This quote jumped out to me because it is something that I see quite often among bisexual people. Especially this statement a few lines after the text you quoted:

>That’s not to say that disputes over categorization aren’t important. They may be necessary, especially in rule-making contexts like the law or in organizations. But you have to take the entire process with a grain of salt and recognize the limits of what the category can tell you.

If you peruse (safe for work) bisexual communities online, you will find a lot of people asking whether they are "actually bisexual", "still bisexual", "bisexual enough", etc. for a number of reasons. Some bisexual people who are in heterosexual or homosexual relationships (e.g., a bisexual man dating a heterosexual woman or a bisexual woman dating a lesbian woman) often share a sense of struggle with the fact that they have "chosen" a specific gender to partner with.

This creates a strange insecurity that I see to often - especially (IMO) among bisexual men - centered on whether that bisexual person is "no longer bisexual" partner because they have chosen a partner of the opposite sex.

Some people seem to have an idea that bisexuality implies a type of attraction that is evenly split between men and women. The notion that a bisexual person can have a gender preference at all seems to also be something people struggle with.

But, to me, this quote offers some much needed guidance. Namely, that bisexuality is a way of simplifying a complex form of attraction so that it can be easily understood. That simplification throws away a lot of granular information about the nature of a given bisexual persons feelings of attraction, but it is also a helpful starting point for those who feel this way and wish to understand themselves better.

In other words, like all categories, categories describing sexual attraction can be liberating, but also limiting.

You can say that in a nutshell as well, as follows. Every word is an abstraction. Each abstraction has the cost of being lossy.

If you abstract and formalise, it's possible to divvy up the world into nouns ("being") and verbs ("becoming") transitioning between them.

On one hand, as long as we accept that chaining two compatible verbs produces another verb, it follows that chaining no verbs is the same as chaining a single verb "to remain the same", and now we don't even need nouns, because everywhere we used to have, say, an apple, we can formally use the verb "to remain an apple".

On the other hand, if we're attempting to prove things, and wish to use excluded middle or double negation elimination, it's very convenient to have explicit nouns (for which we can do so safely) rather than having almost everything we do be consequent upon taking care to manipulate only the subset of verbs which involve remaining the same.

What you are talking about here (and you articulated it well), reminds me of The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. If you haven't read it, I think it would connect a lot of dots for you and I think you would find it very interesting and very relevant to your experience.

The nouns are always in transition, even in the box. We pretend they are not in an effort to provide ourselves with a refuge from the flux.

In each case they are alike in certain respect(s) and different in certain respect(s).

For example, in the first example, the apples are instantiations or examples of the same thing. So they are alike in that regard. But they differ in other regards, most obviously in the bundle of matter that makes them up.

In the third example, pretty much the same thing, with some additional detail.

In the second and fourth examples, they are not examples of the same thing. But 'fruit' doesn't imply any species of fruit -- it's generic in that regard -- so apples and oranges share that genus while being different species. Being an apple and being an orange both imply being a fruit; but being a fruit doesn't imply either of the others.

If mathgenius is to be believed, decategorization is about paying attention to the map from apples to oranges..

riffing on that, designori will try to unify the shiny and the essential.. and though John “Designor” Henrys are memorialized, nobody sane would want to be John Henry …

question: how would “the central bank” help?

L: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/456414/what-is-decategori...