26 – Concept Networks and Hanging Nodes

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s original post on Neural Categories and hanging nodes.

Scott Alexander on Diseased Thinking and a longer essay Concept Networks.

The very worthwhile analysis on holiday gift giving reddit comment.

Google’s deep learning utilizes these sorts of networks. “The Great AI Awakening” discusses this at some length, and is Eneasz’s source for visual recognition software finding cats in youtube videos and The Hidden Watchers.

This Alien Shore is what inspired Eneasz’s face-tattoos, it contains a society where every morning people apply very elaborate face make-up to signal their interests, social status, careers, education, etc. Those who are very confident they won’t have personality shifts over time get them tattooed on.

TED talk by David Epstein regarding extreme body-types of the most elite athletes. Link starts at 6:00, but the first six minutes of the talk is about how new technology has led to record-breaking improvements in performance, which is also very interesting.

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2 Responses to 26 – Concept Networks and Hanging Nodes

  1. Senjiu says:

    In german, there are three genders for words, like He, She and It. The difference (and difficulty for people learning german as a non-native speaker) is that all kinds of things have genders that don’t really have an explanation. I am no linguist and there’s probably some connection to how a word is pronounced but I don’t know about that.

    Anyway, “Tür” (door) is female for example, “Tor” (gate) is neutral (like it), “Eingang” (entrance) is male…
    And for people it’s:
    Mann (man) – male
    Frau (woman) – female
    Junge (boy) – male
    Mädchen (girl) – neutral

    I usually use this as an example to point out that this is a difficulty when learning german. Oh and germans (or at least I) have problems with french, because french also assigns gender to things and it’s sometimes different than in german.
    La lune (female in french) – der Mond (male in german) – the moon (neutral in english)
    Le monde (male in french) – die Welt (female in german) – the world (neutral in english)
    English is fairly easy to learn because stuff like that is clearly defined. Every non-human is an it. Except for pets with names I think.

    I don’t think anyone thinks of a girl as a thing or as something non-female based on the language though, but I don’t know when these words emerged and what people thought then. I never really thought about the difference with boys and girls in german langue and why that is.

  2. I only listened to this episode yesterday and I feel the latest XKCD is strangely relevant:

    https://xkcd.com/1971/

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