Fallacies of Compression

I love you, Eliezer.

Thanks, but I already have a girlfriend.

Was that an intentional example of a definitional mismatch?

"Expanding your map is (I say again) a scientific challenge: part of the art of science, the skill of inquiring into the world."

Unless you're doing original research, you could simply read about <subject you don't understand> until you realize that you have to use separate mental categories for the two distinct objects. Original discovery is far too time-consuming to bother with when you're just reworking old ground.

Cracking post, many thanks.

Surprised you didn't note this as a fundamental skill gained (to some extent) in growing up. I'm reminded of the study in which two young kids were shown a ball being hidden under one of three cups. One of the kids was led out of the room, the ball switched to another cup, and the remaining kid asked where he thought the other kid believed the ball was. I think it's between the ages of three and four that kids gain the ability to create an additional, temporary, subjunctive bucket, which allows them to empathise with another mind.

I started reading this blog a few days ago and am particularly interested in your posts since you seem to be a modeler. This sort of thing appeals to me.

Comments/criticisms:

I agree that it is not a good idea to cram too much into one point/label. However, what are your thoughts regarding the necessity of doing this? This is a point which I have not seen you address.

What I would claim is that our own personal "definitions" for words correspond strongly to the computational structures related to those words (as I expect you would agree) - however it may be, and we should expect that it is, difficult to operate outside of our current computational structures. To bifurcate a definition (e.g. to split "phenomonological sound" into "systematic sound" and "experiential sound") might be extremely mentally taxing, it might bring the conversation to a halt. How easy is it to change the map, in your opinion?

I am also somewhat wary of the recent trends in your thinking. In particular, all of your examples refer to very specific phenomena, very simple phenomena. Can you give an example of how you think that we apply/should apply (is there a should in here somewhere?) decoupling in order to disambiguate in very high-order contexts? E.g. let's say we're talking about a difficult-to-pin-down-but-easy-to-use term like "post-modernism?" Is there any way to talk about such a thing without developing a definition with someone? The dictionary definition would obviously be worthless, but so would pretty much any definition that we can come up with.

What about words that "can't be defined"? (e.g. "art")

I have many more questions for you, but I'll end here.

You seem like you might actually think somewhat clearly about the world, which is rare indeed. I really do appreciate the clarity and thoughtfulness of your posts, I'm merely trying to bring up points pertinent to my current and past interests and (hopefully) open up your eyes to potential gaps in your thinking.

Hope all is well.

The use of the word 'reality' in this context is meaningless anyway. Standing in California, amongst this reality, would not offer a better perception of what california was/is like. Reality is, infact, compressed.

::threadjack:: I've come up with what is, to me, a satisfactory definition of "art": Art is that which is designed for the purpose of creating a reaction in an audience.

By that definition a punch in the nose is art.

Paul McCarthy did a video/performance in the 1970s where he punches his own nose (face). So it is art, isn't it?

By that definition a punch in the nose is art

Only in a staged boxing match - since when is a hittee an 'audience'? And is a punch supposed to create a reaction or, say, disable the hittee?. I agree that the nature of the reaction needs further definition - or arson in a theatre must be art:)

Going back to the definition of art by Doug S. A reaction by the audience is not necessarily a definition for art. A reaction by an audience can be achieved by many means. See post by Richard Hollerith. I fear that a definition of art that is audience oriented conforms more or less to a definition favoured by public bodies like arts councils, governments and everybody who gives money to the arts. There are numerous studies about art and audiences. Similar to television ratings that make us belief that something is good television because it is watched by zillions, audience reaction (ratings) are used to define if something is (good or bad) art. By the way, many artists have created art because they enjoyed doing so, and many of them (think about painters) did not necessarily think about the reaction of an audience when they created their works.

I now Taboo the word 'art'. Does anyone still think they have a point to make?

Reality is very large - just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across.

bah.

a poster above has already noted the irony here: the term 'reality' is just as susceptible to equivocal use as is 'sound' or 'art'.**

what is reality, after all, if not 'the part we can see'? (by 'see' i am of course including all means of detection, from literal sensory awareness to circumstantial inference.) indeed, it's dicey to posit the existence of any 'reality' independent of our own consciousness. as richard dawkins has said, even the most seemingly incontrovertible truths - like the heat of the desert and the hardness of rocks - are only so because of our own evolutionary adaptations. i.e., we feel rocks as hard only because our brains have created 'hardness' as a way of rationalizing our quantum interactions with rocks.

--

on a separate note, it's amazing how much bigger northern california (and that means northern california - the cold part with the big trees) looks when one flips the map of california so that south faces up. (i will not commit the fallacy of referring to this orientation as 'upside down'.)

**er, sorry, i meant 'that which is deemed to have value unrelated to practical utility'

Reality is very large - just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I don't mean to be insulting, but PUNY HUMAN, YOU CANNOT CONTAIN REALITY WITHIN YOUR TINY BRAIN

...a team of neurologists investigated a 40Hz electrical rhythm...

For the sake of the blook; neuroscientists, not neurologists. Words can be wrong.

Great post! There is also the non-discrete aspect of compression: information loss. English has, according to some dictionaries, over a million words. It's unlikely we store most of our information in English. Probably there is some sort of dimension reduction, like PCA. There is in any case probably lossy compression. This means people with different histories will use different frequency tables for their compression, and will throw out different information when encoding a verbal statement. I think you would almost certainly find that if you measure word use frequency for different people, then cluster the word use distributions, some clusters would correspond to ideologies. The interesting question is which comes first, the ideology, or the word usage frequency (caused by different life experiences).