Title: Blegg Mode
-Date: 2018-03-01 5:00
+Date: 2018-02-01 13:45
Category: commentary
Tags: deniably allegorical, epistemology
-Status: draft
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").
Further investigation reveals that 90% of the adapted bleggs—like 98% of rubes, and like only 2% of non-adapted bleggs—contain fragments of palladium.
-As the days go on, you find yourself taking notice of adapted bleggs—now that you're aware of their existence, they're not too hard to spot (although you have no way of knowing how many sucessfully "passing" adapted bleggs you've missed), and you need to take them to the sorting scanner so that you can put the majority of palladium-containing ones in the palladium bin (formerly known as the _rube bin_). You notice that—despite having insisted on the neutral adjective _adapted_ rather than something perjorative like _counterfeit_ to descibe the modified objects—you don't really put them in the same mental category as bleggs: they seem to occupy a third category in your internal ontology of sortable objects.
+As the days go on, you find yourself taking notice of adapted bleggs—now that you're aware of their existence, they're not too hard to spot (although you have no way of knowing how many successfully "passing" adapted bleggs you've missed), and you need to take them to the sorting scanner so that you can put the majority of palladium-containing ones in the palladium bin (formerly known as the _rube bin_). You notice that—despite having insisted on the neutral-valence adjective _adapted_ to describe the modified objects rather than something pejorative like _counterfeit_—you don't really put them in the same mental category as bleggs: they seem to occupy a third category in your ontology of sortable objects.
-You ponder what this matter has taught you about the nature of categorization: what kind of structure does a population of objects need to exhibit in order for an efficient cognitive architecture to find it profitable to reify them as a distinct _category_ of object? (This job is so boring that you need to do philosophy of cognitive science to keep your mind occupied while you sort.)
+You ponder what this matter has taught you about the nature of categorization: what kind of structure does a population of entities need to exhibit in order for an efficient cognitive architecture to find it profitable to reify it as a distinct _category_ of entity? (This job is so boring that you need to do philosophy of cognitive science to keep your mind occupied while you sort.)
-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.
+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 large 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.
+In contrast, adapted bleggs are _both_ easily identifiable _and_ the difference matters to your decisionmaking: a distinction that makes a difference, something your brain wants to have an efficient representation so that you can attend to it.
+
-You're pleased with the iota of philosophical progress you seem to have made, and will sure to be on the lookout for more applications of it in your everyday life.
+You're pleased with the iota of philosophical progress you seem to have made, and will be sure to be on the lookout for more applications of it.
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