… and then usually the answer is “well, there’s a certain structure out in the world which people recognize as X, because recognizing it as X is convergently instrumental for a wide variety of goals”, so we want to characterize that structure. But that’s beyond the scope of this post; this post is about the question, not the answer.
I fear I’m being uncharitable here, but this all seems self-evident.
I’m thinking about The Cluster Structure of Thingspace. We could define “dog” to mean “vacuum or prime number or bar of soap or cheese”, but that wouldn’t be a useful definition. It’d be like picking a bunch of random points in thingspace and saying “there: that’s a dog”. Of course we wouldn’t want to do that. Of course we’d want to draw the boundaries in such a way that captures related things.
I guess that only explains why we all pretty much draw the boundaries around similarity clusters though. It doesn’t answer the question of why people tend to draw boundaries around the same similarity clusters. On first thought, I’m seeing various reasons:
For something like “food”, I dunno, I guess it’s just useful to draw the boundary around things that provide nutrients, taste reasonably good, are accessible, etc.
For something like “beauty”, I guess it’s a mix of genetic drives and cultural stuff. Like maybe there’s something genetic about symmetrical faces, and something cultural about being attracted to fat vs thin people.
For something like “awful”, I guess it’s just convenient to go along with where everybody else is drawing the boundary for the sake of communication. Like, it originally meant “full of awe” and sounds like it means “full of awe”, so “something really bad” seems like the wrong way to draw the boundaries, but since everyone else is already drawing them there, I may as well do so as well.
I get a strong sense that there’s something deeper here that I’m missing, but I don’t know what it is.
Maybe Zack_M_Davis’ Where to Draw the Boundaries? points at a potential answer to your question? The reason I think it’s relevant is basically this paragraph from that post, which builds upon Eliezer’s post you referenced:
A standard technique for understanding why some objects belong in the same “category” is to (pretend that we can) visualize objects as existing in a very-high-dimensional configuration space, but this “Thingspace” isn’t particularly well-defined: we want to map every property of an object to a dimension in our abstract space, but it’s not clear how one would enumerate all possible “properties.” But this isn’t a major concern: we can form a space with whatever properties or variables we happen to be interested in. Different choices of properties correspond to different cross sections of the grander Thingspace. Excluding properties from a collection would result in a “thinner”, lower-dimensional subspace of the space defined by the original collection of properties, which would in turn be a subspace of grander Thingspace, just as a line is a subspace of a plane, and a plane is a subspace of three-dimensional space.
I fear I’m being uncharitable here, but this all seems self-evident.
I’m thinking about The Cluster Structure of Thingspace. We could define “dog” to mean “vacuum or prime number or bar of soap or cheese”, but that wouldn’t be a useful definition. It’d be like picking a bunch of random points in thingspace and saying “there: that’s a dog”. Of course we wouldn’t want to do that. Of course we’d want to draw the boundaries in such a way that captures related things.
I guess that only explains why we all pretty much draw the boundaries around similarity clusters though. It doesn’t answer the question of why people tend to draw boundaries around the same similarity clusters. On first thought, I’m seeing various reasons:
For something like “food”, I dunno, I guess it’s just useful to draw the boundary around things that provide nutrients, taste reasonably good, are accessible, etc.
For something like “beauty”, I guess it’s a mix of genetic drives and cultural stuff. Like maybe there’s something genetic about symmetrical faces, and something cultural about being attracted to fat vs thin people.
For something like “awful”, I guess it’s just convenient to go along with where everybody else is drawing the boundary for the sake of communication. Like, it originally meant “full of awe” and sounds like it means “full of awe”, so “something really bad” seems like the wrong way to draw the boundaries, but since everyone else is already drawing them there, I may as well do so as well.
I get a strong sense that there’s something deeper here that I’m missing, but I don’t know what it is.
Maybe Zack_M_Davis’ Where to Draw the Boundaries? points at a potential answer to your question? The reason I think it’s relevant is basically this paragraph from that post, which builds upon Eliezer’s post you referenced: