Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundaries?

There is an important difference between having a utility function defined over a statistical model's performance against specific real-world data (even if another mind with different values would be interested in different data), and having a utility function defined over features of the model itself.

Arbitrariness in the map doesn't correspond to arbitrariness in the territory. Whatever criterion your brain is using to decide which word you want, is your non-arbitrary reason ...

So the one comes back to you and says:

That seems wrong—why wouldn't I care about the utility of having a particular model? I agree that categories derive much of their usefulness from "carving reality at the joints"—that's one very important kind of consequence of choosing to draw category boundaries in a particular way. But other consequences might matter too, if we have some moral reason to value drawing our categories a particular way. I don't see why I shouldn't be willing to trade off one unit of categorizational nonawkwardness for $X$ units of morality, even if trading off a million units of categorizational nonawkwardness for the same $X$ units of morality would be bad.
I once read about an analogy between category boundaries and national borders. Imagine a diplomat trying to come up with a proposal for a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. There's no such thing as the "correct" border between Israel and Palestine, but there are consequences of choosing one border or another. For example, awarding territory to one side risks angering the other. For another, if the West Bank and Gaza Strip are to be part of Palestine, but Tel-Aviv and the southern city of Eilat are to be part of Israel, then topology forces you to decide which of Israel and Palestine gets to be continuous, and which will be split into two parts, because a "land bridge" between Gaza and the West Bank would separate Tel Aviv and Eilat, and vice versa. Since borders can't be "true" or "false", the diplomat's task is and can only be to weigh these kinds of trade-offs.
Analogously, I think of language, following Eliezer Yudkowsky's "A Human's Guide to Words", as being a human-made project intended to help people understand each other. It draws on the structure of reality, but has many free variables, so that the structure of reality doesn't constrain it compl

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