Search Ideas

You misunderstood my criticism. I said the US Federal Reserve Notes used to be backed by gold, not that the gold itself was backed by something.

What happened here?

“Bitcoin is not backed by anything” can also be stated as “Bitcoin is not redeemable in anything”.

“POW” or “computational work” or “encryption” are not things you can redeem if you own bitcoin.

This is in contrast to gold-backed currencies, for example, which are currencies which can be redeemed in gold. The United States Federal Reserve Note only became fiat when it was no longer redeemable in gold.

Bitcoin (and by extension Zcash) does not solve fiat. A key problem of fiat is that it isn’t backed by anything. Bitcoin isn’t backed my anything, and as far as I know, neither is Zcash.

No, I think the ‘Popperian Wikipedia’ idea is too different to Veritula for it to be a competitor. Veritula is primarily a discussion tool. I envision more of an encyclopedia of competing ideas presented independently of each other, with no (or very little) discussion functionality.

For example, on the topic of addiction, this site would contain different articles explaining different models of what addiction is, how it works, etc. Each article would explain the given model from within its own framework, rather than from some pre-approved framework and set of sources (as is currently the case at Wikipedia).

I realise “methods of criticism” in my reply above may have confused that somewhat.

I think my idea could be made within Veritula, if you would be interested. Different explanations could be cataloged in Wikipedia-style articles (with versioning), which could then be referred to and discussed in threads here. Maybe we should open a discussion for this potential feature?

At the end of the day, I think something like that should exist in the world, and I am indifferent to how it might come about. It wouldn’t bother me if I wasn’t involved. I would also consider financially supporting someone who gave me good reason to think they had the vision, the motivation, and the technical skill to create it.

I think correspondence is to epistemology as adaptation is to evolution. Knowledge that corresponds more to reality tends to be more useful (and/or has more reach), similar to biological adaptation.

This may make it harder for me to discuss sensitive topics (e.g. navigating personal relationships, health issues, etc.) since it may reveal things to people who know me personally, things that I may wish to keep to myself, that I would only discuss online behind a pseudonym.

Using my true name here causes me to take more care in what I write. I’m not hiding behind an identity I can discard.

People often say there are safety issues involved in using your true name online.

I’m curious btw, how did you hear about Veritula?

I believe I came across it while exploring your blog. My ‘Popperian Wikipedia’ idea was particularly sharp in my mind in that moment, so I was very excited to see how you had set things up here. I think a tremendous amount of it is transferable.

My vision is for an online encyclopedia that contains complete articles describing the totality of a perspective, with articles for alternate explanations readily available. I see many problems with this idea but I think it is worth exploring.

Would it be possible / worth it to produce a competitor to Wikipedia based on Popperian epistemology? Larry Sanger (a founder of Wikipedia) has said that he now thinks Wikipedia should have competing articles on the same topic to allow for the fact that people disagree.

The idea of having a Wikipedia equivalent that presents high quality competing articles detailing different alternative explanations for things (with some sort of versioning and methods of criticism) excites me greatly.

I have thought of producing something like this myself, which was part of what drew me to Veritula.

Please see #2298 for a link to an article outlining various other reasons for getting sunlight. Vitamin D is not the only reason to get sunlight (or some artificial equivalent).

Thank you for sharing. Skimming his content, I’m not finding any criticisms of the biological explanations I currently hold that reject polyunsaturated fats. I will dig deeper later on.

I haven’t yet found good criticisms of Ray Peat’s ideas regarding unsaturated fats, so those are the ideas I am currently living by.

I want to live in places that are mostly sunny, most of the time. This is for health reasons.

I could have multiple homes around the world that I move between throughout the year. This way I can make the most of geographical and seasonal advantages of different places.

Ideally I would live at some altitude, for health reasons.

I want to live somewhere with a more libertarian culture than average. I want to live somewhere where property rights are respected more than average, and people are left alone by the government more than average.

I want access to good quality food, particularly good quality meat, dairy, and fruit. Ideally the place I live has a growing culture of eating well (for example, in Austin, many restaurants are now making it a point not to use any seed oils in their cooking.)

I want to live close to thriving cities (say, no more than 60 minutes away on an average day).

I want superior water quality for drinking, bathing, etc.

This means I need to live somewhere sufficiently advanced to be able to provide and service high quality reverse-osmosis water filters. Otherwise I would need to be somewhere that I can directly access spring water, which I think is much more difficult.

Will the criterion for “battle tested” change as the site grows? If the purpose of this feature is to enable users to quickly see the best ideas on the site, I would imagine the number of addressed criticisms needed to count as “battle tested” would need to grow with the site. @dennis-hackethal*