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I am not the parent and I don't speak for the parent, but I think I share some of the same sentiment. I'm not confused about the categorical parts of biology.
by lolsal 5y ago
I am not the parent and I don't speak for the parent, but I think I share some of the same sentiment.
I'm not confused about the categorical parts of biology. I don't understand it all, but that's OK, I don't need to. What's irritating is the pedantry that comes from articles like this.
If I wrote an article like, "There's no such thing as a strawberry, cryptographically," I imagine it would be entirely uninteresting.
If I write a tree categorization algorithm that categories what I call a "tree" as something else, my algorithm would be buggy.
- svara 5y agoI guess people who make precisely classifying millions of objects their job need to be a little on the pedantic side to do that well. ;) But, in all seriousness, I didn't think the article was like that at all. The title is meant to grab your attention and then tell you lots of (to me, at least) interesting things about the evolution of trees. If you were able to write insightfully about strawberries from a cryptography perspective, that title you suggested might be completely fine. That said, I, too, remember people telling me things about how X wasn't actually Y because ... IMO, these types of arguments come across as pedantic when they're framed as basically being just about using words the right way, without also telling you something deeper about why something looks like an X but in many non-obvious ways is closer to a Y. My favorite example of that is the statement "Black is not a color". I heard that a lot as a child, and I would agree that that is unnecessarily pedantic. Learning about how color perception works, and how black is unlike other colors, is still super interesting.
- lolsal 5y agoYou make good points and I agree with all of them!