Lately I’ve been spinning up on natural abstractions, and in particular on John Wentworth's work on natural latents. As I’ve been studying, I’ve noticed some big gaps in the existing literature. Some of my biggest questions have not been answered by existing blog posts and writeups.

One of my grumps about the existing body of work has to do with the typology of concepts, and the representative examples we’re using for that typology.

If we’re going to do a lot of work to talk about concepts using math, I’m going to want to work a bunch of concrete examples to some level of precision. So far I’m not happy with the list of examples, and I’m not happy with the level of hand-waving in tying the math back to the various kinds of examples.

It seems to me that there are a lot of different kinds of concepts. Some concepts are “more abstract” than others – or to put it another way, some concepts map back very clearly to the physics of our universe, while others seem more fuzzy, hard to pin down, and maybe not “natural” at all. Some concepts are big clusters containing lots of varying examples [...]

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Outline:

(02:07) Concepts that Bind to Reality

(03:06) Why do we care?

(04:00) "Reality"

(04:13) "Concepts"

(05:03) "Bind to"

(06:27) The case for building a half-assed concept typology with representative examples

(08:24) My initial brainstorm of example concepts

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 16th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHmyKpGqhTTJg9Tsi/a-test-suite-for-concepts

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Stick figure and robot imagining trees with thought bubbles.

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“A Test Suite for Concepts” by Gretta Duleba

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“A Test Suite for Concepts” by Gretta Duleba