lukeprog comments on Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory - Less Wrong

60 Post author: lukeprog 16 May 2011 06:28AM

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Comment author: lukeprog 17 May 2011 01:29:37PM 1 point [-]

Thanks for the Causality heads-up.

some seemingly fuzzy concepts actually have perfect intuitive consensus (e.g. almost everyone will classify any example as either concept X or not concept X the same way)

Can you name an example or two?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 17 May 2011 05:32:12PM *  2 points [-]

Well, as I said, 'actual cause' appears to be one example. The literature is full of little causal stories where most people agree that something is an actual cause of something else in the story -- or not. Concepts which have already been formalized include concepts which are both used colloquially in "everyday conversation" and precisely in physics (e.g. weight/mass).

One could argue that 'actual cause' is in some sense not a natural concept, but it's still useful in the sense that formalizing the algorithm humans use to decide 'actual cause' problems can be useful for automating certain kinds of legal reasoning.

The Cyc project is a (probably doomed) example of a rabbit-hole project to construct an ontology of common sense. Lenat has been in that rabbit-hole for 27 years now.