I think it has made me more skeptical of arguments about identities, of people and all kinds of things. We put an awful lot of effort into trying to figure out and convince others of just what kind of person someone is, what kind of action something was, and even what kind of object something is. We often feel that once we determine the thing’s category, then all questions will be answered about it: The person is qualified or unqualified; it’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing; the object must be made out of wood. But division into categories is often arbitrary — not completely, but in some respects. And every category is a simplification to some degree; it throws away information about the thing.
This quote jumped out to me because it is something that I see quite often among bisexual people. Especially this statement a few lines after the text you quoted:
>That’s not to say that disputes over categorization aren’t important. They may be necessary, especially in rule-making contexts like the law or in organizations. But you have to take the entire process with a grain of salt and recognize the limits of what the category can tell you.
If you peruse (safe for work) bisexual communities online, you will find a lot of people asking whether they are "actually bisexual", "still bisexual", "bisexual enough", etc. for a number of reasons. Some bisexual people who are in heterosexual or homosexual relationships (e.g., a bisexual man dating a heterosexual woman or a bisexual woman dating a lesbian woman) often share a sense of struggle with the fact that they have "chosen" a specific gender to partner with.
This creates a strange insecurity that I see to often - especially (IMO) among bisexual men - centered on whether that bisexual person is "no longer bisexual" partner because they have chosen a partner of the opposite sex.
Some people seem to have an idea that bisexuality implies a type of attraction that is evenly split between men and women. The notion that a bisexual person can have a gender preference at all seems to also be something people struggle with.
But, to me, this quote offers some much needed guidance. Namely, that bisexuality is a way of simplifying a complex form of attraction so that it can be easily understood. That simplification throws away a lot of granular information about the nature of a given bisexual persons feelings of attraction, but it is also a helpful starting point for those who feel this way and wish to understand themselves better.
In other words, like all categories, categories describing sexual attraction can be liberating, but also limiting.
You can say that in a nutshell as well, as follows. Every word is an abstraction. Each abstraction has the cost of being lossy.
As someone who has lived both primarily outside and primarily inside, my preference for categories, for putting things in boxes, has a direct connection with my willingness to put myself in a box (i.e. a "room" in a "building", box in a box).
Likewise, most software/computer interfaces I know are pretty focused on putting things in boxes. For one thing, the screen is a small rectangle, and everything has to fit into a smaller rectangle in that rectangle.
Even the title "how we sort the world" implies that categories are the central element and that they can be sorted.
Nouns are the "real" thing, and verbs are transitory.
However, when you live outside, spend both days and nights without walls to encase you, my perspective flipped. Verbs became the important thing. It doesn't matter what the weather is, there is always weather, what matters is how it is changing.
A verb-centric world, where the nouns are always in transition.
Look, I like central heating and indoor plumbing. I live in a box these days. But I also remember how it was to live outside walls.
If you abstract and formalise, it's possible to divvy up the world into nouns ("being") and verbs ("becoming") transitioning between them.
On one hand, as long as we accept that chaining two compatible verbs produces another verb, it follows that chaining no verbs is the same as chaining a single verb "to remain the same", and now we don't even need nouns, because everywhere we used to have, say, an apple, we can formally use the verb "to remain an apple".
On the other hand, if we're attempting to prove things, and wish to use excluded middle or double negation elimination, it's very convenient to have explicit nouns (for which we can do so safely) rather than having almost everything we do be consequent upon taking care to manipulate only the subset of verbs which involve remaining the same.
What you are talking about here (and you articulated it well), reminds me of The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. If you haven't read it, I think it would connect a lot of dots for you and I think you would find it very interesting and very relevant to your experience.
The nouns are always in transition, even in the box. We pretend they are not in an effort to provide ourselves with a refuge from the flux.
Well, they are and they aren't.
The oak tree might grow by a few microns every day, and change in any number of other ways, but it remains an oak tree for all that. This isn't (just) a matter of words, but a matter of reality.
OTOH, if you burn the oak tree, it ceases to exist entirely.
