Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies

Re:Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies by catalogia on Saturday April 11, 2020 @11:34AM (#22842192)

It seems a human tendency to organize things into hierarchies, I think our brains are likely optimized for it, but I think it's often an oversimplification. Taking biological evolution as an example, kids are taught about the evolutionary "tree of life", e.g. phylogenetic tree, wherein organisms are organized into a hierarchy of what is related to what. But while that worldview seems broadly accurate, it's definitely an oversimplification. Cross-species genetic transfer does occur in nature through various mechanisms, for instance in ring species or rare instances of viable hybridization (mules are the classic example of infertile hybrids, but fertile mules have rarely been observed in the modern era.)

It seems to me that a directed acyclic graph, rather than a tree, is a more accurate model in this case. (Directed because time always flows in one direction.)

A phylogenetic tree also fails to capture information about life that people might reasonable find interesting. Suppose for instance you want to study all organisms that fly. Bats, birds, insects and pterosaurs all fly[flew] but don't share common flying ancestors. The "flying organism" classification doesn't fit into that simple hierarchical tree.

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Re:Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies by modwest on Saturday April 11, 2020 @02:46PM (#22843305)

I think it's a built-in cognitive pattern in the brain to create categories for sure. But organizing those categories into a hierarchy? I don't know.

How I model it, personally, is that as we learn more about the world, or learn about more things, we can increase the resolution of our categories, i.e. have more of them at a finer level of detail. From this process, my personal mental model goes, hierarchies tend to emerge as kind of "meta-categories." It's our attempt to overlay some predictability.

Mostly, it works okay, but when you hit a certain level of resolution, hierarchies get exposed as a very leaky abstraction. Busting out of that hierarchical mindset is, in my model, what happens when I "think outside the box:" Putting things which aren't "supposed" to be on the same level on the same level.

In my experience, thinking through things in this way leads to interesting places.

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