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Psy-Kosh comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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How, precisely, does one formalize the concept of "the bucket of pebbles represents the number of sheep, but it is doing so inaccurately." ie, that it's a model of the number of sheep rather than about something else, but a bad/inaccurate model?
I've fiddled around a bit with that, and I find myself passing a recursive buck when I try to precisely reduce that one.
The best I can come up with is something like "I have correct models in my head for the bucket, pebbles, sheep, etc, individually except that I also have some causal paths linking them that don't match the links that exist in reality."
See this thread for a discussion. A less buck-passing model is: "This bucket represents the sheep ... plus an error term resulting from this here specific error process."
For instance, if I systematically count two sheep exiting together as one sheep, then the bucket represents the number of sheep minus the number of sheep-pairs erroneously detected as one sheep. It's not enough to say the sheep-detector is buggy; to have an accurate model of what it does (and thus, what its representations mean) you need to know what the bug is.