I mean, yes, there’s the allusion in the title! (The post wasn’t originally written for being shared on Less Wrong, it just seemed sufficiently sanitized to be shareable-here-without-running-too-afoul-of-anti-politics-norms after the fact.)
Zack_M_Davis
Karma: 2,409 (LW), 0 (AF)
NewTop
The “Disguised Queries” post that first introduced bleggs and rubes makes essentially the point that categories are somewhat arbitrary, that there’s no One True Right Answer to “is it a blegg or a rube?“, and that which answer is best depends on what particular things you care about on a particular occasion.
That’s not how I would summarize that post at all! I mean, I agree that the post did literally say that (“The question ‘Is this object a blegg?’ may stand in for different queries on different occasions”). But it also went on to say more things that I think substantially change the moral—
If [the question] weren’t standing in for some query, you’d have no reason to care.
[...] People who argue that atheism is a religion “because it states beliefs about God” are really trying to argue (I think) that the reasoning methods used in atheism are on a par with the reasoning methods used in religion, or that atheism is no safer than religion in terms of the probability of causally engendering violence, etc… [...]
[...] The a priori irrational part is where, in the course of the argument, someone pulls out a dictionary and looks up the definition of “atheism” or “religion”. [...] How could a dictionary possibly decide whether an empirical cluster of atheists is really substantially different from an empirical cluster of theologians? How can reality vary with the meaning of a word? The points in thingspace don’t move around when we redraw a boundary. [bolding mine—ZMD]
But people often don’t realize that their argument about where to draw a definitional boundary, is really a dispute over whether to infer a characteristic shared by most things inside an empirical cluster...
I claim that what Yudkowsky said about the irrationality about appealing to the dictionary, goes the same for appeal to personal values or priorities. It’s not false exactly, but it doesn’t accomplish anything.
Suppose Bob says, “Abortion is murder, because it’s the killing of a human being!”
Alice says, “No, abortion isn’t murder, because murder is the killing of a sentient being, and fetuses aren’t sentient.”
As Alice and Bob’s hired rationalist mediator, you could say, “You two just have different preferences about somewhat-arbitary category boundaries, that’s all! Abortion is murder-with-respect-to-Bob’s-definition, but it isn’t murder-with-respect-to-Alice’s-definition. Done! End of conversation!”
And maybe sometimes there really is nothing more to it than that. But oftentimes, I think we can do more work to break the symmetry: to work out what different predictions Alice and Bob are making about reality, or what different preferences they have about reality, and refocus the discussion on that. As I wrote in “The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions”:
If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word—common words being a scarce and valuable resource both culturally and information-theoretically—rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in describing the conflict. Before shrugging and saying, “Well, this is a difference in values; nothing more to be said about it,” we can talk about the detailed consequences of what is gained or lost by paying attention to some differences and ignoring others.
We had an entire Sequence specifically about this! You were there! I was there! Why doesn’t anyone remember?!
I don’t see bullets on Firefox 65.0.1, but I do on Chromium 72.0.3626.121 (both Xubuntu 16.04.5).
I think that this allegory misses crucial aspects of the original situation
That makes sense! As gjm noted, sometimes unscrupulous authors sneakily construct an allegory with the intent of leading the reader to a particular conclusion within the context of the allegory with the hope that the reader will map that conclusion back onto the real-world situation in a particular way, without doing the work of actually showing that the allegory and the real-world situation are actually analogous in the relevant aspects.
I don’t want to be guilty of that! This is a story about bleggs and rubes that I happened to come up with in the context of trying to think about something else (and I don’t want to be deceptive about that historical fact), but I definitely agree that people shouldn’t map the story onto some other situation unless they actually have a good argument for why that mapping makes sense. If we wanted to discuss the something else rather than the bleggs and rubes, we should do that on someone else’s website. Not here.
your argument seems to rely purely on the intuition of your fictional character
Yes, the dependence on intuition is definitely a weakness of this particular post. (I wish I knew as much math as Jessica Taylor! If I want to become stronger, I’ll have to figure out how fit more studying into my schedule!)
you seem to assume that categories are non-overlapping.
you seem to assume that categories are crisp rather than fuzzyI don’t believe either of those things. If you have any specific wording suggestions on how I can write more clearly so as to better communicate to my readers that I don’t believe either of those things, I’m listening.
If you take a table made out of a block of wood, and start to gradually deform its shape until it becomes perfectly spherical, is there an exact point when it is no longer called a “table”?
No, there is no such exact point; like many longtime Less Wrong readers, I, too, am familiar with the Sorities paradox.
