trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Sneaking in Connotations
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-19T19:41:37.000Z

Yesterday, we saw that in Japan, blood types have taken the place of astrology—if your blood type is AB, for example, you're supposed to be "cool and controlled".

So suppose we decided to invent a new word, "wiggin", and defined this word to mean people with green eyes and black hair—

A green-eyed man with black hair walked into a restaurant.
"Ha," said Danny, watching from a nearby table, "did you see that? A wiggin just walked into the room. Bloody wiggins. Commit all sorts of crimes, they do."
His sister Erda sighed. "You haven't seen him commit any crimes, have you, Danny?"
"Don't need to," Danny said, producing a dictionary. "See, it says right here in the Oxford English Dictionary. 'Wiggin. (1) A person with green eyes and black hair.' He's got green eyes and black hair, he's a wiggin. You're not going to argue with the Oxford English Dictionary, are you? By definition, a green-eyed black-haired person is a wiggin."
"But you called him a wiggin," said Erda. "That's a nasty thing to say about someone you don't even know. You've got no evidence that he puts too much ketchup on his burgers, or that as a kid he used his slingshot to launch baby squirrels."
"But he is a wiggin," Danny said patiently. "He's got green eyes and black hair, right? Just you watch, as soon as his burger arrives, he's reaching for the ketchup."

The human mind passes from observed characteristics to inferred characteristics via the medium of words. In "All humans are mortal, Socrates is a human, therefore Socrates is mortal", the observed characteristics are Socrates's clothes, speech, tool use, and generally human shape; the categorization is "human"; the inferred characteristic is poisonability by hemlock.

Of course there's no hard distinction between "observed characteristics" and "inferred characteristics". If you hear someone speak, they're probably shaped like a human, all else being equal. If you see a human figure in the shadows, then ceteris paribus it can probably speak.

And yet some properties do tend to be more inferred than observed. You're more likely to decide that someone is hu...
Categorizing Has Consequences
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-19T01:40:56.000Z

Among the many genetic variations and mutations you carry in your genome, there are a very few alleles you probably know—including those determining your blood type: the presence or absence of the A, B, and + antigens. If you receive a blood transfusion containing an antigen you don't have, it will trigger an allergic reaction. It was Karl Landsteiner's discovery of this fact, and how to test for compatible blood types, that made it possible to transfuse blood without killing the patient. (1930 Nobel Prize in Medicine.) Also, if a mother with blood type A (for example) bears a child with blood type A+, the mother may acquire an allergic reaction to the + antigen; if she has another child with blood type A+, the child will be in danger, unless the mother takes an allergic suppressant during pregnancy. Thus people learn their blood types before they marry.

Oh, and also: people with blood type A are earnest and creative, while people with blood type B are wild and cheerful. People with type O are agreeable and sociable, while people with type AB are cool and controlled. (You would think that O would be the absence of A and B, while AB would just be A plus B, but no...) All this, according to the Japanese blood type theory of personality. It would seem that blood type plays the role in Japan that astrological signs play in the West, right down to blood type horoscopes in the daily newspaper.

This fad is especially odd because blood types have never been mysterious, not in Japan and not anywhere. We only know blood types even exist thanks to Karl Landsteiner. No mystic witch doctor, no venerable sorcerer, ever said a word about blood types; there are no ancient, dusty scrolls to shroud the error in the aura of antiquity. If the medical profession claimed tomorrow that it had all been a colossal hoax, we layfolk would not have one scrap of evidence from our unaided senses to contradict them.

There's never been a war between blood types. There's never even been a political conflict between blood types. The stereotypes must have arisen strictly from the mere existence of the labels.

Now, someone is bound to point out that this is a story of categorizing humans. Does the same thing happen if you categorize plants, or rocks, or office furniture? I can't recall reading about su...
Fallacies of Compression
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-17T18:51:59.000Z

"The map is not the territory," as the saying goes. The only life-size, atomically detailed, 100% accurate map of California is California. But California has important regularities, such as the shape of its highways, that can be described using vastly less information—not to mention vastly less physical material—than it would take to describe every atom within the state borders. Hence the other saying: "The map is not the territory, but you can't fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment."

A paper map of California, at a scale of 10 kilometers to 1 centimeter (a million to one), doesn't have room to show the distinct position of two fallen leaves lying a centimeter apart on the sidewalk. Even if the map tried to show the leaves, the leaves would appear as the same point on the map; or rather the map would need a feature size of 10 nanometers, which is a finer resolution than most book printers handle, not to mention human eyes.

Reality is very large—just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I don't mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny, comparatively speaking.

Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map.

But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, "Oh, look, I'm compressing two things into one point on my map." What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it.

