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PhilGoetz comments on Rationality Quotes Thread August 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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What's it supposed to mean?
We sometimes lose information efficiency when we categorize something more specifically. Information efficiency (IE) = (bits that a proposition implies) / (bits it takes to make the statement or retrieve it from memory).
I have hypothesized that Rosch's "basic level" is the level in an ontology where IE is maximized. For instance, it may take fewer bits to go from "mammal" to "cat" than from "cat" to "American Bobtail cat", yet you get many more bits of information from going from cat to mammal.
I took it to mean that if we're trying to identify what's important, there's an optimum level of abstraction, and there's currently a push in the social sciences to add so much detail that the principle gets obscured.