Benjamin Davies

Fallibilism

This is the philosophical position that all human knowledge—every belief, theory, and observation—is conjectural, incomplete, and potentially mistaken. It holds that there is no conclusive justification and no rational certainty for any belief. Fallibilism is distinct from skepticism. Skepticism argues that because certainty is impossible, knowledge is impossible. Fallibilism agrees that certainty is impossible but denies that this invalidates knowledge. Fallibilism holds that people can and do possess real, objective knowledge, and that people can improve it through a process of error correction.

The Open Society

This is the political philosophy of Critical Rationalism, detailed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. It is defined as a society "in which an individual is confronted with personal decisions," as opposed to a closed, "tribal or collectivist society". It replaces the justificationist political question, "Who should rule?", with the "fallibilist" question: "How can we structure our institutions so that we can remove bad rulers and bad policies without violence?". In this view, democracy is not "rule by the people" (an essentialist definition) but is valued as the only known institutional mechanism for error-correction and leadership change without bloodshed.

Justificationism

The mistaken philosophical tradition holding that knowledge must be "justified" (i.e., proven, supported, or made probable) by appealing to an ultimate, infallible authority. Critical Rationalism identifies this entire approach as logically untenable, as any demand for justification leads to an inescapable logical trap known as the Münchhausen Trilemma: either an infinite regress (every justification needs a justification), circularity (the belief justifies itself), or dogmatism (the justification stops at a "self-evident" belief). Critical Rationalism is a non-justificationist philosophy; it rejects the entire quest for justified, certain foundations and replaces it with an emphasis on criticism and error correction.

Political Holism

Synonymous with large-scale social engineering, this is the political program that follows from Historicism. It is the attempt to remodel an entire society from a central blueprint, based on a historicist prophecy of an "ideal" state. Popper argued this program is both violent and irrational. It is violent because it requires the suppression of all dissent to enact the central plan, and it is irrational because when an entire system is changed at once, it becomes impossible to trace the consequences of any single action, making it impossible to learn from mistakes.

The mistaken belief that history is governed by discoverable, large-scale "laws of history" or "powerful historical trends". This belief leads to the idea of unconditional historical prophecy, which is anti-rational and politically disastrous, as seen in the philosophies of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. It is contrasted with the "piecemeal" method of making specific, conditional predictions.

This could lead to a cool knowledge graph feature down the line, where users could see how ideas might relate across discussions, and which ideas are referred to the most.

Idea: Links within Veritula could be made bidirectional. While viewing an idea, users could see all the ideas that refer to it. This could be displayed as a list of backlinks at the bottom of the idea’s page.

The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.

This is how relating discussions works currently. For instance, if I start a discussion on Bitcoin, I might want to connect it to the existing discussion on Zcash. At present, the only way to achieve this is by adding a link to the Zcash discussion within my new Bitcoin discussion.

I suspect you would agree with me that this approach to how discussions interact isn’t really an issue. I also think it wouldn’t be an issue for independently published ideas, for the same reasons.

Yes.

A discussion aiming to identify and develop Critical Rationalist terminology

Dennis suggested I create this discussion and tag @dirk-meulenbelt and @darren-wiebe.

Logan Chipkin has also suggested I get in contact with @darren-wiebe in regards to putting together a CR encyclopedia or something of the sort.

I think it is worth noting that I am much more excited to publish standalone articles than to drop top-level ideas into discussion topics.

I am not marking this as a criticism, as my personal desires in this respect may be irrelevant to the goals of Veritula.

These are not standalone pages in the sense that a Wikipedia page is a standalone page.

Articles would have the same ‘page’ status as the discussion pages that currently exist. (Forgive my lack of technical vocabulary.)

A possible counter-factual that may or may not be relevant to the goals of Veritula: An article with title metadata ‘Boron’ would presumably be much more search engine-friendly than a top-level ideas for Boron where the metadata title is ‘#[ID]’ and the actual desired title is merely included as the fist line of the body text, while it is effectively a subpage of a discussion of another name.

See #2777.

While it is true that discussions don’t restrict people from posting long-form content that on the ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ discussion, that is not the intuitive function of a discussion thread. I believe the long-form content in that discussion is much more natural to an article format.

If a goal of Veritula is for it to eventually be widely used, it should cater to at least some of what people are used to. The articles and encyclopedia formats are the most standard way for high-level information to be presented in written form, and internet users expect different kinds of content in articles vs discussions.

If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic. The same would be true if I wanted to make articles on CR terms—this doesn’t seem very natural to do in a Veritula discussion, but would be very natural in a series of Veritula articles, one for each term.

Just because something feels unintuitive or unnatural to you doesn’t mean it isn’t the right way for it to be done in the grand scheme of things.

If Veritula did implement articles, the first thing I’d want is the ability to criticize them; to submit deeply nested counter-criticisms; and to render a label showing how many pending criticisms an article has, calculated based on criticism chains.

I agree, and I think here you have inadvertently pointed at a key difference between discussions and articles. In terms of implementation, articles would be a near clone of discussions, except that the articles themselves can be criticised by users, including all the functionality that articles being criticisable may one day come with, like entire articles going dormant if they don’t answer criticisms within a certain period.

A couple of examples: If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic. The same would be true if I wanted to make articles on CR terms—this doesn’t seem very natural to do in a Veritula discussion, but would be very natural in a series of Veritula articles, one for each term.

It also favours this articles idea that implementing it would be fairly straightforward, due to how much could be carried over from the discussions implementation. It makes it low cost to try.

Works well 👍

I used to think that articles would need to be grouped in some way, but I no longer think so. Articles will often compete, even if they aren’t about the same or even similar topic.

E.g. an article ‘Easy-to-Vary Explanations’ would compete with an article ‘The Simulation Hypothesis’

Users would be able to point out and connect conflicting articles, but that wouldn’t cause them to be connected by topic, but rather by conflict.

Users may wish to publish articles that don’t neatly fit into a discussion topic.

Top-level ideas need to be published to a specific discussion, which will cause some amount of silo-ing or similar dynamics.