#it's up to you to decide the subjective and arbitrary boundary value when defining your categories from continuous high-dimensional data

[eimearkuopio]

The stuff you're discussing is actually really well handled by x+y by Eugenia Cheng, a mathematician who specialises in category theory. She proposes (and argues very convincingly for) a decoupling of language between biological and social aspects of concepts which are traditionally defined as masculine or feminine, and proposes using the term "ingressive" for traditionally masculine social aspects, and "congressive" for traditionally feminine social aspects. I've found it an extremely helpful way of thinking about my own behaviour and society. It also helps to overcome a lot of the issues that the existing conceptual models fall prey to by their very language.

Here's the thing I don't think you've noticed; and from my perspective, if I can explain it properly, I think you'll agree with what I'm saying. (Big if! But there's a reason I win awards for my teaching.)

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. You agree with a lot of what I'm saying.

But I'm saying, "Any time we reduce this complex reality to a simplified model, even by the act of describing it in language, by necessity, that act will obscure some facet of that complex reality. We should consider which aspects we are obscuring in a given conversation, why we have made those choices, and what the implications are; but we must simplify somehow to make those approximations and have meaningful and productive discourse, and claiming otherwise is disingenuous and harmful."

And you are reading that as, "This specific approximation is fine actually!"

But you're the one who's dissecting the nature of the approximation in biological terms. I'm just saying that some approximation is necessary, and it's more important to define the approximation and the limitations of that approximation than to try to generalise unnecessarily and end up using four-dimensional tensors in a situation where you can just multiply by 10 and call it a day. You're striving for spurious precision, claiming that the "right" answer needs a certain number of decimal places of accuracy and then we can call it "correct"; and I'm saying that in practical, day-to-day terms, we're actually better off saying that pi is approximately 3 as long as we're not using that value to build any bridges.