+> With the Hopes that our World is built on
+> They were utterly out of touch,
+> They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;
+> They denied she identified as Dutch;
+> They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;
+> They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to have Wings;
+> So we worshipped the Gods of the Market
+> Who promised these beautiful things.
+>
+> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
+
+## Prelude: on Charity Norms and Intepretive Labor Balance
+
+This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to Scott Alexander's ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/). The reply ends up covering a lot of worldview-ground, so ideas in this post may be expanded upon in future posts.
+
+Before anything else, I'd like to thank Ozy for their thoughtful reply. Substantive, longform engagement between contrasting viewpoints is a rare and beautiful thing that deserves to be socially rewarded so that we get more of it, thereby collectively becoming more likely to get things right [systematically rather than by coincidence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/)!
+
+saying something
+
+we can't talk about bad faith
+playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles
+
+"from the merely naive to the dense to the outright vapid" insults violate a symmetry constraint
+
+_people who think they're lizards_
+
+the real strength of "be charitable to those you disagree with" is that it forces you to clarify your ideas in order to defend against every possible absurd misinterpretation
+
+-----