For those interested, Douglas Hofstadter (of the famous Gödel, Escher, Bach) wrote recently a book called Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking which develops the thesis that analogy is the core and fuel of thinking, and does it quite brilliantly.

I'm only half-way through the book yet, but so far I liked it very much, the first part on language for example develops somewhat similar ideas, but with a quite different viewpoint, than the "Humans Guide to Words" Sequence on Less Wrong, and both complement each other well.

Potluck means we bring our own food and then share it? Is there a list of what people are bringing, to avoid duplicates?

Oh hey, this is convenient, I just got to Sydney yesterday and you guys have a meetup tonight. =) I'll probably attend. (I'm in town for three months, visiting from the United States.)

I have an ulterior motive for attending: I am looking for housing near Macquarie University for the next three months. I don't suppose anyone here has a room for rent, or knows of a good place to stay? (Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask about such things!)

Sure, but that understanding is very specific to our culture.

Maybe in other cultures children get more instructions on eventually having children of their own, too? I don't know.

No one says "Following a career path is a huge responsibility, so think very carefully whether you want to do it."

A career is often equated with having a job. Or rather, a stable job, job security, a good salary that increases with time, etc. Therefore, unless you are independently wealthy, having a job / career is seen as both good and necessary: the alternative is to be poor.

On the other hand, having children is related mostly to happiness, satisfaction, and perhaps the social life. We know some people have no children and are still happy. So it's much easier to accept that having children is optional for others (whether or not you want it for yourself or for your children).

There are certainly negative concepts associated with being childless-by-choice, but not as many or as strong as those associated with being poor-by-choice.

To construct a friendly AI, you need to be able to make vague concepts crystal clear, cutting reality at the joints when those joints are obscure and fractal - and them implement a system that implements that cut.

Strongly disagree. The whole point of Bayesian reasoning is that it allows us to deal with uncertainty. And one huge source of uncertainty is that we don't have precise understandings of the concepts we use. When we first learn a new concept, we have a ton of uncertainty about its location in thingspace. As we collect more data (either through direct observation or indirectly through communication with other humans), we are able to decrease that uncertainty, but it never goes away completely. An AI which uses human concepts will have to be able to deal with concept-uncertainty and the complications that arise as a result.

The fact that humans can't always agree with each other on what constitutes porn vs. erotica demonstrates that we don't all carve reality up in the same places (and therefore there's no "objective" definition of porn). The fact that individual humans often have trouble classifying edge cases demonstrates that even when you look at a single person's concept, it will still contain some uncertainty. The more we discuss and negotiate the meanings of concepts, the less fuzzy the boundaries will become, but we can't remove the fuzziness completely. We can write out a legal definition of porn, but it won't necessarily correspond to the black-box classifiers that real people are using. And concepts change - what we think of as porn might be classified differently in 100 years. An AI can't just find a single carving of reality and stick with it; the AI needs to adapt its knowledge as the concepts mutate.

So I'm pretty sure that what you're asking is impossible. The concept-boundaries in thingspace remain fuzzy until humans negotiate them by discussing specific edge cases. (And even then, they are still fuzzy, just slightly less so.) So there's no way to find the concept boundaries without asking people about it; it's the interaction between human decision makers that define the concept in the first place.

I can't help but think that some of this has to do with feminism, at least in the case of girl teenagers. I hear a lot of people emphasizing that having children is a choice, and it's not for everyone. People are constantly saying things like "Having children is a huge responsibility and you have to think very carefully whether you want to do it." The people saying this seem to have a sense that they're counterbalancing societal pressures that say everyone should have children, or that women should focus on raising kids instead of having a career.

It's interesting, though, that no one applies the same advice to careers. (At least, not in my demographic.) No one says "Following a career path is a huge responsibility, so think very carefully whether you want to do it." A lot of people say "think very carefully about which career you want" but not "think carefully about whether you want a career at all".

I wonder, also, if there's gender differences. Do parents talk to male teenagers about their careers, and female teenagers about their future children, or anything like that?

These are interesting questions. I think the keyword you want for "hash collisions" is interference. Here's a more helpful overview from an education perspective: Learning Vocabulary in Lexical Sets: Dangers and Guidelines (2000). It mostly talks about semantic interference, but it mentions some other work on similar-sounding and similar-looking words.

Cog sci question about how words are organized in our minds.

So, I'm a native English speaker, and for the last ~1.5 years, I've been studying Finnish as a second language. I was making very slow progress on vocabulary, though, so a couple days ago I downloaded Anki and moved all my vocab lists over to there. These vocab lists basically just contained random words I had encountered on the internet and felt like writing down; a lot of them were for abstract concepts and random things that probably won't come up in conversation, like "archipelago" (the Finnish word is "saaristo", if anyone cares). Anyway, the point is that I am not trying to learn the vocabulary in any sensible order, I'm just shoving random words into my brain.

While studying today, I noticed that I was having a lot more trouble with certain words than with others, and I started to wonder why, and what implications this has for how words are organized in our minds, and whether anyone has done studies on this.

For instance, there seemed to be a lot of "hash collisions": vocabulary words that I kept confusing with one another. Some of these were clearly phonetic: hai (shark) and kai (probably). Another phonetic pair: toivottaa (to wish) and taivuttaa (to inflect a word). Some were a combination of phonetic and semantic: virhe (error), vihje (hint), vaihe (phase, stage), and vika (fault). Some of them I have no idea why I kept confusing: kertautua (to recur) and kuvastaa (to mirror, to reflect).

There were also a few words that I just had inordinate amounts of trouble remembering, and I don't know why: eksyä (to get lost), ehtiä (to arrive in time), löytää (to find), kyllästys (saturation), sisältää (to include), arvata (to guess). Aside from the last one, all of these have the letter ä in them, so maybe that has something to do with it. Also, the first two words don't have a single English verb as an equivalent.

There were also some words that were easier than I expected: vankkuri (wagon), saaristo (archipelago), and some more that I don't remember now because they quickly vanished from my deck. Both of these words are unusual but concrete concepts.

Do different people struggle with the same words when learning a language? Are some Finnish words just inherently "easy" or "hard" for English speakers to learn? If it's different for each person, how does the ease of learning certain words relate to a person's life experiences, interests, common thoughts, etc.?

What do hash collisions tell us about how words are organized in our minds? Can they tell us anything about the features we might be using to recognize words? For instance, English speakers often seem to have trouble remembering and distinguishing Chinese names; they all seem to "sound the same". Why does this happen? Here's a hypothesis: when we hear a word, based on its features, it is mapped to a specific part of a learned phonetic space before being used to access semantic content. Presumably we would learn this phonetic space to maximize the distance between words in a language, since the farther apart words are, the less chance they have of accessing the wrong semantic content. Maybe certain Finnish words sound the same to me because they map to nearby regions of my phonetic space, but a speaker of some other language wouldn't confuse these particular words because they'd have a different phonetic space? I'm just speculating wildly here.

I'd be interested to hear everyone else's vocab-learning experiences and crazy hypotheses for what's going on. Also, does anyone know any actual research that's been done on this stuff?

That's very helpful! I've heard a lot of scattered remarks about this perspective but never read up on it systematically. I will look into Tennenbaum and Griffiths. Any particular suggestions (papers, books)?

The unfalsifiability remark is interesting, btw.