17-12-27 Map / Territory Confusions

Category: Idea Lists (Upon Request)

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1. Rights as real 2. Expecting meaning to be in the territory 3. Expecting objective answers to oughts or should questions

1. Wanting objective foundations to behavior
2. Morality
   1. ‘Feels immoral’ is in the territory, ‘is immoral’ is a map
   2. Next chosen philosopher, come to unify map and territory
   3. Dangers of moral realism
   4. If morality is objective then contradictions are deep and problematic. If it’s a map then that’s to be expected.
3. DL algorithms optimize to predict the outcome, and the structure that’s relevant to the outcome can emerge in the representation. But it doesn’t optimize directly for that structure’s quality - just for predictive accuracy on a particular task.
4. Lasso happens to zero out some features, as a function of the regularization term in the objective. It doesn’t do feature selection directly.
   1. Map says ‘lasso does feature selection’, territory says it’s sometimes a byproduct.
5. Metaphorical Truth
   1. Religious myths

Source: Original Google Doc