Today's post, Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words was originally published on 24 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You draw an unsimple boundary without any reason to do so. The act of defining a word to refer to all humans, except black people, seems kind of suspicious. If you don't present reasons to draw that particular boundary, trying to create an "arbitrary" word in that location is like a detective saying: "Well, I haven't the slightest shred of support one way or the other for who could've murdered those orphans... but have we considered John Q. Wiffleheim as a suspect?"

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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