Categorization, Comparison and Cases

To make sense of the world, we rely on our brains' capability to form fictions that we call "categories" of things and experiences. This capability is both automatic and hidden: we can't avoid doing it, yet we don't know exactly how we do it. We know that differences and similarities play a role, but it is still difficult. When we try to be more deliberate about the process, for instance because we want to write software based on our categories, we call it modelling. In the process, we tend to replace our intuitive common-sense categories with technical categories. In this talk, we'll take a look at different perspectives on categorization, see why equality is more difficult than we tend to let on, and why edge cases are just regular cases that got unlucky.

Loose cannon at NAVTwitter