David Deutsch’s idea of hard to vary is also a degree approach: look at the degree/amount of hardness to vary.
I think there’s a way of recasting hard-to-vary as a decisive approach, which is basically the answer ET gave to my first question in this thread.
edit: To be clearer about what I mean, the connection is that if a theory is easy to vary, that means by definition that it contains some unnecessary baggage. On those grounds it can be criticized decisively as not meeting certain (good) goals, such as the goal of having theories without unnecessary baggage.
We should always act on a non-refuted IGC. Why? Better something without a known error than with a known error. That’s what using our knowledge instead of ignoring it means.
I noticed how different this is from the conventional view of errors.
In the conventional view, known errors are completely unavoidable. For example, speaking from the conventional viewpoint: I think of my floor as a rectangle, and that theory has some errors because my floor is not a perfect rectangle. On this view, it wouldn’t make sense to always prefer things without known errors, because if that was your preference then you could never do anything in the real world.
In the CF view, known errors are avoidable. The idea that my floor is a rectangle can only be judged as having an error if it is part of an IGC triplet, and if the goal is something like “I want to put my rectangular desk flush against the wall,” then I know of no errors in that IGC triplet.
Earlier in the essay there is some stuff about variations on ideas:
The reason ideas can’t change from refuted to non-refuted is that if you change an idea to fix some problem, now you have a different idea. That’s a variant idea, not the same idea. The original idea without the fix is still refuted, and the new version was never refuted at any time because the criticism of the original idea does not apply to the new variant. People sometimes refer to many versions of an idea by the same name, e.g. “democracy” or “induction”. We can get away with this sometimes but it also leads to a lot of confusion. In some conversations, it helps to give each variant of an idea a different name. You can use descriptive names (“direct democracy”) or numbers (“induction-7”). We could specify dozens of different versions of direct democracy, and number them, but we usually don’t; we try to allocate precision where it’s actually useful, and most conversations don’t rely on precise nuances about democracy.
Later in the essay there is a comment about Objectivism:
If you do creative research, and come up with new knowledge, you’re actually changing the context! Creating new background knowledge doesn’t actually refute the old IGCs. What it can refute is the old I and G combined with the new C, which is useful. (This is related to Objectivism’s idea of contextual knowledge, which says ideas can remain non-refuted in a prior context even as you learn new things that refute them. Objectivism likes to view progress in terms of moving on to new, better knowledge without invalidating our old knowledge – it still had value and was useful in its context even if we know better today. That contrasts with the Critical Rationalism’s view of progress as a succession of new problems and errors, and belief that all our ideas are flawed/imperfect. Despite the different emphasis, these views are actually basically compatible. Progress involves getting closer to perfection without reaching it, and you can look at that in terms of making improvements, correcting errors, or both.)
The context in which a new variant of a refuted idea can still be used is set by its successor. That variant incorporates knowledge about the circumstances in which the old idea doesn’t work for some problem.
Goal: React to the beginning of the article (up to IGCs) and write about it.
People disagree about some of the details, but Critical Fallibilism (CF) says something clearly different : ideas start at 1 (non-refuted) and can be lowered to 0 (refuted), but can’t go up.
Ideas have to start out as non-refuted because you can’t have refuted an idea that you never heard of or thought of before. Contradictions or conflicts involve at least two ideas. You can think of an idea and then refute it in the next second but the logical starting point has to be non-refuted. You could think of a new idea that conflicts with some of your existing knowledge but the full refutation of the new idea doesn’t exist until you connect your existing knowledge to being a refutation of the new idea.
Ideas can toggle back and forth between refuted and non-refuted based on the state of debate. Neither status is final. All previous arguments and criticisms get wiped out with a successful new criticism which decisively changes the state of debate. That’s why the number or amount of arguments that argue in one directions or another doesn’t matter. What matters is which side has stands uncritisized.
The important thing is you shouldn’t come up with an idea and then instantly act on it, believing it’s just as good as any other non-refuted idea.
Lack of consideration or lack of critical analysis being one of the criticisms you can level against a new idea. It’s sort of a default criticism that pushes the new idea into refuted status.
In CF, initial review of an idea usually takes under 5 minutes.
I guess that the initial review is relatively short because spending more than a few minutes indicates you don’t really have the knowledged to evaluate the idea as refuted. If you need more than a few minutes to quickly brainstorm and check top-of-mind references then you’re probably getting into an area that you don’t understand that well. You probably lack the background and automatizations to make a decisive judgement. You might have to do significant prequisite work and go on multiple extended side quests in order to build up the skills needed for the evaluation.
Non-refuted does not mean you should act on an idea.
My impression is that an idea and an idea + action are two separate ideas. Or, maybe they could be thought of like an idea with actions implied/included and hypothecial version of an idea that excludes implied actions. The actions included versions of ideas have more criticism filters that they have to get through depending on what’s at stake with taking the action.
The number of refutations doesn’t directly matter.
This is due to the distinction between contradiction and consistency. One contraction is all it takes to be wrong.
The reason ideas can’t change from refuted to non-refuted is that if you change an idea to fix some problem, now you have a different idea.
This means that you aren’t actually toggling between refuted and non-refuted as the state of debate goes on. What’s really happening is that each side is elaborating new more nuanced ideas in response to criticisms. The final winner is a more fully developed idea than the initial idea. The idea that won the debate is more of a distant descedant of the original idea. The descendant contains more information and is more adapted to the overall problem situation. It’s a better explanation because it has been developed to contain more functional elements, which address the received criticism.
People sometimes refer to many versions of an idea by the same name, e.g. “democracy” or “induction”.
Differering ideas about what terms mean can lead to talking past each without addressing points of disagreement. Back and forth discussion helps each side fully describe the meaning of the ideas that they’re arguing about. This is where discussion trees come into play. In longer discussions you need to be able to identify where the disagreements are so the discussion doesn’t just go off in a bunch of different directions. You need a thread that connects the current disagreement to the main discussion.
Logic by Lionel Ruby has some related discussion, in Chapter 1, about “verbal disputes”.
The previous sentence touched on (with low precision) the quantity 100, the “is” relationship, the difference between “a” and “the”, lowness, estimates, numbers, things, “per”, conversations, basicness, what “every” means, words, and phrases – and those 13 things aren’t a complete list.
There’s too much to go into detail on every little thing in a discussion. That’s one of the reasons why discussions rely on prerequisite knowledge, standard terminology and, in more advance cases, familiarity with existing literature.
I said “can’t go up” and you contradicted that with “can toggle back and forth”. It’s hard to tell if this is intentional or what’s going on.
It’s possible to have a toggling back and forth version of CF, and I may talk that way sometimes, but it’s not my preferred viewpoint in general. (In functional programming terms: I prefer to reduce mutable state.) And it’s not what I said here in the quote of me.