-----------------+---------------------+--------------------
blue, egg-shaped | furry, flexible | glows, contains vanadium
red, cube-shaped | smooth, hard | unglowing, contains palladium
-
-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, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers as "bleggs"), _or_ red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, 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.
-
-You make a startling discovery—the object was originally a smooth, hard red cube, of which someone had sanded off the corners to approximate an egg shape, and ironed on a layer of _faux_ blue fur.
-
-"Wow," you say, "someone sure has gone to a lot of trouble to make these rubes look like bleggs!"
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff