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Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
I gave you an opportunity to be eligible for the remaining funds if you just stopped arguing. Now you’re doubling down and arguing more. You’ve forfeited the remaining funds.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved.
I’m banning you from Veritula in perpetuity. Don’t contact me again. I wish you well and hope you find another forum more to your liking.
When thousands of dollars are at stake, I think it’s fair to ask people to play by the rules. Still, I’m allowing flexibility by giving Jad a chance to collect the remaining funds.
I’m always happy to reward good work; I’ve paid out bounties in the past. And before I found out about Jad’s use of AI, I gave him tips increasing his odds of beating the bounty. I also submitted criticisms of some of my own ideas, further increasing his odds.
But people need to earn the reward. At some point, I noticed Jad had submitted his replies very quickly, with unusually verbose text, and in fairly rapid succession. AI is notoriously verbose, so that would have been the second-best time for him to mention he was using AI. He did not. But some people do genuinely type fast, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
When I later asked him directly whether he was using AI, he admitted to it but claimed it was merely to “help edit some of [his] writings”.
Pangram, an AI detector, paints a different picture: it says 100% (!) of the code and 22% of the prose in his first idea are AI-generated. I’ve also sampled some of his replies since, which Pangram says are also 100% AI-generated.
To play devil’s advocate once again, I wanted to make sure Pangram wasn’t giving me false positives. So I ran several tests against some of my own prose and code, and compared the results with known AI-generated prose and code. Pangram was almost always right – the few times it did make mistakes, they were almost always false negatives, so if anything, Pangram is too permissive. It does have lower confidence for shorter texts, so I also made sure to use only texts that are long enough. I showed Jad these results privately and he didn’t have a good answer, so I’m surprised he now wants to continue the discussion publicly.
In terms of content, handwriting the code matters because of Deutsch’s yardstick for having understood a computational task: if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it. Jad says he still understands the code regardless, so it shouldn’t matter. But why not raise that before agreeing to a rule he took issue with? Why accept the risk of disqualification instead?
In terms of fairness, as Jad knows, payout for a bounty depends on addressing all known criticisms inside a review deadline. When a participant uses AI to help with that, but the funders don’t know about it, it creates an unfair advantage. That’s a violation of not just the letter but also the spirit of the rules. It’d be like secretly using a chess computer for help in a chess competition. The amount of text Jad has submitted also creates an uphill battle for the remaining funders to review his submissions before the deadline. Jad says he knows how bounties work, so he knows payouts are automatic at the deadline. Still, the remaining funders are willing to accommodate him.
Before I made the decision to withdraw my funds, I reached out to Jad privately, as I said, to make sure there wasn’t anything I had missed and that there were no hard feelings. We discussed the issue thoroughly and I couldn’t find anything. I also discussed the matter with the co-funders for a second and third opinion, again to make sure I hadn’t left any stones unturned. (To be clear, the responsibility for the decision to withdraw my funds is mine alone.)
I understand Jad was hoping for a bigger payout, so this must be a disappointing outcome. I empathize with that. I’d be bummed too. But he could have easily avoided this outcome. One can’t agree to a rule, immediately break it, get an unfair advantage, hope I won’t notice, and then complain when I do. But with any luck, he’ll get the remaining funds, provided that the arguing ends now.
Unfortunately, Jad has admitted to using AI for his submissions, in violation of the bounty terms. As a result, he’s not eligible for a payout. After discussing the issue with him and separately with cofunders @dirk-meulenbelt and @davies, I’ve decided to withdraw my funds.
However, the co-funders say they don’t mind the use of AI. For that reason, and as a token of appreciation for Jad’s idea, I’m making an exception and he’ll remain eligible for their funds, pending further development of this bounty.
This is out of scope for the bounty. The bounty merely says the program must “Return a ranking indicating which explanation is better, worse, or equal.” It doesn’t say the program has to specify which variation.
The program can't accept my judgment that these are genuine variations and then independently override that judgment because it “knows” they're actually irrelevant. Doing that would require the program itself to understand what is doing explanatory work. That's precisely the part I'm outsourcing to the user.
Fair enough.
As of 2026-09-02, I’ve removed that part from the blog post.
It sounds like you’re agreeing, in which case this shouldn’t be marked as a criticism.
@jadelmourad be sure to submit separate criticisms separately. You benefit because it means I need to address each criticism individually, not in ‘bulk’. (See #5546, keyword ‘bulk’.)
One could run the program again with corrected inputs but as I noted in #5533, that approach won’t scale.