A sufficiently young child, or a sufficiently ancient Greek philosopher, would not know that there were such things as "acoustic vibrations" or "auditory experiences". There would just be a single thing that happened when a tree fell; a single event called "sound".

To realize that there are two distinct events, underlying one point on your map, is an essentially scientific challenge—a big, difficult scientific challenge.

Sometimes fallacies of compression result from confusing two known things under the same label—you know about acoustic vibrations, and you know about auditory processing in brains, but you call them both "sound" and so confuse yourself. But the more dangerous fallacy of compression arises from having no idea whatsoever that two distinct entities e...
Replace the Symbol with the Substance
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-16T18:12:06.000Z

What does it take to—as in yesterday's example—see a "baseball game" as "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions"? What does it take to play the rationalist version of Taboo, in which the goal is not to find a synonym that isn't on the card, but to find a way of describing without the standard concept-handle?

You have to visualize. You have to make your mind's eye see the details, as though looking for the first time. You have to perform an Original Seeing.

Is that a "bat"? No, it's a long, round, tapering, wooden rod, narrowing at one end so that a human can grasp and swing it.

Is that a "ball"? No, it's a leather-covered spheroid with a symmetrical stitching pattern, hard but not metal-hard, which someone can grasp and throw, or strike with the wooden rod, or catch.

Are those "bases"? No, they're fixed positions on a game field, that players try to run to as quickly as possible because of their safety within the game's artificial rules.

The chief obstacle to performing an original seeing is that your mind already has a nice neat summary, a nice little easy-to-use concept handle. Like the word "baseball", or "bat", or "base". It takes an effort to stop your mind from sliding down the familiar path, the easy path, the path of least resistance, where the small featureless word rushes in and obliterates the details you're trying to see. A word itself can have the destructive force of cliche; a word itself can carry the poison of a cached thought.

Playing the game of Taboo—being able to describe without using the standard pointer/label/handle—is one of the fundamental rationalist capacities. It occupies the same primordial level as the habit of constantly asking "Why?" or "What does this belief make me anticipate?"

The art is closely related to:

Pragmatism, because seeing in this way often gives you a much closer connection to anticipated experience, rather than propositional belief;

Reductionism, because seeing in this way often forces you to drop down to a lower level of organization, look at the parts instead of your eye skipping over the whole;

Hugging the query, because words often distract you from the question you really want to ask;

Avoiding cached thoughts, which will rush in usi

...
Taboo Your Words
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-15T22:53:20.000Z

In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a card, without using that word or five additional words listed on the card. For example, you might have to get your partner to say "baseball" without using the words "sport", "bat", "hit", "pitch", "base" or of course "baseball".

As soon as I see a problem like that, I at once think, "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions." It might not be the most efficient strategy to convey the word 'baseball' under the stated rules - that might be, "It's what the Yankees play" - but the general skill of blanking a word out of my mind was one I'd practiced for years, albeit with a different purpose.

Yesterday we saw how replacing terms with definitions could reveal the empirical unproductivity of the classical Aristotelian syllogism. All humans are mortal (and also, apparently, featherless bipeds); Socrates is human; therefore Socrates is mortal. When we replace the word 'human' by its apparent definition, the following underlying reasoning is revealed:

All [mortal, ~feathers, biped] are mortal;
Socrates is a [mortal, ~feathers, biped];
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

But the principle of replacing words by definitions applies much more broadly:

Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest makes a sound."
Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not make a sound."

Clearly, since one says "sound" and one says "not sound", we must have a contradiction, right? But suppose that they both dereference their pointers before speaking:

Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest matches [membership test: this event generates acoustic vibrations]."
Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not match [membership test: this event generates auditory experiences]."

Now there is no longer an apparent collision—all they had to do was prohibit themselves from using the word sound. If "acoustic vibrations" came into dispute, we would just play Taboo again and say "pressure waves in a material medium"; if necessary we would play Taboo again on the word "wave" and replace it with the wave equation. (Play Taboo on "auditory experience" and you get "That form of sensory processing, within the human bra...
Classic Sichuan in Millbrae, Thu Feb 21, 7pm
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-15T00:21:21.000Z

Followup to: Bay Area Bayesians Unite, OB Meetup

The Bay Area Overcoming Bias meetup will take place in the Classic Sichuan restaurant, 148 El Camino Real, Millbrae, CA 94031. 15 people said they would "Definitely" attend and an additional 27 said "Maybe". Oh, and Robin Hanson will be there too.

Dinner is scheduled for 7:00pm, on Thursday, February 21st, 2008. I'll show up at 6:30pm, though, just to cut people some antislack if it's easier for them to arrive earlier.