If you say there is no unchanging entity underlying the tree's daily growth, then any predication about reality becomes impossible. All predication would be limited to the concepts we've created in our minds.
from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41077201 :
Two apples are the same as two apples.
Two apples are not the same as two oranges.
Two ripe apples are not the same as two rotten apples, even though they are both two apples and two apples.
Two fruits are the same as two fruits, even though they could be two apples and two oranges.
In each case they are alike in certain respect(s) and different in certain respect(s).
For example, in the first example, the apples are instantiations or examples of the same thing. So they are alike in that regard. But they differ in other regards, most obviously in the bundle of matter that makes them up.
In the third example, pretty much the same thing, with some additional detail.
In the second and fourth examples, they are not examples of the same thing. But 'fruit' doesn't imply any species of fruit -- it's generic in that regard -- so apples and oranges share that genus while being different species. Being an apple and being an orange both imply being a fruit; but being a fruit doesn't imply either of the others.
If mathgenius is to be believed, decategorization is about paying attention to the map from apples to oranges..
riffing on that, designori will try to unify the shiny and the essential.. and though John “Designor” Henrys are memorialized, nobody sane would want to be John Henry …
question: how would “the central bank” help?
L: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/456414/what-is-decategori...
In the Acemoglu and Restrepo model, a low interest rate results in automating all current tasks, while a higher one results in new labour-intensive tasks being added to the model economy as fast as old ones are being automated away.
(incidentally, they also had some regime in which automation was predicted to increase wages, but I didn't read that closely)
riffing* off https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week121.html I think decategorisation is about forgetting the differences between the maps into and out of two apples and two oranges (and even two fruits), leaving us with just a (relabelable) set of cardinality 2?
(via JvN's construction: {∅,{∅}})
EDIT: taking connected components of the projection down to the "largest groupoid" sounds very similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_component : the finest partition (here, of objects from the original category) that is totally ordered by reachability (direction of arrows from the original category).
Ah i didnt see that JCB and got it flipped again (and misspelled as a bonus) — had better do this after a long walk (or sleep)
Ps that was a helpful blogpost, as well as a very concrete wiki eg!
Thanks for distilling A&R: f(o)rex “thinking” and “writing” can be quite labor-intensive, but we’d like to have finer distinctions between the types — what kinds “should” be added vs replaced.. so we should also pay attention to exchange rates??
(as a first guess, optimizing shiny vs essential — “form follows function” for reverence [why dont hackernewsies revere brutalism?] — for bosons, fermions & everything in between)
I like the full ANW quote:
> “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
but it does make sense it's normally truncated in citation: at the beginning of the XX he might have been able to expect the casual reader to appreciate a simile involving cavalry charges, and probably even Euclid, a couple of thousand years earlier, would've appreciated it, but we need a new simile for new millennia.
Operations of thought are like power-ups in a game — they are strictly limited in number, they are time-boxed, and must only be made at decisive moments?
https://archive.org/details/introductiontoma00whitiala/page/...
Re: HPL,J
I shall join you in being charitable, in my case to YC’s secrecy (i.e. that they have a teleos, maybe a plan, but not the man :)
Our other man breck did not have sufficient bad [faith] to be effective enough to find a way to archive the vid. Now hes banned
I had a vision of the future days, One without golden bouoys or silk-clad popes; Where all the might of consumers harnessed, For health of earth and all the god’s creatures. Without irony the downtrickle shall, be Fully potable.
The Apotheosis of Californication Is Neither Roman Nor British
A classic anecdote is asking to describe an aquarium to some Westerners and Asians, the former see immediately the number of fish, prevalent color etc, the latter the environment the aquarium represent. Both descriptions of course are categories and way to sort the world.
Categories are useful but they so often get in the way. Maybe this is because the granularity is too large meaning they are imprecise? Either way, sometimes you can shortcut this by thinking about attributes instead. For example, people might not be able to agree about what object-oriented means (or if it's any good) but they can often agree on one of its attributes such as 'programming to an interface'. Similarly functional programming can be broken down into attributes like first class functions, immutability, laziness etc. These are much more precise while still being general terms.
All models are wrong. Some models are useful.