From e1e07af8ade7f11bff165f9d895f19e2211e375e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2018 11:12:35 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] full draft of "Blegg Mode" I also have a diagram (to be scanned and GIMP'd). This post is pretty straightforward; maybe we can publish it later today?? --- content/drafts/blegg-mode.md | 14 +++++++++++--- 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/blegg-mode.md b/content/drafts/blegg-mode.md index b05a2e2..10312c0 100644 --- a/content/drafts/blegg-mode.md +++ b/content/drafts/blegg-mode.md @@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ As part of a series—ah, Sequence—of [posts explaining the hidden Bayesian st I want you to imagine that 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 notice them, get curious, and take the time to examine one. -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. +You make a startling discovery—this 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!" @@ -18,8 +18,16 @@ Susan rolls her eyes at you, but apparently doesn't care enough to argue about i 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 liminal 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 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. 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.) -After some thought, you conjecture that it must have 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.) + +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. + +[diagram goes here] + +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. -- 2.17.1