There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)

After any substantial ground clearing event (eg bushfire, etc), wouldn't the subsequent "winners" be those who grew the fastest to capture the available sunlight + suppress their competitors?

^This applies mostly to epistemology.

I like my philosophy in the format of what the youth calls 'schizo-posts'. Weird, out-there, grasping to find right words and closer to art than anything else.

Philosophy is also not science, since there is no attempt to rigorously test the theories with experiments or data.

So I lump philosophy with art. It's strongly tied with a person's sense of aesthetics as well as the culture around them.

Physics and maths tend to poopoo any line of thinking which considers human experience - and there is amazing utility in that! No opinions are important for calculation of a trajectory. However, human experience does exist, and operating rationally on it, despite the lack of ability to experiment, leads one into a world that mathematicians might scoff at, but is still a completely valid field of inquiry.

People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm.

I recommend Michael Segrue on YouTube - his lectures are fantastic as an intro to philosophy. Particularly his into to Kierkegaard touches on the birth of existentialism out of the furnace of pure scientific rationality.

It's actually the reverse—multiple sciences started out as subfields of philosophy, that got useful enough on their own that they were peeled out into their own thing. It would be more useful to think of as philosophy as a soup of proto-sciences that are developing, that some might prove useful, and some might die out.

That's not really all philosophy is, but at least it's a more historically accurate way to look at it.

The problem here is postmodernism, which is absolutely a meaningless word salad designed solely to impress the gullible.

I think this is basically the point. Understand the world around you, and especially the connections and influences between different components of a system (broadly defined), to form and verify more holistic, nth-order models rather than disconnected, first-order-only analyses.

I think it goes beyond "cool idea" and really strikes at the same kinds of intuitions that many on HN appreciate as regards simple models that explain complex phenomena. In this sense, then, D&G's work is a sort of "meta-model" for guiding intuitions when building specific models about specific systems.

It is not a predictive framework. I guess I would call it an "ontological/architectural" framework.

(I laughed)

> I find it basically useless in my every day life and work

D&G is of utility in architecture, for one. You need to have some philosophical decoration for your doodle. The art is in mapping bs to doodle. In general, useless philosophy is a faithful companion in bullshit fields. Where in software we could use D&G then? I suggest crypto space.

A rhizome, maybe. The article is about literal trees (e.g. dogwoods, oak) and not mathematical structures, but it has a decidedly philosophical bent, and I find the idea of rhizomes to be relevant to that, at least.

IDK, I barely understand what's going on here.

and that's exactly what we see in the article, right? if a species took a path A-B-C-D to exhibit features of D, and another took A-F-G-D and so also exhibits features of D, then isn't there more to the history there than simply genetic change via ancestry over time? there's a reason why convergent evolution is so weird and surprising.

epigenetics, for example, is an interesting manifestation of what sorts of new domains you can explore as you broaden the horizon for asking questions beyond "linear ancestry" or "natural heirarchy" - arborescent vs rhizomatic thinking. blasting out of these constraints is the process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization D&G put forward as necessary and essential.

Nobody that I am aware of is clustering things based on similar functionality simply to say "look, these two things are similar", without having some sort of "explanation".

To be honest I'm not the best person to ask because every time I dip my toes in the area I realize (a) how little I know and (b) just how ugly these debates get. and (c) how much scientists like to treat some side observation as golden data that is absolutely right when trying to build support for their theory

> The question of whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable found its way into the United States Supreme Court in 1893. The court ruled unanimously in Nix v. Hedden that a tomato is correctly identified as, and thus taxed as, a vegetable, for the purposes of the Tariff of 1883 on imported produce. The court did acknowledge, however, that, botanically speaking, a tomato is a fruit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable#Terminology

"Vegetable" is defined by how a plant is cooked and eaten, and so has a lot of cultural and context specific influences. A vegetable can be a root (potato), a stalk (celery), a fruit (cucumber), seeds (beans), even non-plant fungi (mushroom).

A fruit has a very specific definition (especially in a biological or botanical usage). It's the "seed-bearing structure in flowering plants that is formed from the ovary after flowering" (Wikipedia).

The part of the cucumber we eat is the fruit (you can see its seeds). But the way we prepare and eat it means we classify it as a vegetable.

I think the best alternative is to use different names depending on what we're highlighting (cladistics versus functionalism, for instance).

The -id/-ine suffix (e.g. ursid / ursine) seems to do this.

It would be clarifying to distinguish hodgepodge groupings such as "fish", and groupings such as "ducks" that are basically monophyletic with some exceptions removed from the group. Ducks are just small Anatidae.

There’s also pea in the same. It’s kinda like a pea and kinda like a nut.

With my younger kids, I settled on just introducing the ideas of multiple overlapping systems, but not pushing on it too hard until they're older. They're only now getting to that age and I've been folding it in to some conversations lately more strongly. I think having some fun with it early as you are is a very strong approach to the topic.

I sort of dislike the framing of this sort of article, as well as the "actually nothing's really a berry" and similar culinary silliness, because this is a really important cognitive skill for higher-level thinking and introducing it with an approach virtually guaranteed to produce resistance and associating it with trickery rather than clear thinking is a real disservice, in my opinion.

This article, once it gets going, is good; I'm only complaining about the framing, not the content.

I will complain about the culinary version of this, where the trickery I'm referring to is "You think that a strawberry is a berry (often heavily implied, 'dumbass'), but really it's an aggregate accessory fruit (often heavily implied, 'as I am smarter for knowing than you')." The whole frame is wrong; it isn't really one thing or the other, it is both, and several other things besides. The multiple classifications all exist at once and they aren't better or worse than each other, they are better or worse for certain uses, and there certainly isn't one classification that is the "real" one and all the rest are fake. For people pushing this, it's like, yeah, you almost get the idea that multiple classifications can exist at once, but you've still completely missed the point.

Tomatoes and peanuts are primarily known to be useful as food, and in the context of food, they fill the niche of vegetables and peanuts, respectively. Palm trees are useful pretty much only decoratively and to provide shade (unless you harvest them, which most people don't) so they have exactly the same utility as trees, making them trees.

It's interesting to think about how these things are biologically different from the other things in their practical category, but we strip away the utility of placing things into categories if we try to apply them outside of the context in which the category is... useful. So unless you're in a biology lesson (or you are a botanist, or just having fun with facts), tomatoes are vegetables.

Strawberries aren't berries but bananas are.

But bananas? Who calls bananas grasses? They're not even in Poales!