thomblake comments on Skill: The Map is Not the Territory - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (174)
"grass is green" and "sky is blue" are always funny examples to me, since whenever I hear them I go check, and they're usually not true. Right now from my window, I can see brown grass and a white/gray sky.
So they're especially good examples, as people will actually use them as paradigms of indisputably true empirical propositions, and even those seem almost always to be a mismatch between the map and the territory.
I wish I could upvote this twice, just for pointing out an obvious error that I've never previously twigged on. I shall try to keep it close to the front of memory the next time I feel really certain about something.
As an experiment, a couple raised their child without telling them what colour the sky was. When they eventually asked, the child... thought about it. Eventually... "white". (I'd assumed it was a clear sky. Just realised it's a pointless story if it was cloudy.)
Why Isn't the Sky Blue? - starts with colours in Homer.