When rationalists say that definitions can be wrong, we don’t mean that there’s a unique category boundary that is the True floating essence of a word, and that all other possible boundaries are wrong. We mean that in order for a proposed category boundary to not be wrong, it needs to capture some statistical structure in reality, even if reality is surprisingly detailed and there can be more than one such structure.
So, I got this part. And it seemed straightforwardly true to me, and seemed like a reasonably short inferential step away from other stuff LW has talked about. Categories are useful as mental compressions. Mental compressions should map to something. There are multiple ways you might want to cluster and map things. So far so straightforward.
And then the rest of the article left me more confused, and the disagreements in the comments got me even more confused.
Is the above claim the core claim of the article? If so, I’m confused what other people are objecting to. If not, I’m apparently still confused about the point of the article.
[edit: fwiw, I am aware of the subtext/discussion that the post is an abstraction of, and even taking that into account still feel fairly confused about some of the responses]
So, I got this part. And it seemed straightforwardly true to me, and seemed like a reasonably short inferential step away from other stuff LW has talked about. Categories are useful as mental compressions. Mental compressions should map to something. There are multiple ways you might want to cluster and map things. So far so straightforward.
And then the rest of the article left me more confused, and the disagreements in the comments got me even more confused.
Is the above claim the core claim of the article? If so, I’m confused what other people are objecting to. If not, I’m apparently still confused about the point of the article.
[edit: fwiw, I am aware of the subtext/discussion that the post is an abstraction of, and even taking that into account still feel fairly confused about some of the responses]