LESSWRONG

Once upon a time, there was a court jester who dabbled in logic. The jester presented the king with two boxes.  Upon the first box was ins

Followup to:  The Parable of the Dagger "All men are mortal.  Socrates is a man.  Therefore Socrates is mortal."         — Aristotle(?)

Followup to:  The Parable of Hemlock Suppose I find a barrel, sealed at the top, but with a hole large enough for a hand.  I reach in, and

Followup to:  Words as Hidden Inferences "What is red?" "Red is a color." "What's a color?" "A color is a property of a thing." But wh

Followup to:  Extensions and Intensions Once upon a time, the philosophers of Plato's Academy claimed that the best definition of human wa

Followup to:  Similarity Clusters Birds fly.  Well, except ostriches don't.  But which is a more typical bird—a robin, or an ostrich? Whic

Followup to:  Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity The notion of a "configuration space" is a way of translating object descriptions int

Followup to:  The Cluster Structure of Thingspace Imagine that you have a peculiar job in a peculiar factory:  Your task is to take object

Followup to:  Disguised Queries In Disguised Queries, I talked about a classification task of "bleggs" and "rubes".  The typical blegg is

Followup to:  Neural Categories "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"  I remember seeing an actual a

Followup to:  How An Algorithm Feels From Inside I have watched more than one conversation—even conversations supposedly about cognitive s

Followup to:  Disputing Definitions When I hear someone say, "Oh, look, a butterfly," the spoken phonemes "butterfly" enter my ear and vib

Followup to:  Feel the Meaning Part of the Standard Definitional Dispute runs as follows: Albert:  "Look, suppose that I left a microph

Followup to:  The Argument from Common Usage Consider (yet again) the Aristotelian idea of categories.  Let's say that there's some object

Followup to:  Empty Labels In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a ca

Continuation of:  Taboo Your Words Followup to:  Original Seeing, Lost Purposes What does it take to—as in yesterday's example—see a "ba

Followup to:  Replace the Symbol with the Substance "The map is not the territory," as the saying goes.  The only life-size, atomically de

Followup to:  Fallacies of Compression Among the many genetic variations and mutations you carry in your genome, there are a very few alle

Followup to:  Categorizing Has Consequences Yesterday, we saw that in Japan, blood types have taken the place of astrology—if your blood t

Followup to:  Sneaking in Connotations "This plucked chicken has two legs and no feathers—therefore, by definition, it is a human!" When

Followup to:  Arguing "By Definition" The one comes to you and says: Long have I pondered the meaning of the word "Art", and at last I'

Followup to:  Where to Draw the Boundary? Suppose you have a system X that's equally likely to be in any of 8 possible states: {X1, X2,

Continuation of:  Entropy, and Short Codes Suppose you have a system X that can be in any of 8 states, which are all equally probable (rel

Followup to:  Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace Thingspace, you might think, is a rather huge space.  Much larger than reality

Followup to:  Searching for Bayes-Structure Previously I spoke of mutual information between X and Y, I(X;Y), which is the difference betw

Followup to:  Conditional Independence, and Naive Bayes (We should be done with the mathy posts, I think, at least for now.  But forgive m

Followup to:  Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles Albert:  "Every time I've listened to a tree fall, it made a sound, so I'll guess that o

Followup to:  Just about every post in February, and some in March Some reader is bound to declare that a better title for this post would

[Editor’s Note: This is an abridgement of the original version of this essay, which contained many interactive elements.] Your friends