[pictureofabear]

I also struggled to find an interesting new thought in the article. It was a bit nihilistic to just say that there is no dividing line and leave it at that. Great... there is no clear-cut line, so what?

Categorization is a tool for scientists to use for comparison. It's kind of like k-nearest neighbors learning. We have to draw the line for categories somewhere initially, then we adjust where that line is over time and add more categories if needed.

[0134340]

At the same time with taxonomy, we're basically lossy encoding the information and so data is lost or glossed over. IE, white walls aren't exactly white, there's other color information there but it's easier for our brains to encode. Creating lines, borders and categories is a lossy function and if objective truth is to be obtained, it's important to retain as much of it as possible while we can also be intellectually honest about our needs for such distinctions.