If you're arriving via the BART/Caltrain station, just walk up from the Southbound Caltrain side and turn right onto El Camino, walk a few meters, and you're there.

If driving, I'd suggest taking the exit from 101 onto Millbrae Ave - the exit from 280 onto Millbrae surprisingly goes down a winding mountain road before arriving at downtown. Doesn't mean you have to take 101 the whole way there, but I definitely recommend the 101 exit.

For parking, I would suggest parking near the BART/Caltrain station.
From 101 onto Millbrae Ave., turn right onto El Camino, almost
immediately pass the Peter's Cafe parking lot and then turn right onto
a small street toward the train station. The first parking lot you see on
your right is reserved for Peter's Cafe, but immediately after that (still on
your right) is some city parking that looked mostly empty when I visited last Thursday. El Camino itself was parked up, though. If all
else fails, you should be able to park in the train station lots and pay a small fee.
Then walk up to El Camino and turn right, as before.

Classic Sichuan has vegetarian dishes. They also have a reputation for their spicy food being spicy,
so watch out! I ate there to check quality, and while I'm generally a
cultural barbarian, I didn't detect any problems with the food I was
served. Depending on how many people actually show up, we may overflow
their small private room, but hopefully we won't overflow the
restaurant.

My cellphone number is (866) 983-5697. That's toll-free, 866-YUDKOWS.

Long live the Bayesian Conspiracy! See you there!
Empty Labels
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-14T23:50:06.000Z

Consider (yet again) the Aristotelian idea of categories. Let's say that there's some object with properties A, B, C, D, and E, or at least it looks E-ish.

Fred: "You mean that thing over there is blue, round, fuzzy, and—"
Me: "In Aristotelian logic, it's not supposed to make a difference what the properties are, or what I call them. That's why I'm just using the letters."

Next, I invent the Aristotelian category "zawa", which describes those objects, all those objects, and only those objects, which have properties A, C, and D.

Me: "Object 1 is zawa, B, and E."
Fred: "And it's blue—I mean, A—too, right?"
Me: "That's implied when I say it's zawa."
Fred: "Still, I'd like you to say it explicitly."
Me: "Okay. Object 1 is A, B, zawa, and E."

Then I add another word, "yokie", which describes all and only objects that are B and E; and the word "xippo", which describes all and only objects which are E but not D.

Me: "Object 1 is zawa and yokie, but not xippo."
Fred: "Wait, is it luminescent? I mean, is it E?"
Me: "Yes. That is the only possibility on the information given."
Fred: "I'd rather you spelled it out."
Me: "Fine: Object 1 is A, zawa, B, yokie, C, D, E, and not xippo."
Fred: "Amazing! You can tell all that just by looking?"

Impressive, isn't it? Let's invent even more new words: "Bolo" is A, C, and yokie; "mun" is A, C, and xippo; and "merlacdonian" is bolo and mun.

Pointlessly confusing? I think so too. Let's replace the labels with the definitions:

"Zawa, B, and E" becomes [A, C, D], B, E
"Bolo and A" becomes [A, C, [B, E]], A
"Merlacdonian" becomes [A, C, [B, E]], [A, C, [E, ~D]]

And the thing to remember about the Aristotelian idea of categories is that [A, C, D] is the entire information of "zawa". It's not just that I can vary the label, but that I can get along just fine without any label at all—the rules for Aristotelian classes work purely on structures like [A, C, D]. To call one of these structures "zawa", or attach any other label to it, is a human convenience (or inconvenience) which makes not the slightest difference to the Aristotelian rules.

Let's say that "human" is to be defined as a mortal featherless biped. Then the classic syllogism would have the form:

All [morta

...
The Argument from Common Usage
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-13T16:24:21.000Z

Part of the Standard Definitional Dispute runs as follows:

Albert: "Look, suppose that I left a microphone in the forest and recorded the pattern of the acoustic vibrations of the tree falling. If I played that back to someone, they'd call it a 'sound'! That's the common usage! Don't go around making up your own wacky definitions!"

Barry: "One, I can define a word any way I like so long as I use it consistently. Two, the meaning I gave was in the dictionary. Three, who gave you the right to decide what is or isn't common usage?"

Not all definitional disputes progress as far as recognizing the notion of common usage. More often, I think, someone picks up a dictionary because they believe that words have meanings, and the dictionary faithfully records what this meaning is. Some people even seem to believe that the dictionary determines the meaning—that the dictionary editors are the Legislators of Language. Maybe because back in elementary school, their authority-teacher said that they had to obey the dictionary, that it was a mandatory rule rather than an optional one?

Dictionary editors read what other people write, and record what the words seem to mean; they are historians. The Oxford English Dictionary may be comprehensive, but never authoritative.

