At some point in his mental journey, every man must contend with the riddle of categories

What is a category, where do category distinctions come from? Are they PREscriptive or DEscriptive?, etc, etc.

Much of the current wave of AI advancement has consisted of finding ways to formalize category construction into rigorous mathematical procedures.

It’s instructive when to look at the ways that AIs fail to classify their inputs, because it holds up a mirror to our own internal struggles in this arena, which differ from those of an AI in degree more than kind

Big Yud’s memorable formulation was “a category is a cluster in thing space”
If you know an object is in a particular category, you can predict many of its attributes, because those attributes often appear together https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025738822980526082

A category is virtuous if its predictive power is high, vicious if its predictive power is low. No category is perfect, because in the real world, there are always exceptions and outliers

We build our categories by aggregating our observations, but we don’t do it in a vacuum. We inherit most of our categories from our language and our culture. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1045307949717966848

Categories exist in the mind, and they are “socially constructed”, which is a fancy way of saying that they are abstractions, and no one can locate them in material space, and that we could construct them slightly differently at the margins

Most categories, narrow or broad, are nearly as old as humanity itself: tools, animals, food, man, woman, mushroom, hero. Some of them are very recent: computer, car, amino acid. Creating a useful new category requires an act of genius

(Aside: genius in popular usage is much degraded from its original meaning. It does not refer to mere intelligence. The sole provenance of creativity is the divine, and the genius, with the power to create, manifests this godly attribute)

Political power is in part the power to dictate which categories are ontologically valid or invalid. These days they are telling me that “sexual orientation” is a very important category and “biological sex” is a category with no predictive power

There’s a trick that propagandists of all stripes like to use, and the hustle works like this: You think X is a real category, but it’s not, the bounds are arbitrary. Here are some boundary cases, you don’t know how to classify them. Humans invented this category, it’s not real

This kind of categorical assault can be very disorienting, especially if you are young and idealistic and haven’t figured out yet that all human knowledge is a fuzzy image of unknowable things-in-themselves

No one who pushes the categorical assault is arguing in good faith, though many have succumbed to it, and wish you to join them in their confusion.

Edge cases don’t turn poles into spectrums

The point of the categorical assault is to temporarily suspend your capacity for judgement, so that the propagandist can tweak your mental models for their own gain. You seem confused, friend, let me help you resolve that...

What they want you to imagine is that the categories in your mind were fabricated from whole cloth by some long vanished committee for the construction of social consensus (ironic, really) and that, because these things were implemented by fiat, they can be discarded, however...

Most of our beliefs and behavior are not generated in this way. Beliefs evolve just like DNA, very slowly, over generations, and with many dead ends. There is no ultimate goal, only fitness, only ever fitness, and fitness is local and idiosyncratic to its environment

Beliefs accumulate in societies like useful mutations accumulate in organisms, and very old beliefs are more likely to be useful than very new ones. Innovation is not the destruction of old categories, but the classification of new perceptions

Besides trying to confuse existing categories, another trick that propagandists use is to invent farcical new ones that contain the whole world, and then present their agenda as an exciting new alternative to a previously invisible default

This is a bit like pointing out the existence of water to the fish, and suggesting that they try breathing air instead. All your life you have been oppressed by waterism, and you didn’t even realize it! I call this kind of attack a categorical rebase (plz invent a better name!)

The most successful categorical rebase in history may be convincing people that there is something called capitalism, and something called communism, and that all your unhappiness is caused by being trapped inside capitalism

(Aside: libertarianism is another famous, but far less successful categorical rebase) https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1061983839940046848

Red pill: capitalism is not a thing, humans make markets like honeybees make hives, and communism is not an alternative to it, it’s the equivalent of trying to convince honeybees not to build hives. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1036625619142959106

When people criticize capitalism they are mostly talking about their own innate desires and capacities. They hate consumerism but natural selection endowed them with greed, hedonic adaptation, loss aversion, and a need to compete over status

All the humans who felt peaceful and content and lived in harmony died out aeons ago, they were killed or eaten or outbred by the ones who were cunning and duplicitous and eternally hungry and eternally discontent, and you are their progeny

Another more recent categorical rebase is the invention of the category “cisgender” and its attendant “alternative.” In the same way that communism is just disruption of disruption of social imperatives, transgenderism is just a disruption of bio-imperatives

Real communism has never been tried because there is nothing to try, there is only breaking shit like a child throwing a temper tantrum because you have a malformed theory of moral desert