#bullshitish taxonomizing

[max1461]

Hmm. I had formerly considered "type of guy who is more interested in social abstractions than in objects" to be the essentially normie position. Which is it. But it's now becoming clear that this is also the rationalist position and, more broadly, the computer guy position. As contrasted with the object-first stance, the interest in the-thing-for-its-own-sake, which you find among chemists, biologists, historians and so forth. And philologists of course.

"Is this good? Is this just? Is this optimal? Is this efficient? Is this socially responsible?" <- one question, the judgement question, the question of engineers and social reformers.

"How does this work? Where did it come from? What are its characteristics?" <- another question, the content question, the question of scholars, motivated by curiosity in its purest form.

One dimension of your type-of-guy-vector is determined by which question you ask first and most fervently upon encountering something new.

[max1461]

Oh I haven't done any bullshitish taxonomizing in a little while. I should get back into that.

As usual I will occupy the position of "specialest ever most perfectly balanced guy" in this taxonomy.

So I think that there are maybe two kinds of people. They sort of overlap with humanities people and STEM people, but not exactly. I'm going to call them, uh, Order people and Chaos people. And Order people like order and Chaos people like chaos. Or something. So Order people, you know, aesthetically they love efficiency and elegance and all that, and they tend to think in a structured, deductive way. And Chaos people, well they like chaos, aesthetically they enjoy syncretism and particularism and partial patterns, and they tend to think in free associations. Or something.

And yeah, this is the same thing as every other dichotomy. I've reinvented this like five times. This is autism vs. schizophrenia, this is STEM vs. humanities, this is extremism vs. centrism. The trads will even tell you this is man vs. woman. This is the ur-bullshitish-dichotomy.

And anyway the reason I am specialest ever, as usual, is that my aesthetics are Chaos and my thinking is Order.

I hate optimization, optimization sucks ass, beauty is messiness and incomplete patterns and ordered rules layered with ordered exceptions layered with ordered exceptions-to-the-exceptions until it looks like there are no patterns at all. That's the way natural language is, that's the way ecosystems are, against the efforts of every computer scientist ever that's the way computers still are, at least in some ways. To be uncharitable: order is for suckers who don't want to think, chaos gives you a never-ending stream of new puzzles. More charitably: order is for people with a low novelty drive and chaos is for people with a high novelty drive. Or something.

But, you know, I'm an Order-thinker, I'm very careful, I'm reasonably skeptical. I feel like any satisfying explanation for an effect should contain a mechanism, free association isn't good enough. That kind of thing. I don't believe in astrology.

And anyway this makes me the bestest, the coolest ever, as usual. I'm like the girl from the teen dystopia where they sort everybody into types, but I'm two types at once. Doesn't that make me neat. Anyway.

[max1461]

I think my epistemic position on most of my bullshit taxonomies is like, "the more annoyed I am the more true they feel". you know, like I'm not gonna claim they're actually true, I think it would be too strong to claim even that they represent an intuition or a loose pattern. all I can claim is that when I'm really frustrated with a guy the place my brain goes first is often "oooh he doesn't even know that i'm better than him according to my Taxonomies". and really, that's good enough.