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by yaccb3 8 hours ago
Look, the whole thing actually makes sense and the core idea is pretty cool because it's true that a lot of stuff in math looks identical. But in my opinion this is way too much of a macro-level overgeneralization and you risk throwing everything into the same pot, which ends up diluting the actual point of things.I mean, if you take a hammer and a meat mallet, at the end of the day they're both chunks of metal used to hit stuff, but if you bunch them together without making any distinction, you lose track of why you use one to drive nails into a wall and the other to prep cutlets.Saying everything is just one big logarithm is a nice mental exercise, but I feel like it flattens out the differences too much and makes you lose the practical utility of the individual math tools, which are meant to solve completely different problems.
1 comments

I'm a programmer so to me this brings to mind the idea of classes and subclasses. A program is implemented by having a set of classes. The classes can be organized into a class-hierarchy where they inherit methods from their ancestor-classes.

Now assume originally you did not have the feature of inheritance in your programming language so you would just create all the classes you need without orgnizing them into an inheritance-tree. Then you upgraded to a language that doe shave inheritance and you wanted to refactor your program to omit duplicate definitions of methods.

What kind of class-hierarchy would you come up with? There is no single way to do it. Some ways are better than others. There migh be more than one optimal way.

Same goes with generalization general, it is part of the language we create to describe things and there are many different languages we may come up with, some simpler, some more difficult to understand.