Categorizing Has Consequences

ponders Just a thought for a possilbe start to a reasonable protocol for such an experiment:

Maybe something like having the subjects themselves create the categories instead of giving it to them? What I mean is this: You'd have, some set of plants (or whatever objects) and a group of test subjects. Then have each subject independantly produce a category. That is, tell them to select X plants at random and give a made up name to that group.

Several possible ways to deal with those that have been assigned to multiple categories. One way may be to remove each such entity. Other would simply be to give those a name somehow constructed from the names of the categories they're made of. Alternately, invent a new artificial category, like the "2 cat" category, the "3 cat" category, etc...

(This is just a bit if a fuzzy idea, not a full experimental protocol or anything, just a notion of a starting point for one)

Nice article, marred by the inaccurate presentation of maternal-fetal immune reaction. Most severe allergic reactions to the child have to do with Rhesus type, not ABO type. ABO reactions are rarely serious, and could only occur in a type O mother, because it's type Os who have the anti-A and anti-B antibodies in their blood serum. Irrelevant sidenote: they made a similar mistake on 'House' recently.

Acheman, corrected.

"Or you can see this in terms of the boundless human ability to make stuff up out of thin air and believe it because no one can prove it's wrong."

Suppose that, on a tour of a Mad Scientist's Lab (tm), you see an object apparently floating in midair. You walk around it, and you determine that there are no structural supports, hidden wires, or air currents holding it up. And it's still, say, 1900, well before magnetic levitation and so forth are well known. The two alternatives you've expounded on before are:

• Make up a theory out of thin air and whatever physics knowledge you possess. The theory must, obviously, predict levitation in this instance, but it should also predict a whole bunch of other phenomena, a great deal of which won't be testable. If the theory gains any notoriety, it will probably be hijacked by crackpots in precisely this manner.
• Declare the matter a mystery, beyond the ability of present-day science to solve. This runs into the problem of people worshipping sacred mysteries.

Is there another alternative that has a better chance of finding the correct explanation?

Tom McCabe:

3rd alternative: analyse more and/or try to gather more evidence before proposing any solution/theory to the mystery.

As Eliezer wrote: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ka/hold_off_on_proposing_solutions/

I thought Mr. McCabe was suggesting that holding off has a tendency to blur into worshiping the mystery. If so, I think the solution may just be to be extra special careful not to do that.

The ideas you're touching on in this and related posts are probably the most important and most overlooked because they're not all that "sexy." These are the kinds of errors made in nearly every utterance and nearly every thought.

Does the same thing happen if you categorize plants, or rocks, or office furniture? I can't recall reading about such an experiment

IIRC, there were experiments which showed that native speakers of languages with grammatical genders tend to assign stereotypical-man-like features to objects the noun for which is grammatically masculine and stereotypical-woman-like features to objects the noun for which is grammatically feminine.

"Thus people learn their blood types before they marry"

should be

"Thus people aware of this problem learn their blood types before they deliberately attempt to conceive"

unless it was a statement designed to provoke exactly this analysis. ;)

I think the oddness of this fad can be described by its link to the "science" literary genre.

I heard about this theory a few years ago, and looked it up on the internet, where i promptly found out it was just a myth. however at first i believed it. And i had a decent reason to do so.

I didn't know a lot about genetics (not that i do now lol). It seemed entirely reasonable that the genetics that determined your blood type would at least give a predisposition for a persons personality to slide in a certain direction from the norm.

This myths popularity can probably be explained by its believability. Only people doing further research would find out its a myth. Most would likely believe it on the spot and be satisfied because it sounds like something that came from doctors and scientists.

It may be that the original myth came about because of someone LOOKING for differences between labelled groups, but honestly it kind of makes sense to do this when those labels represent physical differences in genetics.

Theres a good reason human pattern-recognition runs in overdrive. Its damn useful.

As long as you're not trying to force yourself to find similarities, but just looking (even if its just for curiosity), I don't see the problem with trying to find similarities between different groups (labelled or otherwise). After all, so often, those similarities exist, and are very interesting. Especially where humans and psychology are concerned, if that kind of thing tickles your fancy as it does mine.

"The stereotypes must have arisen strictly from the mere existence of the labels." Actually, there is an interesting history to where these (completely bogus) stereotypes came about. Wikipedia has an article on this that explains the historic roots of this fad in racism and politics. For example, Japan had a political conflict with Taiwan, and someone noticed that Taiwanese people are predominantly type O. He therefore argued that "Taiwanese rebelliousness" was genetically determined and that blood type was a marker of this. Clearly this is pattern recognition gone wild, but there was an actual political agenda motivating this false pattern recognition. Therefore, the blood type fad did not originate "strictly from the mere existence of the labels." Of course it is possible that the fad has persisted long after the original political agendas have been forgotten (although I am speculating here) and this meme has taken on a life of its own so to speak.