PhilGoetz comments on The Trouble With "Good" - Less Wrong

83 Post author: Yvain 17 April 2009 02:07AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 17 April 2009 05:38:35PM *  21 points [-]

This very good post! Yay Yvain! You have high karma. Please give me stock advice.

I know a guy who constructed a 10-dimensional metric space for English words, then did PCA on it. There were only 4 significant components: good-bad, calm-exciting, open-closed, basic-elaborate. They accounted for 65%, 20%, 9%, and 5% of the variance in the 10-dimensional space, leaving 1% for everything else. This means that we need only 8 adjectives in English 99% of the time.

So it would not be surprising to find that our morality is a quick hack on the same machinery that runs our decisions about which food to eat or which pet to adopt.

This could be explored more deeply in another post.

Comment author: Yvain 02 May 2009 10:28:42PM 8 points [-]

Sorry, I didn't see this until today.

Can you give me a link to some more formal description of this? I don't understand how you would use a ten dimensional metric space to capture English words without reducing them to a few broad variables, which seems to be what he's claiming as a result.

Comment author: hylleddin 05 December 2013 05:51:43AM 2 points [-]

This is a long time after the fact, but I found this.

Comment author: jmmcd 09 November 2010 07:22:31AM 7 points [-]

This means that we need only 8 adjectives in English 99% of the time.

Awesome

Comment author: Peter_de_Blanc 17 April 2009 09:56:32PM *  1 point [-]

Are you talking about Alexei Samsonovich? I saw a very similar experiment that he did.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 17 April 2009 08:38:17PM 0 points [-]

I agree that it could use more exploration. I suspect that many of our biases stem from simple preference ranking errors.

Comment author: FlakAttack 19 April 2009 06:09:25AM 1 point [-]

I'm pretty sure I actually saw this in a philosophy textbook, which would mean there are likely observations or studies on the subject.