Form: Quote Commentary

DUKE NEWCOMB EXPLAINS DECIDABILITY

by Duke Newcomb (important)

This notion of decidability, as you say, strikes me as one of your most important contributions. By decidability, I take it you mean a diffuse decision architecture that allows people at various levels to make decisions that are consistent with the intent of the program. It is a kind of information architectonics.

If you could develop a geometry for decidability, that REALLY allows for analytically testing which notions are decidable by the human agent before deployment, THAT is the pathway to power. Or at least part of it. It doesn’t do the work of building an organization. You have to do that with ideas, influence, charisma, &tc. But once you have an organization and a defined and consistent decidability architecture you can quickly transform organization into institution. And those economy of scale efficiency gains (everyone doing their right proper part rowing the boat) would allow you to outcompete institutional rivals.

I think I’m starting to see the core logic of your analytic system. It is this Darwinian metaphor for selection of information that Dawkins uses. By invoking this kind of post-Popperian notion of falsification as key lever of the epistemology, you are using competitive falsification as an evolutionary selection mechanism to get to better phenotypes of truth.

How progressive!

Basically, you aim to create multilayered sieves for truth out of all of these different layers of thought: geometry, philosophy, law, economics; with each doing its part to. Operational analysis as sieving process. T

he biggest problem I see is that each of these disciplines is at different levels of technical maturity. Many disciplines are in a pre-Copernican Revolution state, so they’re immature and will give you variable performance.

I suppose the best you can do is put more mature disciplines at more fundamental levels so they do more of the work filtering out falsehoods and the less mature disciplines, like economics, can just kind of pick the fat off the bones.

(OMG. Thank you. yes. Thats far better than I can say it. -CD )