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If drugs were legal, they’d be less dangerous, see #4964. If alcohol were illegal, error correction (including correcting safety errors) would get harder not easier.

I found a clip of Milton Friedman refuting my point:

… prohibition encouraged alcoholism rather than the opposite. To the young people in particular, it became an adventure to go out and get drunk, to go to a speakeasy. Today, with heroin illegal, it pays a heroin pusher to create an addict because, given that it’s illegal, it’s worth his while to spend some money on getting somebody else hooked. Because once hooked, he has a captive audience. If heroin were readily available everywhere, it wouldn’t pay anybody to create an addict, because the addict could then go anywhere to buy.

So if drugs were legal, sellers would have little to no incentive to turn their customers into addicts since the customers could go anywhere to get the drugs. Also, the sellers could always get new customers, so they don’t need to get customers addicted in the first place.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you but this still sounds different from languages just having different grammar. Some languages just don’t have the subject-predicate structure you spoke of. Still, people who speak them can state true things.

Then that statement, as you just wrote it, may not have any pending criticisms, in which case we assume it’s true. As long we treat ideas as discrete and immutable, even when there’s overlap, we can always still say true things.

One of the problems with cynicism, IMO, is that it ends up with pseudo-problems of language rather than genuine philosophical problems. I think that was one of the big issues with DD’s talk on statements vs. propositions.

I spoke of different grammar, not categories.

This could be a promising approach to formalize HTV:
https://x.com/FZdyb/status/2051352500582641931
https://github.com/deoxyribose/hard_to_vary_posterior_predictive

It’s AI generated, so not eligible for the bounty. And I’m not familiar enough with the probability calculus to evaluate it. But bookmarking it here for the future.

(One of my first criticisms was that HTV has nothing to do with likelihood, which the author granted but addressed by saying it maps onto marginal likelihood. See https://x.com/FZdyb/status/2051004605601898561 and surrounding discussion.)

…the subject-predicate structure…

What could grammar have to do with this? A different language that uses different grammar can still make true statements.

By the way, continuing here may not be in your interest because #4930 breaks the criticism chain. If your goal is to refute the notion that ideas can be true, you’ll probably want to connect your next criticism to #4915 somehow, or one of the ideas above it.

A better framing of what I mean might be «closer to truth». If the theories are consistent with more perspectives (big objects, people, small objects etc.), it is closer to truths. Newton’s theory is in that sense closer to truth than Ptolemy’s geocentric theory.

This sounds like verisimilitude, which Popper worked on a bunch. As I recall, David Miller refuted it toward the end of Popper’s life. Popper was still around to accept the refutation.

I’m not aware that anyone restored or vindicated verisimilitude. But even if someone did, we’d need to formalize and quantify it. Just saying “Newton’s theory is in that sense closer to truth than Ptolemy’s geocentric theory” would be too vague IMO.

But to verify absolute truth you would need to know every possible criticism of an idea.

But we don’t need to verify our ideas. As I wrote in #4891, there’s no criterion of truth to tell that an idea is true. But it can still be true.

This comprehensive playlist of Karl Popper videos is sure to have some videos of his you haven’t seen: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQtm033Fi_N1ZCu2ElpqrJ_pXNWLk3WW

Simple Refutation of David Deutsch’s ‘Hard to Vary’:
https://libertythroughreason.com/simple-refutation-of-david-deutschs-hard-to-vary/

Beating procrastination is simpler than you think:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a_UTkkSZhzs

Rereading some of BoI and I noticed some passages missing citations.

For example, chapter 12:

… [P]hysicist Ernst Mach (father of Ludwig Mach of the Mach–Zehnder interferometer), who was also a positivist philosopher, influenced Einstein, spurring him to eliminate untested assumptions from physics – including Newton’s assumption that time flows at the same rate for all observers.

Citation needed. Where and when and how did Mach influence Einstein? How does Deutsch know this?

That happened to be an excellent idea. But Mach’s positivism also caused him to oppose the resulting theory of relativity, essentially because it claimed that spacetime really exists even though it cannot be ‘directly’ observed.

Need to quote Mach opposing Einstein. It would have to be something to the effect of: ‘I disagree with Einstein about spacetime because it can’t be directly observed.’

Mach also resolutely denied the existence of atoms, because they were too small to observe.

Where did Mach say that? Specifically, how does DD know Mach denied atoms “resolutely”? If there are no primary sources, maybe there are some secondary ones? Skipping some:

… [W]hen the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann used atomic theory to unify thermodynamics and mechanics, he was so vilified by Mach and other positivists that he was driven to despair, which may have contributed to his suicide…

Need a quote by Mach showing how he vilified Boltzmann, and another showing that Boltzmann was indeed driven to despair.

We could just take DD’s word for it and assume he’s right on all of these counts. But we can’t know for a fact. Without citations, it’s harder for us as readers to verify these claims. Maybe DD used citations and just didn’t specify them. Or maybe he didn’t use any in the first place and just went off memory, which is error prone.

We can redefine ‘hard to vary’, but we’d need still a working implementation in the form of computer code.

… Demeter scores 25% and axial tilt scores 100%.

Now do this universally, for any given theory.

By the way Knut, when I go straight into ‘criticism mode’, that can sound cold or harsh. But don’t let that discourage you from exploring your idea further. Maybe you’re onto something! A working implementation of hard to vary would be useful and vindicating.

We can redefine ‘hard to vary’, but we’d need still a working implementation in the form of computer code.

… Demeter scores 25% and axial tilt scores 100%.

Now do this universally, for any given theory.

When you say it's 100% true that it's raining, "the facts" you correspond to are already facts within that framework, and not reality.

I think of them as facts of reality. I don’t think about ‘frameworks’. I think the idea of frameworks invites relativism.

We don’t need the molecular level for this. Truth is a very simple concept. No need to complicate it.

[W]e have no way of verifying that our conceptual carvings track or pick out entities and relations in reality. … [This] definitely rules out absolute truth.

I don’t see how it does. That we have no way to verify our theories (“conceptual carvings”) doesn’t rule out absolute truth. It does sound like we have different notions of ‘absolute truth’ in mind. For mine, see #4894.

Ironically, your idea that theories can be “more true than others” rules out absolute truth in the sense that truth leaves absolutely no room for deviation. Absolute truth is a binary: true or false. Nothing in between.

If you agree that truth is correspondence with reality, and not with the facts within our conceptual framework, the problem reemerges.

I disagree because I think this sets up a false dichotomy.

When I wrote “Truth means correspondence with the facts”, that means with the facts of reality.

Hi Ed, welcome to Veritula. If this idea is meant as a criticism (it sounds like one), be sure to revise it and check the criticism checkbox. See also ‘How Does Veritula Work?’

A contradiction in The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch? 🤔
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xmngAmZMEuo

Steve Jobs was a good writer.
He wrote clearly and simply.
Anyone can understand him.

From https://x.com/WebDesignMuseum/status/2049544240213196807

In that case, I'm unclear what "100% true" means.

Perfect correspondence with the facts.

For example, if it’s currently raining, and you say it is, then your statement is 100% true.

Nice, yes. I do see Deutschians using the concept, especially in the context of the fun criterion. But in the general public inexplicit knowledge is underrated, I agree.

Value isn’t in the object itself. It’s in the owner’s mind. If the owner doesn’t consent to the replacement, the value may well be lower.

For example, imagine somebody replacing your teddy bear from childhood with the ‘same’ one but new.