-Variety, diversity means that objects have different properties.

E.g. a cat has fur, it purrs, and is cute. Whereas a tree has leaves, a trunk, branches, and grows big

-Existence of variety doesn’t preclude existence of a degree of homogeneity. Two objects can have some different properties — and some similar properties

-Thus between two objects there can be a spectrum — ranging from utter dissimilarity to utter similarity

-Since objects can have multitude properties — there are multiple ways in which a group of objects can be similar.

E.g. a group of cats can be categorised into groups of same colour, or same breed, or same sex, or same disposition, or same weight, etc.

 

This is how variety works and how similarity works and how categorisation works and how comparisons work.

It’s important to know how those things work.

Because we use that knowledge to orient ourselves in the world.

 

Granted, we don’t consciously run the entire process,

you know, picking up every property of a given object, and then comparing it with every property of another object.

What we do instead is we recognise a bunch of properties and generalise.

E.g. you see 4 wheels, it’s moving, fits 4 people, surely it’s a car.

It works most of the time.

It works to generally orient yourself in the world: orient yourself where you are, which trees are near your cave, distinguish between animals you eat and animals that eat you, plants you eat and plants that kill you, etc.

It not always works so brilliantly when things get abstract.

It STILL works well. We do a LOT of abstract thinking every day. MOST of our thinking is abstract. And we rapidly recognise things and categories of things and how they differ and how similar they are and what is good for what, etc. We must do this rapidly because there’s no time, decisions must be made.

It works well until it doesn’t

 

It works well until it doesn’t

 

You can erroneously categorise something. You observes objects having some of the properties that objects of given category have. You generalised and now attribute properties of that category to that object,

E.g. you looked at cat and observed that it stands on 4 legs and has a tail — just like DOGS do. And dogs bark. Therefore cats bark.

 

Now if two things belong to two different categories, you can’t compare them qualitatively can you?

What is faster, a plane or a car? Well it depends on what kind of road.

To compare things they first must be comparable. They need enough common characteristics — to formulate a meaningful comparison.

You can improve the question.

e.g. ask what is faster in straight line, when reaching maximum speed.

But if the question is wrong than the answer will be meaningless

 

Finally,

Who is more morally righteous? A washing machine, or a microwave?

Well this is nonsensical too isn’t it? Morality is not a property with which household objects, or machine, are endowed.

Apparently this is called a category mistake.

 

Now you think you wouldn’t make such stupid mistakes,

Except you do them all the time.

 

We label everything. Not minding if the label holds any meaning.

It’s good to label poisonous mushroom “poisonous”. It informs you eating it or not, killing yourself or not.

It’s not good to label a politician “evil”. It doesn’t say anything. You didn’t even define “evil”. If you defined precisely what evil means and what it means for a politician to be “evil” — then this is meaningful.

But you didn’t do it. You labelled him out of habit of labelling things. Out of habit of categorising things — EVEN if you don’t know if they belong to given category or not. And EVEN if it’s utterly meaningless, or even adverse.

You labelled because labelling is what you do, categorising is what you do — it’s an automatic process. It’s automatic so that you can automatically make decisions. Distinguish between prey and predator. Make rapid decision in which direction to run.

 

Go ahead and continue utilising your auto-pilot for the simple things.

The more complicated things get — the less do you want to automatically label.

And even after due reflection — you should still be sceptical of your label.

Because it’s not so simple as distinguishing a tree from a dog.

 

Labelling we do, and stupid labelling at that,

90% is complete gibberish which doesn’t say anything, like “vacuum cleaners are prideful”. Literally it’s as meaningless,

Then there’s 9% which is specious — it appears to convey some meaning but is nevertheless wrong.

The nonsense like left wing and right wing, heaven and hell, good and evil, successful and unsuccessful, just and unjust, etc.

All of the above can have meaning — but usually doesn’t. Not in how most people use it.

It only has meaning if you very carefully define what you mean, and very carefully draw conclusions from that.

 

There really is no other way but extreme epistemic humility.

Educating yourself only gives you more elaborate labels. It does give you the extra depth — which saves you from misapplying the most crude labels. But now you use more sophisticated labels and make the same mistake with them. You plaster them over things you don’t know, based on the greatest overlap with the things you know and labelled.

And again: this doesn’t have to be wrong. It could work. Perhaps that label WILL work, for those particular purposes.

But it could be wrong, and terribly wrong.

Which is what you must be aware of.

Which is achieved by understanding the entire mechanism above — and always staying humble.

And retaining ACTION and RESULT as your greatest guide. Anyone is ignorant but the real world doers.