Today's post, Abstraction, Not Analogy was originally published on November 19, 2008. A summary:

Describing certain arguments as analogies misses much of the point of those arguments. In order to generate predictions, we often ignore certain information in favor of more relevant information. These sorts of abstractions succeed or fail based on whether or not they successfully capture the important details.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. This post is the first official post in the rerun of the AI-FOOM Debate. The previous post was A Few Background Posts by Robin Hanson, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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