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[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md

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 > —_Distress_ by Greg Egan
 
-In ["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 immortal Scott Alexander explains, correctly, that 
+In ["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 immortal Scott Alexander eloquently and correctly explains that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or false in themselves, but rather can only be evaluated by their usefulness. We group similar things into the same category so that we can make similar predictions about them, but this requires both a metric of "similarity," and a notion of which predictions one cares about enough to notice, both of which are relative to an agent's preferences, rather than inherent in the world itself.
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+And so, Alexander explains, the ancient Hebrews weren't _wrong_ to classify whales as a type of _dag_ (typically translated as _fish_), even though modern biologists classify whales as mammals and not fish, because the ancient Hebrews were more interested in distinguishing which animals live in the water rather than which animals were phylogenetically related.
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+Similarly, 
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 OUTLINE—