I think that formulating this in terms of linear algebra is not always as illuminating as explaining it in terms of structure.
The way neural nets work, related concepts get wired together, and therefore cross-activate each other. To re-use your example, because we often activate various positive things alongside the more general notion of positiveness, you’d expect some coupling even between unrelated positive concepts.
The reference to linear algebra should only show, that there have to be states which are mapped to similar representations, even if we don’t know a priory which ones will be correlated.
But if we now look closer at the structure of the brain as a neural network and the learning mechanisms involved, then I think that we could expect positive concepts to be correlated by cross activation, as you explained.
The point of the article is not to come up with a perfect explanation for how the halo effect is actually caused, but to show that there doesn’t have to be an evolutionary reason for it to evolve, besides the ‘obvious’ one that pwno mentions in his comment.
Yes. I thought you were making an interesting and useful point. I was offering you an alternate formalism to explain the phenomenon, not expressing a disagreement with anything you wrote.
I think that formulating this in terms of linear algebra is not always as illuminating as explaining it in terms of structure.
The way neural nets work, related concepts get wired together, and therefore cross-activate each other. To re-use your example, because we often activate various positive things alongside the more general notion of positiveness, you’d expect some coupling even between unrelated positive concepts.
Thanks for the feedback!
The reference to linear algebra should only show, that there have to be states which are mapped to similar representations, even if we don’t know a priory which ones will be correlated.
But if we now look closer at the structure of the brain as a neural network and the learning mechanisms involved, then I think that we could expect positive concepts to be correlated by cross activation, as you explained.
The point of the article is not to come up with a perfect explanation for how the halo effect is actually caused, but to show that there doesn’t have to be an evolutionary reason for it to evolve, besides the ‘obvious’ one that pwno mentions in his comment.
Yes. I thought you were making an interesting and useful point. I was offering you an alternate formalism to explain the phenomenon, not expressing a disagreement with anything you wrote.