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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I mostly disagree, there are a few natural categories like periodic elements, since every element has an exact integer number of protons; but pretty much everything more complex than an atom does not fit into a natural category.

For flight, you'll get into blurry areas when you consider stuff like gliding, whether an animal can fly but only under optimal nutrition and wind conditions, animals that have true flight but for shorter distances than some other animals can jump, etc.

For whatever definition of "flying animal" you can come up with, I'm pretty sure I could come up with an exception, unless maybe you write a couple hundred words in your definition explicitly listing exceptions to the point where it's a very obviously unwieldy and not particularly natural category.

The map won't exactly match the territory I agree, but maps can be made to as faithfully match the territory as possible. It's when an aim comes in other than to match the territory that the process is corrupt. A genuine disagreement can be had over whether homosexuality belongs in the territory, but it should be decided by discussing the territory, not considering special interests.

I think I still agree with Scott's opinion that while trying to make your map match the territory as much as possible is respectable, it can still provide not nearly as much utility as trying to make a map that's just useful. Having something like stuff that DSM categorizes as mental illness be "bad stuff that we want insurance to cover" is a pretty unnatural category, but might be a lot more useful for real life than some sort of biological definition about deviations from a mentally healthy human.

This just seems like a lack of imagination. It's like thinking one to many relationships in a relational database are impossible because you store everything in a flat table. If you are willing to maintain good database schema this is not a problem. The fundamental problem is you have this single table trying to handle two or more things that ought to be separated. The trade offs disappear if you simple use three tables referenced to each other. One to describe to the best of our ability mental disorders. One to enumerate treatments that do and do not work for those disorders. And one to actually map which of those treatments insurance should cover. Really I could easily see half a dozen or more tables being useful.

I don't know much about mental disorder taxonomies. Looking through Scott's post, my guess as to his response to this would be "That would be great! But you'd never get anyone to actually use your system because people would still be shouting about how homosexuality appears anywhere in it, even if it's under the 'don't stigmatize these' table". But that's just my guess.

I guess one of my frustrations is that we as a society have decided to give the kind of people that object to things like that so much control over things that matter. We've decided it's more important to neuter the tools we use to think clearly to protect fools from offense.

For whatever definition of "flying animal" you can come up with, I'm pretty sure I could come up with an exception, unless maybe you write a couple hundred words in your definition explicitly listing exceptions to the point where it's a very obviously unwieldy and not particularly natural category.

Yeah, even 'flying animal' for the purposes of fence building I'm sure for any given fence there's some animals capable of limited flight that would nonetheless find it insurmountable.

There's a difference between a category that's fuzzy in in some cases because it's hard to have a perfect category, and a category that's fuzzy in in some cases because the category is gerrymandered for some reason other than its stated purpose.

there are a few natural categories like periodic elements, since every element has an exact integer number of protons; but pretty much everything more complex than an atom does not fit into a natural category.

Here too there are intermediate states where its unclear whether a proton is part of the atomic core. During radioactive decay, at what point does the atom change element? Now, these intermediates are fine to ignore 99% of the time... just like with lots of other categories that people want to deny being natural.

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