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Khoth comments on Popperian Decision making - Less Wrong Discussion
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tl;dr
I've just Criticised your idea. Your idea is not good enough. You have to come up with a new one.
Or is there some level of criticism that doesn't count because it's not good enough either?
Your criticism is generic. It would work on all ideas equally well. It thus fails to differentiate between ideas or highlight a flaw in the sense of something which could possibly be improved on.
So, now that I've criticized your criticism (and the entire category of criticisms like it), we can reject it and move on.
My criticism is not generic. It would not work on an idea which consisted of cute cat pictures. Therefore, your criticism of my criticism does not apply.
I can continue providing specious counter-counter-...counter-criticisms until the cows come home. I don't see how your scheme lets sensible ideas get in edgeways against that sort of thing.
Anyhow, criticism of criticisms wasn't in your original method.
If you understand they are specious, then you have a criticism of it.
Criticisms are themselves ideas/conjectures and should themselves be criticized. And I'm not saying this ad hoc, I had this idea before posting here.
I understand they are specious, but I'm not using your epistemology to determine that. What basis do you have for saying that they are specious?
It doesn't engage with the substance of my idea. It does not explain what it regards as a flaw in the idea.
Unless you meant the tl;dr as your generic criticism and the flaw you are trying to explain is that all good idea should be short and simple. Do you want me to criticize that? :-)
What I'm trying to get at is: By your system, the idea to be accepted is the one without an uncountered criticism. What matters isn't any external standard of whether the criticism is good or bad, just whether it has been countered. But any criticism, good or bad, can be countered by a (probably bad) criticism, so your system doesn't offer a way to distinguish between good criticism and bad criticism.
You have to conjecture standards of criticism (or start with cultural ones). Then improve them by criticism, and perhaps by conjecturing new standards.
If you want to discuss some specific idea, say gardening, you can't discuss only gardening in a very isolated way. You'll need to at least implicitly refer to a lot of background knowledge, including standards of criticism.
One way this differs from foundations is if you think a standard of criticism reaches the wrong conclusion about gardening, you can argue from your knowledge of gardening backwards (as some would see it) to criticize the standard of criticism for getting a wrong answer.
How can you expect that criticizing your standards of criticism will be productive if you don't have a good standard of criticism in the first place?
Many starting points work fine.
In theory, could you get stuck? I don't have a proof either way.
I don't mind too much. Humans already have standards of criticism which don't get stuck. We have made scientific progress. Our standards we already have allow self-modifiaction and thereby unbounded progress. So it doesn't matter what would have happened if we had started with a bad standard once a upon a time, we're past that (it does matter if we want to create an AI).
Doesn't this create an infinite regress of criticisms, if you try hard enough? (Your countercriticism is also generic, when it applies to the whole category.)
If you try hard enough you can refuse to think at all.
Popperian epistemology helps people learn who want to. It doesn't provide a set of rules that, if you follow them exactly while trying your best not to make progress, then you will learn anyway. We only learn much when we seriously try to, with good intentions.
You can always create trivial regresses, e.g. by asking "why?" infinitely many times. But that's different than the following regress:
If you assert "theories should be justified, or they are crap"
and you assert "theories are justified in one way: when they are supported by a theory which is itself justified"
Then you have a serious problem to deal with which is not the same type as asking "why?" forever.
Things which reject entire categories is not a precise way to state what theories should be rejected. You are correct that the version I wrote can be improved to be clearer and more precise. One of the issues is whether a criticism engages with the substance of the idea it is criticizing, or not. "All ideas are wrong" (for example) doesn't engage with any of the explanations that the ideas it rejects give, it doesn't point out flaws in them, it doesn't help us learn. Criticisms which don't help us learn better are no good -- the whole purpose and meaning of criticism, as we conceive it, is you explain a flaw so we can learn better.
One issue this brings up is that communication is never 100% precise. There is always ambiguity. If a person wants to, he can interpret everything you say in the worst possible way. If he does so, he will sabotage your discussion. But if he follows Popper's (not unique or original) advice to try to interpret ideas he hears as the best version they could mean -- to try to figure out good ideas -- then the conversation can work better.