But in any case, the categorization would depend on the particular trade-offs that the designers of the production line made (depending on things like, how expensive is it to run the palladium scanner)
Right. Another example of one of the things the particular algorithm-design trade-offs will depend on is the distribution of objects.
We could imagine a slightly altered parable in which the frequency distribution of objects is much more evenly spread out in color–shape–metal-content space: while cubeness has a reasonably strong correlation with redness and palladium yield, and eggness with blueness and vanadium yield, you still have a substantial fraction of non-modal objects: bluish-purple rounded cubes, reddish-purple squarish eggs, &c.
In that scenario, a natural-language summary of the optimal decision algorithm wouldn’t talk about discrete categories: you’d probably want some kind of scoring algorithm with thresholds for various tests and decisions as you describe, and no matter where you set the threshold for each decision, you’d still see a lot of objects just on either side of the boundary, with no good “joint” to anchor the placement of a category boundary.
In contrast, my reading of Yudkowsky’s original parable posits a much sparser, more tightly-clustered distribution of objects in configuration space. The objects do vary somewhat (some bleggs are purple, some rubes contain vanadium), but there’s a very clear cluster-structure: virtually all objects are close to the center of—and could be said to “belong to”—either the “rube” cluster or the “blegg” cluster, with a lot of empty space in between.
In this scenario, I think it does make sense for a natural-language summary of the optimal decision algorithm to talk about two distinct “categories” where the density in the configuration space is concentrated. Platonic essences are just the limiting case as the overlap between clusters goes to zero.
In my fanfiction, I imagine that some unknown entity has taken objects that were originally in the “rube” cluster, and modified them so that they appear, at first glance but not on closer inspection, to be members of the “blegg” cluster. At first, the protagonist wishes to respect the apparent intent of the unknown entity by considering the modified objects to be bleggs. But in the process of her sorting work, the protagonist finds herself wanting to mentally distinguish adapted bleggs from regular bleggs, because she can’t make the same job-relevant probabilistic inferences with the new “bleggs (either regular or adapted)” concept as she could with the old “bleggs (only standard bleggs)” concept.
To see why, forget about the category labels for a moment and just consider the clusters in the six-dimensional color–shape–texture–firmness–luminesence–metal-content configuration space.
Before the unknown entity’s intervention, we had two distinct clusters: one centered at {blue, egg, furry, flexible, luminescent, vanadium}, and another centered at {red, cube, smooth, hard, non-luminescent, palladium}.
After the unknown entity’s intervention, we have three distinct clusters: the two previously-existing clusters, and a new cluster centered at {blue, egg, furry, hard, non-luminescent, palladium}. This is a different situation! Workers on the sorting line might want different language in order to describe this new reality!
Now, if we were to project into the three-dimensional color–shape–texture subspace, then we would have two clusters again: with just these attributes, we can’t distinguish between bleggs and adapted bleggs. But since workers on the sorting line can observe hardness, and care about metal content, they probably want to use the three-cluster representation, even if they suspect the unknown entity might thereby feel disrespected.
I share jessicata’s feeling that the best set of concepts to work with may not be very sensitive to what’s easy to detect. [...] there doesn’t seem to be a general pattern of basing that refinement on the existence of convenient detectable features
Yeah, I might have been on the wrong track there. (Jessica’s comment is great! I need to study more!)
I am concerned that we are teetering on the brink of—if we have not already fallen into—exactly the sort of object-level political/ideological/personal argument that I was worried about
I think we’re a safe distance from the brink.
Words like “nefarious” and “terrorist” seem like a warning sign
“Nefarious” admittedly probably was a high-emotional-temperature warning sign (oops), but in this case, “I don’t negotiate with terrorists” is mostly functioning as the standard stock phrase to evoke the timeless-decision-theoretic “don’t be extortable” game-theory intuition, which I don’t think should count as a warning sign, because it would be harder to communicate if people had to avoid genuinely useful metaphors because they happened to use high-emotional-valence words.
But it seems to me that that the relative merits of these depend on the agent’s goals, and the best categorization to adopt may be quite different depending on whether you’re [...] and also on your own values and priorities.
Yes, I agree! (And furthermore, the same person might use different categorizations at different times depending on what particular aspects of reality are most relevant to the task at hand.)
But given an agent’s goals in a particular situation, I think it would be a shocking coincidence for it to be the case that “there are [...] multiple roughly-equally-good categorizations.” Why would that happen often?
If I want to use sortable objects as modern art sculptures to decorate my living room, then the relevant features are shape and color, and I want to think about rubes and bleggs (and count adapted bleggs as bleggs). If I also care about how the room looks in the dark and adapted bleggs don’t glow in the dark like ordinary bleggs do, then I want to think about adapted bleggs as being different from ordinary bleggs.
