In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology is _complicated_; every human is their own unique snowflake. But it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake" theory. In order to [compress our observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) of the world we see, we end up distilling our observations into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons: no one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".
In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology is _complicated_; every human is their own unique snowflake. But it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake" theory. In order to [compress our observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) of the world we see, we end up distilling our observations into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons: no one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".