+The thing is, I was _right_ to notice the similarity between Soares's argument and "... Not Man for the Categories." Soares's [own account](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/HwSkiN62QeuEtGWpN) agreed that there was a causal influence. Okay, so _Nate_ wasn't trying to play gender politics; Scott just alerted him to the idea that people didn't used to be interested in drawing their categories around phylogenetics, and Nate ran with that thought.
+
+So where did _Scott_ get it from?
+
+I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient. I think if you asked Scott Alexander whether dolphins are fish in 2012, he would have said, "No, they're mammals," like any other educated adult.
+
+In a world where the clock of "political time" had run a little bit slower, such that the fight for gay marriage had taken longer [such that the progressive _zeitgeist_ hadn't pivoted to trans as the new cause _du jour_](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/), I don't think Alexander would have had the occasion to write "... Not Man for the Categories." And in that world, I don't think "Dolphins are fish, fight me" or "Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary" would have become _memes_ in our subculture.
+
+This case is like [radiocontrast dye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocontrast_agent) for [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology). Because Scott Alexander won [the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) and writes faster than everyone else, he has the power to _sneeze his mistakes_ onto everyone who trusts Scott to have done his homework, even when he obviously hasn't.
+
+[No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2MD3NMLBPCqPfnfre/cached-thoughts), but you would hope for an intellectual community that can do error-correction, rather than copying smart people's views including mistakes?
+
+To be sure, it's true that there's a cluster of similarities induced by adaptations to the acquatic environment. It's reasonable to want to talk about that subspace. But it doesn't follow that phylogenetics is irrelevant.
+
+Genetics is at the root of the causal graph of all other traits of an organism, which induces the kind of conditional independence relationships that make "categories" a useful AI trick.
+
+But in a world where more people are reading "... Not Man for the Categories" than ["Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace), and even the people who have read "Density in Thingspace" (once, ten years ago) are having most of their conversations with people who only read "... Not Man for the Categories"—what happens is that you end up with a so-called "rationalist" culture that completely forgot the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition/carve-reality-at-the-joints skill! People only remember the specific subset of "A Human's Guide to Words" that's useful for believing whatever you want (by cherry-picking the features you need to include in category Y to make your favorite "X is a Y" sentence look "true", which is easy for intricate high-dimensional things like biological creatures that have a lot of similarities to cherry-pick from), rather than the part about the conditional independence structure in the environment.
+
+After I cooled down, I did eventually write up the explanation for why paraphyletic categories are okay, in ["Blood Is Thicker Than Water"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). But I'm not sure that anyone cared.
+
+--------