If I’m running a factory that harvests sortable objects for their metal content and my sorting scanner is expensive to run, then I want to think about rubes and ordinary bleggs (because I can infer metal content with acceptably high probability by observing the shape and color of these objects), but I want to look out for adapted bleggs (because their metal content is, with high probability, not what I would expect based on the color/shape/metal-content generalizations I learned from my observations of rubes and ordinary bleggs). If the factory invests in a new state-of-the-art sorting scanner that can be cheaply run on every object, then I don’t have any reason to care about shape or color anymore—I just care about palladium-cored objects and vanadium-cored objects.
and picking one of those rather than another is not an epistemological error.
If you’re really somehow in a situation where there are multiple roughly-equally-good categorizations with respect to your goals and the information you have, then I agree that picking one of those rather than another isn’t an epistemological error. Google Maps and MapQuest are not exactly the same map, but if you just want to drive somewhere, they both reflect the territory pretty well: it probably doesn’t matter which one you use. Faced with an arbitrary choice, you should make an arbitrary choice: flip a coin, or call
random.random().And yet somehow, I never run into people who say, “Categories are somewhat arbitrary, therefore you might as well roll a d3 to decide whether to say ‘trans women are women’ or ‘so-called “trans women” are men’ or ‘transwomen are transwomen’, because each of these maps is doing a roughly-equally-good job of reflecting the relevant aspects of the territory.” But I run into lots of people who say, “Categories are somewhat arbitrary, therefore I’m not wrong to insist that trans women are women,” and who somehow never seem to find it useful to bring up the idea that categories are somewhat arbitrary in seemingly any other context.
You see the problem? If the one has some sort of specific argument for why I should use a particular categorization system in a particular situation, then that’s great, and I want to hear it! But it has to be an argument and not a selectively-invoked appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter.
Any “categories” you introduce here are at best helpful heuristics, with no deep philosophical significance.
I mean, yes, but I was imagining that there would be some deep philosophy about how computationally bounded agents should construct optimally helpful heuristics.
Trying to think of some examples, it seems to me that what matters is simply the presence of features that are “decision-relevant with respect to the agent’s goals”. [...]
So, I think my motivation (which didn’t make it into the parable) for the “cheap to detect features that correlate with decision-relevant expensive to detect features” heuristic is that I’m thinking in terms of naïve Bayes models. You imagine a “star-shaped” causal graph with a central node (whose various values represent the possible categories you might want to assign an entity to), with arrows pointing to various other nodes (which represent various features of the entity). (That is, we’re assuming that the features of the entity are conditionally independent given category membership: P(X|C) = Π_i P(X_i|C).) Then when we observe some subset of features, we can use that to update our probabilities of category-membership, and use that to update our probabilities of the features we haven’t observed yet. The “category” node doesn’t actually “exist” out there in the world—its something we construct to help factorize our probability distribution over the features (which do “exist”).
So, as AI designers, we’re faced with the question of how we want the “category” node to work. I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a mathematically correct answer to this that I just don’t know (yet) because I don’t study enough and haven’t gotten to Chapter 17 of Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality. Since I’m not there yet, if I just take at intuitive amateur guess at how I might expect this to work, it seems pretty intuitively plausible that we’re going to want the category node to be especially sensitive to cheap-to-observe features that correlate with goal-relevant features? Like, yes, we ultimately just want to know as much as possible about the decision-relevant variables, but if some observations are more expensive to make than others, that seems like the sort of thing the network should be able to take into account, right??
Remember those 2% of otherwise ordinary bleggs that contain palladium? Personally, I’d want a category for those
I agree that “things that look like ‘bleggs’ that contain palladium” is a concept that you want to be able to think about. (I just described it in words, therefore it’s representable!) But while working on the sorting line, your visual system’s pattern-matching faculties aren’t going to spontaneously invent “palladium-containing bleggs” as a thing to look out for if you don’t know any way to detect them, whereas if adapted bleggs tend to look different in ways you can see, then that category is something your brain might just “learn from experience.” In terms of the naïve Bayes model, I’m sort of assuming that the 2% of palladium containing non-adapted bleggs are “flukes”: that variable takes that value with that probability independently of the other blegg features. I agree that if that assumption were wrong, then that would be really valuable information, and if you suspect that assumption is wrong, then you should definitely be on the lookout for ways to spot palladium-containing bleggs.
