indispensable in keeping consistent discussion trees. We can learn to enjoy it. We benefit from this kind of housekeeping by being able to look up which ideas we can rationally adopt.

Revision done; criticism not needed.

Naval, who’s inspired by Deutsch, says good products are hard to vary, too: https://nav.al/good-products

Gives iPhone as example.

But HTV is also about art (BoI chapter 14).
A piece of art is a kind of end product. And we could write code to produce art.

AFAIK it creates no physical dependence and you don’t build a tolerance.

I was wrong to submit this criticism in this form; it should be only about the lack of dependence. Otherwise the criticism chain is inverted for #5203.

What’s not to love?

#5203 already says: causes people to wake up early. (Can corroborate.)

The Blind Truth-Seeker:
https://libertythroughreason.com/the-blind-truth-seeker/

~All previous methods of preference formation focus too much on what the ideas say; on their content.

Nobody really knows just how simple an idea is (Occam’s razor) or how likely (Bayesianism), for example. In some cases it’s obvious how ideas compare, but in others not so much.

Adherents of those epistemologies are all fooling themselves into thinking they’re being rational when really they’re still acting on whim. Just fancier whim.

Focus instead on how the ideas relate, on the structure of the current state of the discussion, and preference formation gets much easier and simpler.

Then you can easily see which ideas you can adopt and which you can’t. You can even see exactly which criticisms you’d need to address to change someone’s mind, say.

Beautiful.

… it seems like finding a common preference is the thing to do …

It is.

… (and it seems like it works).

It usually does.

But isn't that the same as compromising?

No. A common preference is a new option everyone involved prefers to their respective original stance. A compromise is an option they do not prefer, but merely reluctantly agree to. And it’s usually not really new in content but resulted from mechanically mixing existing options. See the article linked in #5301.

… a compromise can actually be bad, because it is a new theory that no one was advocating for.

Compromise is always bad. It’s a form of irrationality.

Gemini says Brett Hall...

No it’s TCS: https://takingchildrenseriously.com/how-is-a-compromise-not-a-real-solution/

Time-release melatonin has solved the backfire problem for me. But I don't want to be dependent on it forever to get a good 8 hours.

Not to be nitpicky, especially since you ended up agreeing, but #5234 now has a pending criticism (yours), yet you acted on the idea. (Or rather, on the suggestion implied by it.) Acting on an idea with pending criticisms is technically the definition of irrationality on V.

I’m purposely not marking this a criticism so the flags don’t flip.

Idea: rational discussion graph with recursive criticism evaluation, like Veritula does now. Except the ideas are programs, not natural-language text. And they execute when they have no pending criticisms.

I tried this for a few days recently. By day three or four I went to bed at around 6am and woke up at 2pm. Didn’t feel great the rest of the day. Went back to a more regular sleep schedule after that and feeling better now.

You can structure discussions any way you like as long as you make sure the structure won’t break criticism chains.

Comments are for commentary or criticism, not elaborations on the same idea. The same idea shouldn’t be spread over multiple posts. That breaks criticism chains.

Veritula threads don’t work like Twitter/X threads, where people post elaborations on the same idea in comments. They used to have to do that because Twitter enforced a character limit. Now they still do it by tradition. And I’m guessing it’s an adjustment coming to Veritula.

If you realize you need to add more info to an existing idea, put it in a revision, not a comment. Again, #5250 seems like a revision of #5249. The revision of #5249 would then be a combination of both.

Possibly yeah. It doesn’t look like you were going off that. #5246 isn’t a proposed solution. Neither is #5250. That’s an elaboration on #5249.

#1497

But the UI won’t reflect that automatically. Now you have to remember which threads have this structure and which don’t. Will you remember that, say, six months from now?

Experimental Controls Aren’t What You Think:
https://libertythroughreason.com/experimental-controls-arent-what-you-think/

This approach breaks search functions, where the system only goes off the ‘Criticized’ flag. Now the system shows some ideas as rationally adoptable even though they aren’t.

But the UI won’t reflect that automatically. Now you have to remember which threads have structure and which don’t. Will you remember that, say, six months from now?

There’s no need to single out corroboration or verisimilitude as special kinds of criticism.

Preference formation using either can easily be reduced to the method of counting pending criticisms:

Idea A fails to survive two tests.
Idea B fails to survive only one of the two.
Idea C says: I have only A and B; I don’t have time to create another; although both are false, I have to act; so for now I prefer B since at least it passes a test A doesn’t.

If idea C has no pending criticisms, then we should adopt it. (And thus ‘transitively’ adopt B.)