X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fif-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md;h=d390dba1b5a3f541ec7a2bb1759d41d2a4de2548;hp=33663a995e5057a730eb1e1656eee305bda3e4bd;hb=df56d583d625ca601983c7710b0202fa11762444;hpb=510415507f310efdbd288dd3c001ad6c00ee37b8 diff --git a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md index 33663a9..d390dba 100644 --- a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md +++ b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md @@ -387,10 +387,13 @@ I said I would bite that bullet: yes! Yes, I was trying to figure out whether I ----- -[TODO: I had a productive winter blogging vacation in December 2019 -pull the trigger on "On the Argumentative Form"; I was worried about leaking info from private conversations, but I'm in the clear "That's your hobbyhorse" is an observation anyone could make from content alone] +I had a pretty productive blogging spree in late 2019. -[TODO: "Firming Up ..." Dec 2019: combatting Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying shenanigans] +[TODO: "The Legend of the Extortion War"] + +I polished and pulled the trigger on ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), my reply to Yudkowsky's implicit political concession to me back in March. I had been reluctant to post it based on an intuition of, "My childhood hero was trying to _do me a favor_; it would be a betrayal to reject the gift." The post itself explained why that intuition was crazy, but _that_ just brought up more anxieties about whether the explanation constituted leaking information from private conversations—but I had chosen my words carefully such that it wasn't. ("Even if Yudkowsky doesn't know you exist [...] he's _effectively_ doing your cause a favor" was something I could have plausibly written in the possible world where the antecedent was true.) Jessica said the post seemed good. + +I also published ["Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), a critique of Yudkowsky's [code of "meta-honesty"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases), on the occasion of the latter's nomination for a Best-of-2018 Review. (The ungainly title of my post was "softened" from an earlier draft, which said "... Surprisingly Useless".) ----- @@ -553,9 +556,7 @@ If you have the visual metaphor, but you don't have the math, you might think th But if you _do_ have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is not a particularly deep or informative one. -A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of what government. - -In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed. +A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of what government. In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed. But the trick only works to the extent that the category is a regular, non-squiggly region of configuration space: if you know that egg-shaped objects tend to be blue, and you see a black-and-white photo of an egg-shaped object, you can get _close_ to picking out its color on a color wheel. But if egg-shaped objects tend to blue _or_ green _or_ red _or_ gray, you wouldn't know where to point to on the color wheel.