But like, see this thing I’m at least trying to do here, where I think there’s learnable statistical structure in the world that I want to describe using language? That’s pretty important! I can totally see how, from your perspective, on certain object-level applications, you might suspect that the one who says, “Hey! Categories aren’t even ‘somewhat’ arbitrary! There’s learnable statistical structure in the world; that’s what categories are for!” is secretly being driven by nefarious political motivations. But I hope you can also see how, from my perspective, I might suspect that the one who says, “Categories are somewhat arbitrary; the one who says otherwise is secretly being driven by nefarious political motivations” is secretly being driven by political motivations that have pretty nefarious consequences for people like me trying to use language to reason about the most important thing in my life, even if the psychological foundation of the political motivation is entirely kindhearted.
This comment is a test! I prefer the plain-Markdown editor, but I want to try using LaTeX for one comment, so I temporarily swapped my user settings to the “rich” editor so that I could try out the LaTeX editor here. Then after submitting this comment, I’ll switch my settings _back_ to Markdown, and edit this comment to see what the syntax is for using LaTeX from that editor (wrap it in $s, maybe?), which didn’t seem to be explained in the post above? I would be pretty disappointed if it were to turn out that there’s no way to do LaTeX from the Markdown editor, but I would also be somewhat surprised.
Edit: even after switching my settings back, editing this comment gives me the rich editor? So … I guess individual comments are saved on a per-editor basis, with no translation? I’ll concede that that makes sense from a technical standpoint, but it’s somewhat disappointing.
It seems relevant here that Zack pretty much agreed with my description: see his comments using terms like “deniable allegory”, “get away with it”, etc.
So, from my perspective, I’m facing a pretty difficult writing problem here! (See my reply to Dagon.) I agree that we don’t want Less Wrong to be a politicized space. On the other hand, I also think that a lot of self-identified rationalists are making a politically-motivated epistemology error in asserting category boundaries to be somewhat arbitrary, and it’s kind of difficult to address what I claim is the error without even so much as alluding to the object-level situation that I think is motivating the error! For the long, object-level discussion, see my reply to Scott Alexander, “The Categories Were Made for Man To Make Predictions”. (Sorry if the byline mismatch causes confusion; I’m using a pen name for that blog.) I didn’t want to share “… To Make Predictions” on Less Wrong (er, at least not as a top-level post), because that clearly would be too political. But I thought the “Blegg Mode” parable was sufficiently sanitized such that it would be OK to share as a link post here?
I confess that I didn’t put a lot of thought into the description text which you thought was disingenuous. I don’t think I was being consciously disingenuous (bad intent is a disposition, not a feeling!), but after you pointed it out, I do see your point that, since there is some unavoidable political context here, it’s probably better to explicitly label that, because readers who had a prior expectation that no such context would exist would feel misled upon discovering it. So I added the “Content notice” to the description. Hopefully that addresses the concern?
our categories are [...] somewhat arbitrary
No! Categories are not “somewhat arbitrary”! There is structure in the world, and intelligent agents need categories that carve the structure at the joints so that they can make efficient probabilistic inferences about the variables they’re trying to optimize! “Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.” We had a whole Sequence about this! Doesn’t anyone else remember?!
Trans-ness is not always “cheap to detect”. I guess it’s cheaper to detect than, say, sex chromosomes. OK—and how often are another person’s sex chromosomes “decision-relevant with respect to the agent’s goals”?
You seem to be making some assumptions about which parts of the parable are getting mapped to which parts of the real-world issue that obviously inspired the parable. I don’t think this is the correct venue for me to discuss the real-world issue. On this website, under this byline, I’d rather only talk about bleggs and rubes—even if you were correct to point out that it would be disingenuous for someone to expect readers to pretend not to notice the real-world reason that we’re talking about bleggs and rubes. With this in mind, I’ll respond below to a modified version of part of your comment (with edits bracketed).
I guess it’s cheaper to detect than, say, [palladium or vanadium content]. OK—and how often [is a sortable object’s metal content] “decision-relevant with respect to the agent’s goals”? Pretty much only if [you work in the sorting factory.] [That’s] fairly uncommon—for most of us, very few of the [sortable objects] we interact with [need to be sorted into bins according to metal content].
Sure! But reality is very high-dimensional—bleggs and rubes have other properties besides color, shape, and metal content—for example, the properties of being flexible-vs.-hard or luminescent-vs.-non-luminescent, as well as many others that didn’t make it into the parable. If you care about making accurate predictions about the many properties of sortable objects that you can’t immediately observe, then how you draw your category boundaries matters, because your brain is going to be using the category membership you assigned in order to derive your prior expectations about the variables that you haven’t yet observed.
sex chromosomes, which is exactly the “expensive” feature the author identifies in the case of trans people.
