I think this is a useful post, but I don’t think the water thing helped in understanding:
”In the Twin Earth, XYZ is “water” and H2O is not; in our Earth, H2O is “water” and XYZ is not.”
This isn’t an answer, this is the question. The question is “does the function, curried with Earth, return true for XYZ, && does the function, curried with Twin Earth, return true for H2O?”
Now, this is a silly philosophy question about the “true meaning” of water, and the real answer should be something like “If it’s useful, then yes, otherwise, no.” But I don’t think this is a misunderstanding of 2-place functions. At least, thinking about it as a 2-place function that takes a world as an argument doesn’t help dissolve the question.
I was thinking about applying the currying to topic, instead of world, (e.g. “heavy water” returns true for an isWater(“in the ocean”), but not for an isWater(“has molar mass ~18”)), but this felt like a motivated attempt to apply the concept, when the answer is just [How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside).
I think this is a useful post, but I don’t think the water thing helped in understanding:
”In the Twin Earth, XYZ is “water” and H2O is not; in our Earth, H2O is “water” and XYZ is not.”
This isn’t an answer, this is the question. The question is “does the function, curried with Earth, return true for XYZ, && does the function, curried with Twin Earth, return true for H2O?”
Now, this is a silly philosophy question about the “true meaning” of water, and the real answer should be something like “If it’s useful, then yes, otherwise, no.” But I don’t think this is a misunderstanding of 2-place functions. At least, thinking about it as a 2-place function that takes a world as an argument doesn’t help dissolve the question.
I was thinking about applying the currying to topic, instead of world, (e.g. “heavy water” returns true for an isWater(“in the ocean”), but not for an isWater(“has molar mass ~18”)), but this felt like a motivated attempt to apply the concept, when the answer is just [How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside).
Either way, the Sexiness example is better.