Jad originally replied in #5559. I’ve extracted his reply to avoid bulk criticism:
If the user later changes their mind about one of those judgments, then yes, the current minimal CLI requires them to run it again with the corrected input. I agree that wouldn't be good UX for a full application, but that's not what I'm trying to build here. Adding the ability to add, edit, or delete variations and immediately recalculate the ranking is straightforward and doesn't change the decision procedure being demonstrated.
I think the program already gets this through human input.
The prompt isn't asking the user to enter arbitrary changes. It specifically asks:
“Enter variations of this explanation that would still work to explain the same thing.”
So by entering a variation, the user is making the judgment that it still accounts for what the original explanation was supposed to account for. That's intentionally a human judgment, just like the other judgments I've discussed in #5553.
Revisions aren’t for counter-critizing criticisms. Revisions are for changes you make because you agree with a criticism. I’ve restored the original. I’ve also updated #5519 to make the purpose of revisions clearer. It’s now #5546. Please read it in its entirety before you continue working on the bounty. Then continue with #5544.
How Does Veritula Work?
Veritula (Latin for ‘a bit of truth’) can help you live a life guided exclusively by reason.
To reason, within any well-defined epistemology, means to follow and apply that epistemology. Unreason, or whim, is an undue departure from it. Epistemology is the study of knowledge – basically, the study of what helps knowledge grow, what hinders its growth, and related questions.
Veritula follows, and helps you apply, Karl Popper’s epistemology, Critical Rationalism. It’s a continuation of the Athenian tradition of criticism and the only known epistemology without major flaws.1
Critical Rationalism says that ideas are assumed true until refuted. This approach leaves us free to make bold guesses and use the full arsenal at our disposal to criticize these guesses in order to solve problems, correct errors, and seek truth. It’s a creative and critical approach. Critical Rationalism is a fallibilist philosophy: there is no general criterion of truth to determine with certainty whether any given idea is true or false (Tarski). We all make mistakes, and by an effort, we can correct them to get a little closer to the truth. Rejecting all forms of mysticism and the supernatural, Veritula recognizes that progress is both possible and desirable, and that rational means are the only way to make ongoing progress.
Veritula is a programmatic implementation of Popper’s epistemology.
Veritula provides an objective, partly automated way to tentatively determine whether a given idea is problematic. It does not tell you what to think – it teaches you how to think.
On Veritula, ideas are discrete and immutable. Consider an idea I:
I
Since it has no criticisms, we tentatively consider I unproblematic. It is rational to adopt it and act in accordance with it. Conversely, it would be irrational to reject it, consider it problematic, or act counter to it. (See this quick guide for more details on rational decision-making.)
Next, someone submits a criticism C1:
I|C1
The idea I is now considered problematic so long as criticism C1 is not addressed. How do you address it? If you agree with the criticism, you can revise I so that C1 doesn’t apply anymore, which restores the previous state with just the standalone I (now called I2 to indicate the revision):
ReviseI ------------> I2|C1
To track changes, Veritula offers beautiful diffing and version control for ideas.
If you disagree with C, you can counter-criticize it instead, thereby neutralizing it with a new criticism, C2:
I|C1|C2
Now, I is considered unproblematic again, since C1 is problematic and thus can’t be a decisive criticism anymore.
If you can think of neither a revision of I nor counter-criticism to C1, your only option is to accept that I has been (tentatively) defeated. You should therefore abandon it, which means: stop acting in accordance with it, viewing it as unproblematic, etc.
Since there can be many criticisms (which are also just ideas) and deeply nested counter-criticisms, the result is a tree structure. For example, as a discussion progresses, one of its trees might look like this:
I/ | \C11 C12 C13/ \ \C21 C22 C23/ \C31 C32
In this tree, I is considered problematic. Although C11 has been neutralized by C21 and C22, C12 still needs to be addressed. In addition, C23 would have neutralized C13, but C31 and C32 make C23 problematic, so C13 makes I problematic as well.
You don’t need to keep track of these relationships manually. Veritula automatically marks ideas accordingly.
Since decision-making follows the same logic as truth-seeking, you can use these trees to make decisions, too. Veritula implements unanimous consent as defined by Taking Children Seriously, a parenting philosophy that builds on Popper’s epistemology. When you’re planning your next move but can’t decide on a city, say, Veritula helps you criticize your ideas and make a rational decision – meaning a decision you’ll be happy with. Again, it’s rational to act in accordance with ideas that have no pending criticisms.
All ideas, including criticisms, should be formulated as concisely as possible, and separate ideas should be submitted separately, even if they’re related. Otherwise, you run the risk of receiving ‘bulk’ criticisms, where a single criticism seems to apply to more content than it actually does.
