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It might be worth stating that the underlying philosophy of Veritula, in conjunction with fallibilism, says that progress is both possible and desirable, and that rational means are the only way to make progress. This means an end to mysticism and the supernatural.

The pruning mechanism is part of it, but there’s more. Again, there’s also competition between ideas and even predatory behavior that can result in the elimination of ideas. All such phenomena taken together constitute natural selection in the mind.

… Rat Festers cite Popper and Deutsch as if they are infallible.

Shouldn’t it be ‘as if they were infallible’?

Fixed as of 2025-10-08.

Hardly anyone reads those, and many of those who do forget.

There could be an explanation somewhere stating that emoji reactions do not have epistemological relevance.

Those run the risk of turning Veritula into yet another social network like Reddit or messenger like Telegram.

Pasting #2079 here as it’s since been hidden in a resolved child thread and should have applied directly to #2074 in the first place.

My current view is that the only meaningful dichotomy is good vs. bad.

You say yourself in #2071 that one should “always avoid positive arguments.” Calling a theory “good” would be a positive argument.

As I say in #2065, Popperian epistemology has no room for ‘good’ or any other justification. I’m not aware that anyone has successfully proposed a way to measure the ‘hard-to-varyiness’ of theories anyway. We can criticize theories for being arbitrary (which is another word for ‘easy to vary’). That’d be fine. But Popper wouldn’t give them points for not being arbitrary. And arbitrariness isn’t the only type of criticism a theory might receive anyway.

If we follow Popper and get rid of justification, we can’t use ‘good vs bad’ because we can’t use ‘good’. The only dichotomy left standing is ‘has some bad’ vs ‘has no bad’. Another word for ‘pointing out some bad’ is ‘criticism’. So this dichotomy can be rephrased as: ‘has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’, or ‘has reasons to be rejected’ vs ‘has no reasons to be rejected’. Note that there’s a difference: if you think some idea is bad, you submit a criticism. If you think it’s good, you can still submit a criticism because it might not yet be as good as you want it to be. So regardless of how good a theory might be, it can still have pending criticisms, and thus reasons to reject it. Think of Newtonian physics, which (I’m told) is a superb theory, but it’s false and (as I understand it) has plenty of pending criticisms.

‘Has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’ is directly comparable whereas ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t directly comparable. And ‘has n pending criticisms’ vs ‘has m’ or ‘has 0 pending criticisms’ are even numerically comparable.

Veritula does not implement Deutsch’s epistemology. It implements Popper’s. I don’t think they’re compatible.

(As an aside, I’m not sure how I could implement Deutsch’s epistemology even if I wanted to. Would I give each idea a slider where people can say how ‘good’ the idea is? What values would I give the slider? Would the worst value be -1,000 and the best +1,000? How would users know to assign 500 vs 550? Would a ‘weak’ criticism get a score of 500 and a ‘strong’ one 1,000? What if tomorrow somebody finds an even ‘stronger’ one, does that mean I’d need to extend the slider beyond 1,000? Do I include arbitrary decimal/real numbers? Is an idea’s score reduced by the sum of its criticisms’ scores? If an idea has score 0, what does that mean – undecided? If it has -500, does that mean I should reject it ‘more strongly’ than if it had only -100? And so on. Deutsch says you haven’t understood something if you can’t program it, and I don’t think he could program his epistemology.)

Since you’re a doctor, Erik, let me ask: is there a possibility Alzheimer’s could be explained in terms of bad software? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the prevailing view is limited to bad hardware.

I have speculated in the past that ideas compete for attention, but they also compete for any kind of memory, be it something like RAM or hard-disk memory. The RAM-like memory in the brain is presumably closely related to working memory, if not the same.

The reason most people don’t (permanently) run out memory (of either kind) isn’t that memory isn’t scarce but that there’s a pruning mechanism in the mind. And again, there’s competition. That competition can involve predatory ideas which disassemble the source code of other ideas and use it for themselves because that’s cheaper than to construct source code from scratch.

By the way, how is this a criticism? #2200 makes no mention of memory.

I have speculated in the past that ideas compete for attention, but they also compete for any kind of memory, be it something like RAM or hard-disk memory. The RAM-like memory in the brain is presumably closely related to working memory, if not the same.

The reason most people don’t run out memory (of both kinds) isn’t that memory isn’t scarce but that there’s a pruning mechanism in the mind. And again, there’s competition. That competition can involve predatory ideas which disassemble the source code of other ideas and use it for themselves because that’s cheaper than to construct source code from scratch.

Everyone has scarce memory. Everyone’s brain has limited storage space.

Then you counter-criticize them for whatever you think they lack (which should be easy if they really aren’t good), thus addressing them and restoring the idea.

Then the idea should be revised to adjust or exclude the criticized part(s).

But sometimes an idea has other content that shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater just because of some criticism that applies only to part of it.

… I don’t yet know how to reconcile that, nor do I have a satisfactory alternative theory or criticism to offer.

Do #2140 and its children help as an alternative theory?

As a reminder, at some point we will need to do some housekeeping because any criticisms of #2108 are probably also going to be criticisms #2109 and we want an intact criticism chain.

I’m marking this as a criticism so we don’t forget. And when we’re done with the housekeeping, we can say so in a counter-criticism to ‘check off’ that todo item.

… I don’t yet know how to reconcile that, nor do I have a satisfactory alternative theory or criticism to offer.

Does #2140 help as an alternative theory?

… I don’t yet know how to reconcile that, nor do I have a satisfactory alternative theory or criticism to offer.

You do know criticisms, see #2094.

We can criticize theories for lacking structure, resilience, depth, reach, etc. But again, if we want to avoid justificationism, theories that do have those attributes don’t get points for having them.

[L]abeling explanations as good or bad can itself be a form of positive argument.

Labeling them good, yes. But not labeling them bad.

Citations needed.

You retain that freedom. Veritula has no power over you. Being irrational is your prerogative (as long as you don’t violate anyone else’s consent in the process). Just don’t pretend to yourself or others that you’re being rational when you’re not.

You retain that freedom. Veritula has no power over you. Being irrational is your prerogative (as long as you don’t violate anyone else’s consent in the process).