The author did no such thing! It’s epistemology fiction about bleggs and rubes! It’s true that I came up with the parable while I was trying to think carefully about transgender stuff that was of direct and intense personal relevance to me. It’s true that it would be disingenuous for someone to expect readers to not-notice that I was trying to think about trans issues. (I mean, it’s in the URL.) But I didn’t say anything about chromosomes! “If confusion threatens when you interpret a metaphor as a metaphor, try taking everything completely literally.”
Trying to think of some examples, it seems to me that what matters is simply the presence of features that are “decision-relevant with respect to the agent’s goals”. [...]
Thanks for this substantive, on-topic criticism! I would want to think some more before deciding how to reply to this.
ADDENDUM: I thought some more and wrote a sister comment.
unless [...] categorization somehow is important to LW posts
Categorization is hugely relevant to Less Wrong! We had a whole Sequence about this!
Of course, it would be preferable to talk about the epistemology of categories with non-distracting examples if at all possible. One traditional strategy for avoiding such distractions is to abstract the meta-level point one is trying to make into a fictional parable about non-distracting things. See, for example, Scott Alexander’s “A Parable on Obsolete Ideologies”, which isn’t actually about Nazism—or rather, I would say, is about something more general than Nazism.
Unfortunately, this is extremely challenging to do well—most writers who attempt this strategy fail to be subtle enough, and the parable falls flat. For this they deserve to be downvoted.
better to be up front about them
… you’re right. (I like the aesthetics of the “deniable allegory” writing style, but delusionally expecting to get away with it is trying to have one’s cake and eat it, too.) I added a “Content notice” to the description here.
Thanks. In retrospect, possibly a better approach for this venue would have been to carefully rewrite the piece for Less Wrong in a way that strips more subtext/conceals more of the elephant (e.g., cut the “disrespecting that effort” paragraph).
Can you say more? What should the description say instead? (I’m guessing you’re referring to the fact that the post has some subtext that probably isn’t a good topic fit for Less Wrong? But I would argue that the text (using the blegg/rube parable setting to make another point about the cognitive function of categorization) totally is relevant and potentially interesting!)
Blegg Mode
Another fun programming exercise is to do the other direction: have the user come up with a rule, and make the program come up with examples to try to test its hypotheses. (You want the program to generate examples that falsify half the remaining probability-mass.)
What specific bad things would you expect to happen if the post was left up, with what probabilities? (I’m aware of the standard practice of not discussing ongoing legal cases, but have my doubts about whether allowing the legal system to operate under conditions of secrecy actually makes things better on net.)
The mature way to handle suicidal people is to call professional help, as soon as possible.
It’s worth noting that this creates an incentive to never talk about your problems.
My advice for people who value not being kidnapped and forcibly drugged by unaccountable authority figures who won’t listen to reason is to never voluntarily talk to psychiatrists, for the same reason you should never talk to cops.
I may have misinterpreted what you meant by the phrase “makes essentially the point that.”
I see. I think I made a mistake in the great-great-grandparent comment. That comments’ penultimate paragraph ended: “[...] and who somehow never seem to find it useful to bring up the idea that categories are somewhat arbitrary in seemingly any other context.” I should not have written that, because as you pointed out in the great-grandparent, it’s not true. This turned out to be a pretty costly mistake on my part, because we’ve now just spent the better part of four comments litigating the consequences of this error in a way that we could have avoided if only I had taken more care to phrase the point I was trying to make less hyperbolically.
The point I was trying to make in the offending paragraph is that if someone honestly believes that the choice between multiple category systems is arbitrary or somewhat-arbitrary, then they should accept the choice being made arbitrarily or somewhat-arbitrarily. I agree that “It depends on what you mean by X” is often a useful motion, but I think it’s possible to distinguish when it’s being used to facilitate communication from when it’s being used to impose frame control. Specifically: it’s incoherent to say, “It’s arbitrary, so you should do it my way,” because if it were really arbitrary, the one would not be motivated to say “you should do it my way.” In discussions about my idiosyncratic special interest, I very frequently encounter incredibly mendacious frame-control attempts from people who call themselves “rationalists” and who don’t seem to do this on most other topics. (This is, of course, with respect to how I draw the “incredibly mendacious” category boundary.)
Speaking of ending conversations, I’m feeling pretty emotionally exhausted, and we seem to be spending a lot of wordcount on mutual misunderstandings, so unless you have more things you want to explain to me, maybe this should be the end of the thread? Thanks for the invigorating discussion! This was way more productive than most of the conversations I’ve had lately! (Which maybe tells you something about the quality of those other discussions.)