But surely there is a social imperative to use words in a commonly understood way? Does not our human telepathy, our valuable power of language, rely on mutual coordination to work? Perhaps we should voluntarily treat dictionary editors as supreme arbiters—even if they prefer to think of themselves as historians—in order to maintain the quiet cooperation on which all speech depends.

The phrase "authoritative dictionary" is almost never used correctly, an example of proper usage being the Authoritative Dictionary of IEEE Standards. The IEEE is a body of voting members who have a professional need for exact agreement on terms and definitions, and so the Authoritative Dictionary of IEEE Standards is actual, negotiated legislation, which exerts whatever authority one regards as residing in the IEEE.

In everyday life, shared language usually does not arise from a deliberate agreement, as of the IEEE. It's more a matter of infection, as words are invented and diffuse through the culture. (A "meme", one might...
Feel the Meaning
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-13T01:01:17.000Z

When I hear someone say, "Oh, look, a butterfly," the spoken phonemes "butterfly" enter my ear and vibrate on my ear drum, being transmitted to the cochlea, tickling auditory nerves that transmit activation spikes to the auditory cortex, where phoneme processing begins, along with recognition of words, and reconstruction of syntax (a by no means serial process), and all manner of other complications.

But at the end of the day, or rather, at the end of the second, I am primed to look where my friend is pointing and see a visual pattern that I will recognize as a butterfly; and I would be quite surprised to see a wolf instead.

My friend looks at a butterfly, his throat vibrates and lips move, the pressure waves travel invisibly through the air, my ear hears and my nerves transduce and my brain reconstructs, and lo and behold, I know what my friend is looking at. Isn't that marvelous? If we didn't know about the pressure waves in the air, it would be a tremendous discovery in all the newspapers: Humans are telepathic! Human brains can transfer thoughts to each other!

Well, we are telepathic, in fact; but magic isn't exciting when it's merely real, and all your friends can do it too.

Think telepathy is simple? Try building a computer that will be telepathic with you. Telepathy, or "language", or whatever you want to call our partial thought transfer ability, is more complicated than it looks.

But it would be quite inconvenient to go around thinking, "Now I shall partially transduce some features of my thoughts into a linear sequence of phonemes which will invoke similar thoughts in my conversational partner..."

So the brain hides the complexity—or rather, never represents it in the first place—which leads people to think some peculiar thoughts about words.

As I remarked earlier, when a large yellow striped object leaps at me, I think "Yikes! A tiger!" not "Hm... objects with the properties of largeness, yellowness, and stripedness have previously often possessed the properties 'hungry' and 'dangerous', and therefore, although it is not logically necessary, auughhhh CRUNCH CRUNCH GULP."

Similarly, when someone shouts "Yikes! A tiger!", natural selection would not favor an organism that thought, "Hm... I have just heard the syllables 'Tie' and 'Grr' which my fellow tribe members associate with their internal anal...
Disputing Definitions
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-02-12T00:15:11.000Z

I have watched more than one conversation—even conversations supposedly about cognitive science—go the route of disputing over definitions. Taking the classic example to be "If a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?", the dispute often follows a course like this:

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

Albert: "Of course it does. What kind of silly question is that? Every time I've listened to a tree fall, it made a sound, so I'll guess that other trees falling also make sounds. I don't believe the world changes around when I'm not looking."

Barry: "Wait a minute. If no one hears it, how can it be a sound?"

In this example, Barry is arguing with Albert because of a genuinely different intuition about what constitutes a sound. But there's more than one way the Standard Dispute can start. Barry could have a motive for rejecting Albert's conclusion. Or Barry could be a skeptic who, upon hearing Albert's argument, reflexively scrutinized it for possible logical flaws; and then, on finding a counterargument, automatically accepted it without applying a second layer of search for a counter-counterargument; thereby arguing himself into the opposite position. This doesn't require that Barry's prior intuition—the intuition Barry would have had, if we'd asked him before Albert spoke—have differed from Albert's.

Well, if Barry didn't have a differing intuition before, he sure has one now.

Albert: "What do you mean, there's no sound? The tree's roots snap, the trunk comes crashing down and hits the ground. This generates vibrations that travel through the ground and the air. That's where the energy of the fall goes, into heat and sound. Are you saying that if people leave the forest, the tree violates conservation of energy?"

Barry: "But no one hears anything. If there are no humans in the forest, or, for the sake of argument, anything else with a complex nervous system capable of 'hearing', then no one hears a sound."

Albert and Barry recruit arguments that feel like support for their respective positions, describing in more detail the thoughts that caused their "sound"-detectors to fire or stay silent. But so far the conversation has still focused on the forest, rather than defi...