This very good post! Yay Yvain! You have high karma. Please give me stock advice.
I know a guy who constructed a 10-dimensional metric space for English words, then did PCA on it. There were only 4 significant components: good-bad, calm-exciting, open-closed, basic-elaborate. They accounted for 65%, 20%, 9%, and 5% of the variance in the 10-dimensional space, leaving 1% for everything else. This means that we need only 8 adjectives in English 99% of the time.
So it would not be surprising to find that our morality is a quick hack on the same machinery that runs our decisions about which food to eat or which pet to adopt.
This could be explored more deeply in another post.
Can you give me a link to some more formal description of this? I don’t understand how you would use a ten dimensional metric space to capture English words without reducing them to a few broad variables, which seems to be what he’s claiming as a result.
This very good post! Yay Yvain! You have high karma. Please give me stock advice.
I know a guy who constructed a 10-dimensional metric space for English words, then did PCA on it. There were only 4 significant components: good-bad, calm-exciting, open-closed, basic-elaborate. They accounted for 65%, 20%, 9%, and 5% of the variance in the 10-dimensional space, leaving 1% for everything else. This means that we need only 8 adjectives in English 99% of the time.
This could be explored more deeply in another post.
Sorry, I didn’t see this until today.
Can you give me a link to some more formal description of this? I don’t understand how you would use a ten dimensional metric space to capture English words without reducing them to a few broad variables, which seems to be what he’s claiming as a result.
This is a long time after the fact, but I found this.
Awesome
Are you talking about Alexei Samsonovich? I saw a very similar experiment that he did.
I agree that it could use more exploration. I suspect that many of our biases stem from simple preference ranking errors.
I’m pretty sure I actually saw this in a philosophy textbook, which would mean there are likely observations or studies on the subject.
Buddhism says there are two basic emotions, fear and love, and all other human emotions are some permutation or combination of these two elements.
--jrd