To categorize is to throw away information. If you’re told that a falling tree makes a “sound,” you don’t know what the actual sound is; you haven’t actually heard the tree falling. If a coin lands “heads,” you don’t know its radial orientation. A blue egg-shaped thing may be a “blegg,” but what if the exact egg shape varies, or the exact shade of blue? You want to use categories to throw away irrelevant information, to sift gold from dust, but often the standard categorization ends up throwing out relevant information too. And when you end up in that sort of mental trouble, the first and most
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