andrewducker: (Default)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2019-06-18 12:54 pm
pseudomonas: "pseudomonas" in London Underground roundel (Default)

[personal profile] pseudomonas 2019-06-18 02:59 pm (UTC)(link)
"There's no such thing as a tree" is only true if you think that only monophyletic categories with clear boundaries and no edge-cases are meaningful. I get why it's a catchy title, but it's a bit unhelpful to reify some categories and not others like that.

The conclusion you end up with is that many (most?) categories of things don't exist and, well, for some purposes that might be true, but it's pretty at odds with the way human language and culture seems to work.
Edited 2019-06-18 15:04 (UTC)
jducoeur: (Default)

[personal profile] jducoeur 2019-06-25 05:28 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, this. When I took AI in college (back in the mid-80s), the single session that stuck with me most was the one where the professor challenged us to define "chair". We spent 45 minutes at it, and couldn't come up with a definition that he couldn't counter-example. It drove home, quite deeply, that human beings are primarily about loose pattern-matching, rather than rigorous definition...