Search Ideas

I don’t care whether people agree with me about this. I care about what’s true, what the ideas imply, as written. (Ironically, chapter 1 also says theories can have implications their authors did not intend or may not like.)

Liberty says in a previous discussion that the first quote is “just a cherry picked sentence and it's ambiguous as to the claim you're making. Neither Deutsch nor anyone else who agrees with it interprets the theory in the way you're doing.”

But those quotes aren’t all about HTV.

I reply:

BoI is full of remarks about preference formation. Doing word searches for “choose between” and “rival explanation”, we can find, for example:

“… we should choose between [policies or theories] not on the basis of their origin, but according to how good they are as explanations: how hard to vary.” (209)

“… how does the ‘dictator’ itself choose between rival explanations …?” (341)

“[The] main use [of experience] is to choose between theories that have already been guessed.” (4)

“The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories…” (32)

In response, Brett claims “that can’t be so because that’s not the purpose of ‘HTV’.” Claims it is instead “a crucial feature of good explanations.”

Brett’s response:

One can *call* that “rationality”. And ok. But what I’m referring to is that process which causes behaviour in humans. We create (choices) and choose them.

If one wants to extract out “coming up with ideas” from this process, ok. But that to me looks just like sentential logic.

Brett claims/implies Veritula is no better than other online forums; remains “unconvinced it amounts [to] the ‘algorithm’ for rationality.”

Brett claims/implies Veritula is no better than other online forums; remains “unconvinced it amounts [to] the “algorithm” for rationality.”

I think Brett is concerned that Veritula discounts the creation of new options. David is right to point in BoI chapter 13 that traditional accounts of rational decision-making focus too much on choosing from existing options according to a fixed formula while ignoring the fact that man is creative, ie can make new options.

Brett claims in response “the whole Popperian view is that rationality *is* creativity: the *creation* of corrections to errors once identified, etc.” He’s concerned that Veritula “seems to suggest ‘rationality’ is identical to something like ‘logic’ or a purely deductive process.”

Ben found a UI bug:

The text shouldn’t wrap after “trust”.

Brett says this can’t be a fully specified criterion of rationality because it’s not an AGI.

Brett Hall says Newtonian physics has pending criticisms but we can adopt it rationally in many situations so my criterion of rationality must be false.

Brett Hall says this basically comes down to getting the “best explanation” but is “not quite right”.

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.

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.

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?

We can rationally prefer A over B if and only if A has no pending criticisms whereas B has at least one.

The property you mention is the existence of pending criticisms.

Popper says to prefer ideas that are better corroborated, more truthlike. I wrote about this recently, pasting it here:

Corroboration was meant to help us form rational preferences between ideas. From The Logic of Scientific Discovery (pp. 281-282):

We can sometimes rationally justify the preference for a theory in the light of its corroboration, that is, of the present state of the critical discussion of the competing theories, which are critically discussed and compared from the point of view of assessing their nearness to the truth (verisimilitude). The current state of this discussion may, in principle, be reported in the form of their degrees of corroboration.

Specifically, corroboration helps you form a rational preference between two theories that have both been shown to be false while there are no known alternatives. From Conjectures and Refutations (p. 318):

… even after t2 has been refuted in its turn, we can still say that it is better than t1, for although both have been shown to be false, the fact that t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass may be a good indication that the falsity-content of t1 exceeds that of t2 while its truth-content does not. Thus we may still give preference to t2, even after its falsification, because we have reason to think that it agrees better with the facts than did t1.

That “t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass” means t2 is better corroborated than t1.

You may be overstating the difficulty. IIRC you like rural America. Finding a quiet place to live should be doable, even in cities but especially in rural places. (Believe it or not I once stayed at an Airbnb in Tahoe that was TOO quiet to sleep. It was so quiet it kinda freaked me out. And that’s saying something because I love quiet.)

What’s wrong with using melatonin indefinitely?

AFAIK it creates no physical dependence, you don’t build a tolerance, and it’s cheap. What’s not to love?

Then again, so is not sleeping…

But you don’t have that obligation right now, right?

There’s a company that makes a cube that you put in your bedroom and it creates a sound barrier. Like a noise canceling perimeter. It’s like noise canceling headphones except you don’t have to wear anything. I forget the name of the company but worth searching for it online. I remember being excited about it because I had the exact same idea and was stoked to see somebody actually doing it.

Just stumbled upon this tip in my Insta feed to deal with noisy neighbors: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Db4gheyx9WP/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Apparently you can buy a device that cancels out vibrations in your walls. Not sure I’m understanding exactly how it works.