Benjamin Davies

Top-level ideas in a discussion thread are not standalone pages.

One thing that Wikipedia does well is having a structured, high level page for each idea/subject. This enables readers to get a good sense of an idea quickly.

Right now, to get a good sense of an idea on Veritula, a user often has to study a branching discussion, which can take a lot of work depending on how the discussion played out. A discussion also emphasises things that were relevant to the disagreements that took place in the discussion, rather than distilling the most important elements of an idea into a hierarchy, regardless of disagreements that took place in getting to it (like an encyclopedia entry does).

‘Articles’ are functionally no different than top-level ideas in a discussion thread.

Idea: Veritula Articles

Currently, Veritula is a discussion website. I believe it could one day do what Wikipedia (and Grokipedia) do, but better.

A step towards that would be enabling users to produce ‘articles’ or something similar.

An ‘Articles’ tab would be distinct from the ‘Discussions’ tab, featuring explanatory documents similar to encyclopedia entries, and perhaps also blogpost-like content.

Articles focus on distilling the good ideas created/discovered in the discussions that occur on Veritula.

It might make sense to have the new top-level idea form at the top, in the meantime. Compared to the current design, this would invite the creation of more top-level ideas.

Any progress on this? Scrolling to the bottom to submit new ideas is annoying.

Idea: Discussion specific activity feeds

It would be a waste of time to add features that don’t scale well.

The site isn’t at all big enough for this to matter yet.

As the site grows and there is more activity, there would be too much going on for any user to be interested in all the activity on the site, so it would eventually become irrelevant

Idea: Activity feed should track when you last visited it, take you there when you open it. Currently, someone like me who likes to see everything happening on Veritula needs to go back through pages to find the last thing they saw.

Would ideas that no longer have pending criticisms (perhaps because the criticism chain has been flipped further up), be pulled out of the archive?

Idea: Conjecture Arena

Idea: Reason Arena

I like something with ‘Arena’ because it would imply action, some ideas winning out over others, and has a Darwinian aspect to it. Our best ideas are the tentative champions in the arena of ideas, waiting for the next challenger.

To be clear, if you copy the entire box quote and paste it into a textarea, it will start with the > sign. I just double checked.

This doesn't work for me the way it does for you. I tried copying the entire quote, and also in a separate attempt, copying extra stuff above and below the box quote, and neither gave me the > sign.

I have tried on my windows computer and my iPad.

When copying a box quote from Veritula, the box quote formatting (>) is lost.

It is one thing to retroactively explain why a particular good spread more than others in the past, but it is another thing to claim that your specific god of choice will spread more than others in the future.

Your claim is that Zcash is the next money, which is analogous to claiming your niche god of choice is under-appreciated and will be the next big one.

I don’t deny that Zcash might be decentralised and private.

For Zcash to become the next money, it is not sufficient for it to just be durable, fungible, private, decentralised, etc.

As long as it doesn’t have any underlying value, it will not be suitable as money.

You are using secondary attributes of good money as positive justifications for Zcash as good money, but you are failing to answer the criticism that Zcash has no underlying value.

Money needs to be a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value.

Features that support a price floor create the conditions where one can expect that their wealth won’t completely evaporate for one reason or another. Something that has no features supporting a price floor is not good money.

If gold no longer has features supporting a price floor at some point in the future (as you claim might happen), then gold would also not be good money in that future.

Zcash has nothing going for it that makes it a store of value. To the degree that it is ‘worth’ anything in the future, it is because of the dynamics I refer to in #2497.

Thank you for sharing this. I missed this in my read of BoI, and I agree now that Deutsch is wrong on this point.

Separate from Deutsch and going forward with our own epistemological practices, I think it would be appropriate for us to use terms like ‘good’ and ‘hard to vary’ in the sense of ‘not bad’ and ‘not easy to vary’. This eliminates the problem of gradation and positive argument, while preserving a shared and otherwise useful set of terminology.