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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1701 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 1, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Inspired by a Tumblr post I saw:

Is there a term for a cluster of similar, related items connected by shared traits, but where none of the traits are dispositive, nor is there a central example to which the rest are compared?

That is, for example, where one member of the group has relevant traits ABCD, another BCDE, another CDEF, and another ABEF, etc. So that none of the traits ABCDEF are present in all members of the group — so you can't characterize the group as "things with trait[s] [fill in blank]" — nor is there a "type specimen" X with all relevant traits "ABCDEF" — so you can't characterize the group as "X and things closely resembling X." Just a lot of things which resemble one another in a few important ways.

Lesswrong has "cleaving reality at the joints" and "clusters in thingspace" for that concept.

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