--- /dev/null
+Title: Reply to Nate Soares on the Classification of Dolphins; Also, Separately, Speculation on Psychological Motivations for Tweeting About the Classification of Dolphins
+Date: 2021-06-12 18:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: categorization, epistemology, ideology, my robot cult, censorship, whale metaphors
+Status: draft
+
+> "The only thing standing in the way of my own progress," Sagreda said, "is that the forces that once dealt with us honestly have been buried too deep to reach. All I can touch now is the surface, which is shaped by nothing but whim."
+>
+> —["Bit Players"](https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/winter_2014/bit_players_by_greg_egan) by Greg Egan
+
+On Twitter, Nate Soares, executive director of the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](https://intelligence.org/) asserts, ["The definitional gynmastics required to believe that dolphins aren't fish are staggering."](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273) [(Archived.)](https://archive.is/Kxfuu)
+
+Soares [elaborates](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670793327566851):
+
+> Suppose for argument that we adopt the (dubious but sadly common) assumption that words like "fish" should have a genealogical definition. Then, just as whales are mammals, mammals are fish—as you can see by tracing the lineages.
+>
+> Which is to say, if we look at the least common ancestor of all things that are clearly fish, and define a "fish" to be one of its descendants, then dolphins—and humans, and frogs, and birds—are fish.
+>
+> Now suppose instead we take this as the reductio ad absurdum that it is, and accept that words like "fish" should be functionally rooted, according to macroscopic human-relevant features.
+>
+> Then the natural denotation of "fish" is, I claim, the collection of all the swimmy creatures, which clearly includes dolphins.
+>
+> Indeed, this is quite likely what "fish" used to mean—"Jonah was swallowed by a fish", etc. etc.
+>
+> Yet somehow, once we figured out about genealogy, the pedants were like "well actually this fish's uncle was a fuzzy pigdear, so it's not actually a fish, you uneducated idiot, you absolute moron" and then we all forgot what "fish" meant out of sheer shame or something???
+>
+> (I feel a sense of betrayal about this. Usually the pedants are my people! How did it go so wrong?)
+>
+> So, look: this isn't about who the fish's uncle is. When a kid points at a whale and says "look, a fish", and you're like "haha no, its tail flaps horizontally and its gradma had hair", who's in the wrong here?
+
+I claim that Soares is failing to address the strongest case in favor of phylogenetic definitions, even for vernacular words rather than specialist jargon. It's true that in most everyday situations, people don't directly care about which animals are genetically related to each other.
+
+But the function of word _definitions_ is _not_ to capture everything the word means. [If words were identical with their definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels), and you defined _humans_ as "mortal featherless bipeds", [then you would never be able to identify anyone as human without seeing them die](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bcM5ft8jvsffsZZ4Y/the-parable-of-hemlock). That doesn't seem right!
+
+Instead, words [express probabilistic inferences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) as [short messages that compress information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length): if you want to send your friend an email telling them what animal you saw at the beach, it's much more efficient to send 7 the ASCII bytes `dolphin` and trust that your friend knows what dolphins are, than it would be to somehow include _all the information your brain has stored about dolphins_ as an email attachment.
+
+A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" [natural abstraction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro) in their _own_ world-model. Unambiguous discrete features make for better word definitions than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of _using_ the word comes from fuzzy high-dimensional statistical correlates, because discrete features are more useful as a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) that can function as [common knowledge to solve the coordination problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge) of [matching up the meanings in different people's heads](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution).
+
+So where does this leave us with dolphins and fish?
+
+Well, it's complicated.
+
+On the one hand, there's a [cluster of similarities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters) among swimmy creatures.
+
+induced by [convergent evolution]
+
+https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Fledermaus
+
+The reason to define taxonomic categories around which animals are related to each other genetically isn't because people directly care about genetics in most everyday situations;
+
+it's because genetics are the _root of the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models)_ underlying all other
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries
+
+Soares continues:
+
+> I'm not trying to take away your concepts. You've still got words like Vertebrata, Agnatha, and Gnathastomata for when you're thinking about animals in terms of who their uncle is.
+
+But you _are_ trying to take away the _word_ "fish".
+
+------
+
+Overall, one is left with a sense of puzzlement as to Soares's demeanor: why this pugnacious insistence that "fish" should _only_ refer to the swimming-creatures cluster?
+
+In a [followup thread](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401761124429701121), writes a little more about his motivations in the original thread, stating that it was ["aggressively stated for purposes of humor (...among others)"](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401761127843844098).
+
+The humor rationale makes sense—sometimes it's genuinely fun, and funny, to state things in a performatively aggressive manner!
+
+But notice the parenthetical addition "... among others". _That's_ interesting. _What_ other purposes, specifically? Soares doesn't say. Would it be rude for me to speculate?
+
+Actually, I'm pretty sure it _would_ be rude. Speculating on one's interlocutor's motives is usually frowned upon—and for good reason.
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary
+
+Yudkowsky retweeted Nate on dolphins—
+https://archive.is/Ecsca
+
+It's _more_ disturbing if it's not conscious
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff