TheOtherDave comments on Social Presuppositions - Less Wrong

11 Post author: lucidfox 02 December 2010 01:25PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (49)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 04 December 2010 08:20:53PM 0 points [-]

I don't think it's a question of what gets stored so much as what gets activated.

That is, if I have three nodes that "represent" inferring A from G when A is more common in G than in the general population (N1), inferring A from G when A is more common than -A in G (N2), and the word "stereotyping" (N3), and my N1->N3 and N2->N3 links are stronger than N1 and N2's links to any other word, and the N3->N1 link is much stronger than the N3->N2 link, then lexical operations are going to make this sort of mistake... I might start out thinking about N2, decide to talk about it, therefore use the word "stereotyping," which in turn strongly activates N1, which displaces N2.

This is why having distinct words for minor variations in meaning can be awfully useful, sometimes. I'm willing to bet that if we agreed to use different words for N1 and N2, and we had enough conversations about stereotyping to reinforce that agreement, we'd find this error far less tempting, easier to notice, and easier to correct.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2010 10:40:12PM 1 point [-]

See the sequence on A Human's Guide to Words for more on this subject.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 05 December 2010 12:08:58AM 0 points [-]

Cool! I'd read at least most of these, and the ideas aren't new, but I hadn't realized they were all linked in one place. Thanks for the pointer.