Not just language, but things like visual perception of colour as well. We don't perceive things as a continuum, we perceive discrete colours. This phenomena applies to tons of different things. We're literally not wired to perceive things without discretely categorizing them first.

In psycholinguistics it's called categorical perception

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_perception

I find it interesting that you've used the word 'we' given that a portion of your audience will spend the day working with inference, optimization, probabilistic programming, and the like.

I was thinking more about the confident assertions you often see here in hot political topics. It's good to get in the habit of taking a step back and saying "wait, how much do I really know about this?"

To apply this principle here, I'm not sure I know much about what Hacker News readers do. It's easier to know what they comment about, since this is something I actually see.