Elliot Temple's Shortform
Apr 241
Elliot Temple
Message
If you want to discuss or debate an issue to resolution/conclusion with me, explicitly ask for that. I'm open, by request, to putting major effort into resolving disagreements.
-941
25
706
Critical Fallibilism (CF) is a philosophy I developed which deals with rationality, knowledge, and critical thinking and discussion. It builds most on Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism, which says we learn (create knowledge, solve problems) by an evolutionary process of conjectures and refutations. Popper rejected positive arguments (justifications) and induction. He...
@TristanTrim wrote (link added): > I dislike "argument" and "debate" as contexts for discussing discourse. As implied in Centola's book, more minds are changed by discourse than by debate. I know it's obtuse to use a phrase like "collaborative truth seeking" but it would be nice if there were more...
I changed my mind about some things. These examples are illustrative of potential weaknesses of focusing on error correction and critical discussion like Karl Popper advised. I don't think the weaknesses are inherent or unavoidable. They're practical issues that don't require different epistemology principles to address. They're just ways you...
I wrote a dense paragraph about Critical Fallibilism (CF), particularly ideas inspired by Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC). This article breaks it down and explains it. Here's the paragraph with small changes from the original: > People want complex solutions like correctly weighting and adding 50 factors, which are...
Solomonoff Induction (SI) focuses on short code. What’s short in English is not necessarily short in code, and vice versa. Most of our intuition in favor of short, simple explanations is from our experience with English, not code. Is there literature arguing that code and English brevity usually or always...
What counts as a hypothesis for Solomonoff induction? The general impression I’ve gotten in various places is “a hypothesis can be anything (that you could write down)”. But I don’t think that’s quite it. E.g. evidence can be written down but is treated separately. I think a hypothesis is more...