thomblake comments on Skill: The Map is Not the Territory - Less Wrong

49 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 09:59AM

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

Comments (174)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: thomblake 04 October 2012 01:59:09PM 33 points [-]

"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.

Comment author: Error 22 March 2013 11:34:23AM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Chriswaterguy 29 December 2015 11:03:56AM 1 point [-]

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.