Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

It's fascinating how fascinated we are with categories, typologies and their exceptions. It's like Sapiens crack, especially nerd sapiens.

Here is is our linnaean classification of species. Look how these species are breaking the species barrier!

Nature, meanwhile, isn't very fussy about the concept of species. It's not even strict about the concept of an organism.. even cells or any of the classifications we use to understand bundles of biology.

A planet is a thing that orbits our sun. Hey, exoplanets! A planet is a thing that orbits a star. Hey, rogue planets. Hey, rogue solar system! Meanwhile, the universe isn't all that fussy about solar systems or galaxies.

View on HN

I've recently become kind of obsessive on experimenting with this and our natural inclination to adopt and find patterns, habits, categorization. I've been tinkering with various ways to optimize it, seeing how I best adopt new habits or learn new things (right now it's full immersion with small breaks, like hiit but for your brain). You really start to realize that almost all knowledge is just implicitly some sort of massive memory map and association.

I think the most interesting stuff is how things work. How do they form, what’s their life cycle, what attributes and effects to they have, etc. But classifying things is useful to understand the processes and attributes they have in common. But yes our classifications are just a map, and we should not confuse the map for the terrain.

Can we avoid confusing map with terrain?

Our minds don't seem to naturally make as much of a distinction between abstraction and manifestation as we do.

Who is "our minds" vs "we"?

The question of existence.

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self. In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self. -Søren Kierkegaard, "The Sickness Unto Death"

You can, but it requires higher cognitive reasoning. Almost a meta-understanding of understanding. Which starts with self awareness and understanding of categories and taxonomies, what they are, who defines them, that there exist more than one, and that they are just models that serve practical needs.

That said, it isn't always easy, I feel like it was only 5 years ago I started to realize this myself as I got more interested in models, categories and taxonomies. And I feel this is a common mistake people make prior to being experts themselves (in any field), is confusing the abstraction for the concrete.

A very simple example is how tomatoes are both fruits and veggies, in reality, tomatoes are tomatoes, but in culinary science, it is more useful to consider a tomato a vegetable, because most recipes that call for fruits wouldn't be good with tomatoes in them. On the other hand, in botanical science, it is categorized a fruit, as fruit describes the category of seed-bearing structures in flowering plants.

This shows how various studies will use different models, categories and taxonomies to work with that is best adapted for their end results.

The beauty of such models is that they can help innovation, by allowing us to reason about more than we can at once. That's the benefit of any abstraction. But in doing so, we also reduce reality to a simplification, albeit one that ideally allows us to figure out something which meets our requirements and provide us the practical benefits we were looking for, like say figuring out how to build a machine that can fly.

So my advice would be to stop arguing semantics, because so often people will debate what is what: "no tomatoes arn't fruit that's ridiculous they are vegetable". Well who cares, they are what works best, and if you're baking, its better to consider them a vegetable, but if you're gardening, you'll be better considering them fruits. So instead start arguing about the models, it's better they be fruits when gardening because of x,y,z practical reasons that apply to gardening.

I agree that navigating the ambiguity between different categories requires thinking meta. Where I disagree is the need to drop semantics. Semantics are the foundation of how we organize our society. Perhaps on a small-scale or a personal level, dropping categories can be helpful, even freeing. For that to be done universally would be a disaster. I can see that being possible in the future, after large-scale social change, but not currently. The bulk of modern political discourse is effectively arguments over definitions of various categories and the membership of their constituencies.

Even something as minor as the category of a tomato, would matter very much to a tomato farmer when, hypothetically, all vegetable farms qualify for a higher level of government subsidies than fruit farms. Or to a retailer when, again hypothetically, fruits and vegetables are charged different sales tax rates.

Your example only reinforces GP's point. Arguing semantics and confusing map for territory only wastes everyone's time and effort. It's a trap, and we won't progress as society to handle tough political problems until we learn to stop doing it.

What the farmer in your example cares about is the legal classification of tomatoes in context of subsidies and taxation. That's an entirely different thing that biological, or culinary classification, and needs to be explicitly separated. If it isn't it leads to idiocy.

Real life examples of such inane reasoning can be seen with some very popular complaints about "stupid EU bureaucracy" - for example, that EU "decided that snails are fish" (they aren't, they just get bucketed with fish for some trade deal). People really do use it as a serious argument.

You're assuming that we can distinguish between map and territory and science is definitively proving we cannot. See Dr. Robert Sapolsky on behavior as an example.[1] And philosophers like Kant speculate it's map all the way down, so to speak. That perspective is very compatible with everything we know about the world and ourselves. You'll need extraordinary evidence to prove you have a handle on what territory is. Because at this juncture pointing to anything as territory is an extraordinary claim.

And sure, instead of legal classifications, one can discuss ethics related examples. Such as what makes for the good life? Something as simple as saying, the good life is based on some common sense notion of good or the good life is different for everyone and dependent on unique personal circumstances, already assigns numerous categories implicitly. That doesn't mean that both of those notions of the good life cannot be right. It does mean that we need categories to discuss and reconcile their differences, if we wish to have a pluralistic and liberal [in the 19th century sense of the word] society.

[1]https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781594205071

> Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience.

> In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language. "The Unity of Human Knowledge" (October 1960) Niels Bohr

In fairness to sapiens, the patterns are everywhere we’ve looked, even when we look at things 100,000 times smaller or 100,000 times bigger than anything that any of our Earthly peers have.

The classification is done because rogue planets etc. tell us things about the process of solar system and planetary formation. Yeah nature tends to have a continuum of things, but the classifications are primarily used as place holders so that people know what everyone's talking about.

Since stars form in explosive events, it seems painfully obvious that some of the shit that comes flying out does not stick around, and that it could be planet sized/shaped.

Stars are formed in nebulas of gas and dust via gravitational collapse (accretion).

The remaining gas and dust that is swirling around the star flattens out into a disk (because of angular momentum). Planets gradually form in this disk, again via accretion (snowball effect).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplanetary_disk

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_(astrophysics)

There are often clear boundaries or transitions between many natural things that aren't just "made up" for the purpose of satisfying us.

How do you think we would understand anything without categorisation?

The periodic table comes to mind.

Exceptions to the rule are the thing that drive new science.

It isn't Eureka we're looking for its, huh, thats funny.

Hopefully we'll find one day that Nature isn't fussy with the speed of light.

It's the exceptions that teach you something new and further your understanding.

It isn’t just about arbitrary classifications and their exceptions in this case. Rogue planets must have formed inside sone solar system, and somehow been ejected. This is interesting.

Language is a system of categories. Our limited minds are only able to approach approximations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com