X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2F2018%2Fblegg-mode.md;h=383a680dc1f959cef87206ce7d06c50140489123;hb=44057a45831c0af4ab0a569fba4ced2bdc3cfa03;hp=9eb7cddf396413092a6226750f3d85aa12659145;hpb=93cfefba1d29c3ffd8dd564e40911a99b8d8941f;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git diff --git a/content/2018/blegg-mode.md b/content/2018/blegg-mode.md index 9eb7cdd..383a680 100644 --- a/content/2018/blegg-mode.md +++ b/content/2018/blegg-mode.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ Title: Blegg Mode Date: 2018-02-01 13:45 Category: commentary -Tags: deniably allegorical, epistemology +Tags: categorization, deniably allegorical, epistemology As part of a series—ah, Sequence—of [posts explaining the hidden Bayesian structure of language](https://www.lesserwrong.com/sequences/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb), Eliezer Yudkowsky [discusses](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/) [a parable](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/) [about](http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/) 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"). @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ You ponder what this matter has taught you about the nature of categorization: w After some thought, you conjecture that it probably has something to do with having cheap-to-detect features that correlate with more-expensive-to-detect features that are decision-relevant with respect to the agent's goals— -A few (non-adapted) bleggs are purple rather than blue, but are very nearly like ordinary bleggs in all other aspects, so it feels more intuitive to think of them as oddly-colored bleggs rather than their own category of object: their easily-observed deviant color doesn't let you make significant inferences about anything you care about. (While "only" 95% of purple bleggs contain vanadium ore, as compared to 98% of standard-color bleggs, the three-percentage points difference doesn't seem like a big deal.) +A few (non-adapted) bleggs are purple rather than blue, but are very nearly like ordinary bleggs in all other aspects, so it feels more intuitive to think of them as oddly-colored bleggs rather than their own category of object: their easily-observed deviant color doesn't let you make significant inferences about anything you care about. (While "only" 95% of purple bleggs contain vanadium ore, as compared to 98% of standard-color bleggs, the three percentage-points difference doesn't seem like a big deal.) Likewise, 2% of otherwise-entirely-ordinary bleggs contain palladium, but you have no way of knowing this without taking them to the sorting scanner (which is finicky to start up and takes a minute to run): their metal content is of great practical interest, but seems like a rare, unpredictable fluke, unrelated to any other feature that you might hope to use to distinguish a new category of sortable object.