+Alexander praises Eliezer Yudkowsky's ["How an Algorithm Feels From the Inside"](http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/), which builds off [previous](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/) [posts](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/) discussing a parable about factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to _either_ be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers as "bleggs"), _or_ red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, translucent, non-luminescent, and palladium-cored (categorized by the workers as "rubes").
+
+Suppose you're a worker in this factory, and occasionally, an object comes down the conveyor belt that's blue, _roughly_ egg-shaped, and furry, but also hard (unlike the typical blegg, which is slightly flexible to the touch). If such objects are extremely rare, you might not notice them at all—you'd quickly categorize each one as a _blegg_ and toss it in the blegg bin without a second thought. But as these unusual hard bleggs start to become more common, you get curious and take the time to examine one.
+
+While dissecting it, you make a startling discovery—the object was originally a smooth, hard red cube, of which someone had sanded down the corners to approximate an egg shape, and ironed on a layer of blue _faux_ fur. You show your work to Susan the Senior Sorter.
+
+"Wow," she says, "someone sure has gone to a lot of trouble to make these rubes look like bleggs!"
+
+"Hold on, I'm not sure we should be disrespecting that effort by calling them _rubes_," you say. You read _Slate Star Codex_ and are a very intelligent and humane person. "Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories. There's no rule of sorting saying that we should call them rubes, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that we should call them bleggs. And at a glance, they _look_ like bleggs—I mean, like the more-typical bleggs."
+
+So you and Susan agree to call the modified hard objects _trans bleggs_ (two words!—_trans_ as an adjective, not a prefix) and get back to work.
+
+Further investigation reveals that 85% of trans bleggs don't glow in the dark and contain palladium ore—both rube-typical chracteristics. Furthermore, the minority of trans bleggs that glow and contain vanadium also seem more similar to typical ("cis") bleggs in other ways: for example, by being somewhat more successfully egg-shaped and having more realistic _faux_ fur than the non-glowing, palladium-containing trans bleggs.