tetsuo55 comments on Concepts Don't Work That Way - Less Wrong

57 Post author: lukeprog 28 September 2011 02:01AM

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Comment author: tetsuo55 28 September 2011 07:48:33AM *  0 points [-]

Yes i think you understood what i meant. It is a recursive system where you keep defining each thing in detail, hacking at the edges of reality until any hypotheses left are all equally valid.

It is hard work, and it is possibly too much for the brain to handle, but afaik, other than the handful of Direct Instruction studies nobody has done any really big tests. the tests done on the small scale where highly successful though.

I obviously program this stuff in a specially designed tool, which makes it intuitive and easy to keep defining the definitions deeper and deeper (and you basically end up with laws of nature at the bottom, like the math explaining gravity etc..)

I guess what i am trying to say is, that the foggyness of concepts in our head can be a result of our teaching methods and not a flaw of the mind per-se, my only evidence being the fact that we can make tools that help us clear up the fog, and that using these tools/methods to teach people seems to have a big effect.

Comment author: DSimon 28 September 2011 03:41:17PM 0 points [-]

But, the fuzziness isn't necessarily a flaw at all; having more and less typical examples of a category has shown itself to be pretty handy, since we can use the level-of-typicalness to influence how confidently we can make correlations ("birds lay eggs and have feathers and fly, X has feathers but doesn't fly, so I'm only pretty sure it lays eggs").

I think that would be a valuable feature in a fact database.