No Abstraction Without a Goal

I think this is exactly right, because without some goals, purpose, or even just a norm to be applied, there's nothing to power knowing [LW · GW] anything since knowing is at its ground about picking and choosing what goes into what category to separate out the world into things.

Probably it makes sense to emphasize that it's the selection of the abstraction that implies a goal, not the use of the abstraction. If an abstraction shows up in an optimised thing, that's evidence that whatever optimised it had a goal.

Abstraction is a compression algorithm for a computationally bounded agent, I don't see how it is related to a "goal", except insofar as a goal is just another abstraction, and they all have to work together for the agent to have a reasonable level of fidelity of the internal map of the world.

The scout does not tell the general about the bluejays he saw. He reports the number of bombers in the enemy's hangar.

Number of enemy bombers seems more relevant than number of bluejays for predicting most far-future variables to me? E.g. who will control the land, how much damage there will be to existing things in the area, etc.. Maybe it's because I'm not an ornithologist so I don't know anything about bluejays. But I'd think humans tend to be the dominant force in influencing an area with bluejays exerting only negligible influence.

there is no abstraction without a goal.

This isn't immediately obvious. What goal is necessary for 'trees' (in general) as opposed to individual trees?

Good point! Hadn't thought of it this way before but totally agree

Being a stricler for generalization I could believe that for any naturally occurring abstraction there is a goal behind it in a "no smoke without fire" kind of way. However if you bruteforce through all the possible ways to abstract I am less sure that those variants that do not have natural occurencies have an associated goal. For example what is the goal of an abstraction that includes what bombers and bluejays include?

This seems tautological? If the military scout returns with reports of birds and ants, that is still an abstraction, but it isn't relevant to the goal (as those words are commonly used). You seem to be defining a goal in terms of what the abstraction retains.

"Condensation of information always selects for goal-relevant information." To me this seems either not true, or it generalizes the concept of "goal-relevant" so broadly that it doesnt seem useful to me. If one is actively trying to create abstractions that are useful to achieving some goal then it is true. But the general case of losing information need not be towards some goal. For instance, it's easy to construct a lossy map that takes high dimensional data to low dimensional data, whether or not it's useful seems like a different issue.

One might say that they are interested in abstractions in the case they are useful. They might also make an emperical claim (or a stylistic choice) that thinking about abstractions in the framework of goal-directed actions will be a fruitful way to do AI, study the brain, etc. etc., but these are emperical claims that will be borne out in how useful different research programs help us understand things, and are not a statement of fact as far as I can tell.

You might also reply to this, "no, condensation of information without goal-relevance is just condensation of information, but it is not an abstraction" but then the claim that an abstraction only exists with goal-relevance seems tautilogical.