Warrigal comments on The Concepts Problem - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 16 April 2010 06:21AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 17 April 2010 12:26:18AM 0 points [-]

I've kind of wanted to write about the concept-as-regularity thing for a while, but it seems akrasia is getting the best of me. Here's a compressed block of my thoughts on the issue.

Concept-as-regularity ought to be formalized. It is possible to conclude that a concept makes sense under certain circumstances involving other existing concepts that are correlated with no apparent determining factor. Since a Y-delta transformation on a Bayesian network looks like CAR, I'm guessing that the required number of mutually correlated concepts is three. Formalizing CAR would allow us to "formally" define lots of concepts, hopefully all of them. Bleggs and rubes are a perfect example of what CAR is useful for.

Comment deleted 17 April 2010 01:23:11AM [-]
Comment author: Bo102010 17 April 2010 01:26:58AM *  1 point [-]
Comment deleted 17 April 2010 01:42:48AM [-]
Comment author: Bo102010 17 April 2010 01:44:34AM 0 points [-]

I didn't think it was the electrical engineering trick of turning a star-connected load into a triangle-connected one, but on further reflection, we are talking about a network...

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 17 April 2010 02:27:23AM *  1 point [-]

The electrical engineering trick was several decades before Yang and Baxter and has its own wikipedia entry.