Today's post, Neural Categories was originally published on 10 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You treat intuitively perceived hierarchical categories like the only correct way to parse the world, without realizing that other forms of statistical inference are possible even though your brain doesn't use them. It's much easier for a human to notice whether an object is a "blegg" or "rube"; than for a human to notice that red objects never glow in the dark, but red furred objects have all the other characteristics of bleggs. Other statistical algorithms work differently.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Disguised Queries, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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