X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2F2018%2Fblegg-mode.md;h=a043874accecc8c6c36e8d35d2ff3403aab25fd0;hp=9eb7cddf396413092a6226750f3d85aa12659145;hb=21731ba6f1191f1e8f920c44299c4b345f4fa528;hpb=93cfefba1d29c3ffd8dd564e40911a99b8d8941f

diff --git a/content/2018/blegg-mode.md b/content/2018/blegg-mode.md
index 9eb7cdd..a043874 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").
 
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ You make a startling discovery—this object was originally a smooth, hard red c
 
 "Wow," she says, "someone sure has gone to a lot of trouble to make these rubes look like bleggs!"
 
-"Hold on," you say, "I'm not sure we should be disrespecting that effort by calling them _rubes_. [The categories were made for man, not man for the categories](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/): there's no rule of sorting saying that we should call them rubes, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that we should call them bleggs. And at a glance, they _look_ like bleggs—I mean, like the more-typical bleggs."
+"Hold on," you say, "I'm not sure we should be disrespecting that effort by calling them _rubes_. [The categories were made for man, not man for the categories](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/): there's no rule of sorting saying that we should call them rubes, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that we should call them bleggs. And at a glance, they _look_ like bleggs—I mean, like the more-typical bleggs."
 
 Susan rolls her eyes at you, but apparently doesn't care enough to argue about it, so the two of you agree to call the modified hard objects _adapted bleggs_  and get back to work.
 
@@ -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.