Again, criticisms are also just ideas, so the same is true for criticisms. Submitting each criticism separately has the benefit of requiring the proponent of an idea to address each criticism individually, not in bulk. If he fails to address even a single criticism, the idea remains problematic and should be rejected.
The more you discuss a given topic, the deeper and wider the tree grows. Some criticisms can apply to multiple ideas in the tree, but that needs to be made explicit by submitting them repeatedly.
Comments that aren’t criticisms – eg follow-up questions or otherwise neutral comments – are considered ancillary ideas. Unlike criticisms, ancillary ideas do not invert their respective parents’ statuses. They are neutral.
One of the main benefits of Veritula is that the status of any idea in a discussion can be seen at a glance. If you are new to a much-discussed topic, adopt the displayed status of the ideas involved: if they are marked problematic, reject them; if they are not, adopt them.
Therefore, Veritula acts as a dictionary for ideas.
One of the problems of our age is that people have same discussions over and over again. Part of the reason is widespread irrationality, expressed in the unwillingness to change one’s mind; another is that it’s simply difficult to remember or know what’s true and what isn’t. Discussion trees can get complex, so people shouldn’t blindly trust their judgment of whether some idea is true or problematic, whether nested criticisms have been neutralized or not. Going off of memory is too error prone.
Veritula solves this problem: it makes discussion trees explicit so you don’t have to remember each idea and its relation to other ideas. Veritula therefore also enables you to hold irrational people accountable: if an idea has pending criticisms, the rational approach is to either abandon it or to save it by revising it or addressing all pending criticisms.
Many people don’t like to concede an argument. But with Veritula, no concessions are necessary. The site just shows you who’s right.
Using Veritula, we may discover a bit of truth.
Still have questions about rationality? Read the technical paper, learn about Veritula’s recursive epistemology and how to structure discussions, or read the quick guide to rational decision-making.
Want personalized help tailored to your own specific needs? Hire Dennis, founder of Veritula, for personal tutoring, or run a bounty.
Popperian epistemology has some flaws, like verisimilitude, but Veritula doesn’t implement those.
Take the question: Why do seasons occur?
Should credit Deutsch for the example. Reference BoI chapter 1.
She spends part of the year in Hades…
Hades is god the underworld, not a place.
Proposal for new rule
TL;DR: repeat irrationality (as defined below) should be a bannable offense.
Since Popper seemed so agreeable, I mentioned that one of his former students had accused him of not tolerating criticism of his own ideas. Popper's eyes blazed. “It is completely untrue! I was happy when I got criticism! Of course, not when I would answer the criticism… and the person would still go on with it. That is the thing which I found uninteresting and would not tolerate.” In that case, Popper would throw the student out of his class.
… so long as the proponents of our best theories … have to expend their intellectual energies in futile refutation and re-refutation of theories long known to be false, the state of our deepest knowledge cannot improve.
Our forum rules (#4460) include a rule against “Behavior that is intended, or likely, to sabotage debate or prevent progress…” In light of recent, mostly off-platform discussions, I’m thinking about extending it. Or maybe it already applies to the behavior I’m about to describe.
Veritula is built to help people seek truth by criticizing ideas and addressing criticism. More generally, it’s meant to help people live a life guided by reason (#2844) and make progress. That includes the rejection of ideas with pending criticisms.
One of the core insights of Veritula is that people should not rely on memory to decide whether to adopt an idea (#4471). They shouldn’t rely on memory to recall the outcome of a discussion. They shouldn’t track the outcome of a discussion manually (unless they’ve practiced that skill extensively). They should instead feed ideas into Veritula, put them in the proper relationship with each other, and then simply look up which ideas they should adopt or reject. Or, if the discussion has already happened, then they should simply look up its current state instead of duplicating it. (The list of discussions and search function should help with that.) Any idea with a red label showing a count of pending criticisms should be abandoned; any idea without that label should be adopted.
This way, people can avoid having the same discussions over and over again. But some people aren’t willing to do the required work even once and change their mind. They’d rather repeat the same discussions, and repeatedly advocate the same mistaken ideas, like those Easter Islanders who kept building hideous statues with no purpose.
I think members on Veritula should be expected to follow through and update their stances when they’re shown to be wrong. After all, Veritula offers them a way to tell objectively that they’re wrong. We have a criterion of rationality, so why not use it? And if they can’t remember what their updated stance should be, they should get in the habit of simply looking it up. If their old stance has pending criticisms, they should stop advocating it.
