My point was that "fruit" is the flip-side of Eliezer's bird example. A bird is a feathered flying thing. What about an ostrich? What about a penguin? A fruit is the seed pod of a plant. What about eggplants? What about cucumbers? My intention wasn't to give any advice about how to pick and choose definitions or interpret words generally or in a particular context.
The reason I started the discussion is because I think examples like "fruit" where the common usage of the word deviates from any strict definition can help us to understand language and language acquisition better. But this means that we should be asking people why they don't think cucumbers are fruit, not insisting that cucumbers are fruit by definition of the word fruit.
The question is whether it's worth $3 to you at that moment to avoid a) starting a tab, b) walking to the nearest no-fee ATM, or c) not drinking for the rest of the night.
Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, but you're bang on that the amount of cash you get out doesn't make a difference.
Because in the argument as described, Lemon does have more than his experience to go on--he also has the agricultural definition. That's why we invented definitions. To resolve these arguments.
It seems to me that introducing the definition is what starts this argument, not what resolves it. But playing along, are eggplants fruit? Green peppers? String beans? If my hypothesis is that "fruit" means "fruiting body of a plant" and my experiment is to ask people whether things that fit the definition are fruit, does the hypothesis anticipate the results of the experiment?
... (read more)When I say "the performance was so bad, they threw rotten fruit," no one
There was an article in Scientific American a few years ago about the Traveler's Dilemma and how human beings make more money than the Nash Equilibrium tells them to. Edit: Wikipedia summary
It occurred to me that the percentage fallacy might explain why people give high numbers in this version -- the Nash equilibrium is pocket change compared to the max payoff. The same is true for the reward for undercutting; you might not be so motivated to low-ball if your reward for doing so is 2% of the max payoff.
It would be interesting to see an experiment where the payoff for giving the low estimate varied. If... (read more)
Are tomatoes fruits or vegetables?
I've been reading Eliezer's criticisms of Aristotelian classes as a model for the meaning of words. It occurred to me that this little chestnut is a good illustration of the problem. The best part about this example is that almost everyone has argued either on one side or the other at some point in their lives. One would think that the English speaking world could come to some consensus on such a simple, trivial problem, but still the argument rages on. Fruit or vegetable?
In my experience, the argument is usually started by the fruit advocate (we'll call him Lemon). "It's the fruiting body of the plant," he says. ... (read 450 more words →)
Hi LW,
My name's Dan LaVine. I forget exactly how I got linked here, but I haven't been able to stop following internal links since.
I'm not an expert in anything, but I have a relatively broad/shallow education across mathematics and the sciences and a keen interest in philosophical problems (not quite as much interest in traditional approaches to the problems). My tentative explorations of these problems are broadly commensurate with a lot of the material I've read on this site so far. Maybe that means I'm exposing myself to confirmation bias, but so far I haven't found anywhere else where these ideas or the objections to them are... (read more)
Thanks for the recommendation.