But people conveniently ‘forget’ discussion outcomes they view as unfavorable, let a few months pass (at which point they think nobody could reasonably blame them for forgetting), and then go right back to advocating a stance that’s already known to be false.
Mistakes happen; again, memory isn’t perfect. Or sometimes we have a nagging feeling that something about the outcome of a discussion just isn’t quite right, but we can’t put our finger on it. In such a situation, when asked about one’s stance, it’s rational to say something like: ‘Although I personally disagree, at the current state of the discussion, idea X (link to the idea on V) is (or is not) rationally adoptable.’
A good example of how to do this right in a similar situation is @dirk-meulenbelt’s recent post on X:
I wrote a proof/argument on my blog that the challenge is impossible for "two strings" alone, though Dennis has [since] clarified that it's OK to have more than just two strings, and a person may be prompted within reason.
The specific content isn’t important here. What matters is that Dirk shared an objection and then immediately explained why it wasn’t valid anymore. That’s honest. It’s unlike so many dishonest interlocutors who would only mention the objection but not that it’s been addressed already.
As I’ve written before:
The catalog of ideas can be vast – much too big for any one man to hold in his mind. Memory is error-prone. We should not rely on memory to see which ideas we should adopt or reject. We should look them up, dispassionately, in the database [on Veritula], the way a judge would look up a law in a legal text. Rationality is an impersonal thing. Advocacy and rejection of ideas is impersonal as well.
A judge preparing a verdict may personally disagree with a law. For example, he may think it’s too strict or not strict enough. In his ruling, he may even personally distance himself from a specific law. But that doesn’t mean he can just ignore it and act on whim instead.
Yet that is essentially how people treat the advocacy and rejection of ideas more generally. They do it based on whim. If such people participate on Veritula long-term, they will duplicate ideas or even entire discussions. But maintaining discussion trees is no simple task; it takes care and effort. If there are no consequences for such people, one would have to refute and re-refute ideas long known to be false. And that’s time we could spend advocating and improving ideas not known to be false. In short, such people sabotage progress.
Therefore, I suggest that members who are repeatedly found to advocate ideas with pending criticisms, or to reject ideas without pending criticisms, or to have duplicate discussions due to undue reversals to previous, mistaken stances – in short, members who act irrationally in this way, on or off-platform, when they should know better – be given warnings.
If it happens once, it’s no big deal. If it happens twice, it may warrant a warning. Mods should reference both the offending statement and presumed match so the presumed offender can explain any discrepancy. If positive, they may also be asked to explain how they plan to avoid this outcome in the future (eg see #5176). They could run a bounty that will charge their card a small but non-negligible amount if they don’t address a criticism. If it happens a third time, especially if it’s about the same topic as before, their account may be temporarily locked or banned permanently. More leeway can be given if a lot of time passes between offenses or due to other extenuating circumstances, case by case.
Non-members who wish to join Veritula, but who’ve been found to act irrationally in this way off-platform, will need to make a convincing case that they want to improve. Evidence that they’ve changed their mind on some issue, eg some written public record of that change, including some evidence that they remember that change over time, would be a good start.
This rule wouldn’t be retroactive for bans, but once effective, past ‘offenders’ may be warned if their behavior is expected to continue. Past warnings will count toward the decision for future bans.
I want people who take ideas, reason, and progress seriously. Others can go goof off on other platforms, there’s plenty of those around. People who take reason seriously need a way to protect their time against people who don’t.
The rule is meant to address blatant disregard for rationality. If someone honestly tries to be rational but fails, the rule doesn’t apply.
That’s already covered by the recommendation to separate one’s personal stance from what can be objectively & rationally advocated: “‘Although I personally disagree, at the current state of the discussion, idea X (link to the idea on V) is (or is not) rationally adoptable.’” That can be changed slightly to: ‘Although I’m not yet able to do it fully myself, at the current state of the discussion, idea X should be adopted.’
A valuable contributor might advocate elsewhere an idea that has pending criticisms on Veritula, without affecting Veritula or its members.
Irrationally spreading ideas affects everyone. Culture can’t be neatly contained like that. I think that’s one of the reasons Deutsch and Popper voiced their frustrations. And I want members of V to be known for not spreading ideas irrationally. I want them to have a reputation for (fallibly) acting rationally. (I add the proviso ‘fallibly’ to appreciate that members may sometimes struggle to act rationally, but as long as they make an honest try, they’re fine in my book.)
A valuable contributor might advocate elsewhere an idea that has pending criticisms on Veritula, without affecting Veritula or its members.
If they’re valuable, mods can take that into account when making a decision. Since multiple warnings would be given first, it’s not like we’d suddenly lose valuable members left and right.