I don't understand how you make the leap from knowledge being equated to the field being dead? Taxonomy provides a foundation for others to learn about something.

Of course. But thinking belongs to the practitioner, the point is that you have to do it and not just study the doing of it.

You acquire a mental model by doing the things that lead to having that mental model, not by reading about the model. Memorizing a taxonomy of cognitive biases doesn't necessarily make you a better thinker, anymore than memorizing design patterns necessarily makes you a better programmer.

> Any field of knowledge that has been dissected into a taxonomy must be dead.

As others have said, this is clearly untrue. Consider algorithms, for instance. We have categories like dynamic programming, and genetic algorithms (a subcategory of evolutionary algorithms).

Building taxonomies is the easy part, and occurs long before a field is 'completed'.

Also, building and learning taxonomies allows for discovery of new knowledge. This is especially obvious in mathematics, where you start with rigorously-defined symbols and operations and very little knowledge, and then manipulate the symbols to gain more knowledge. Indeed, it could be argued that taxonomies are necessary for understanding.

Chemistry, biology, botany, and geology are dead?

i think the point they're making is that many learners in a given field (e.g., undergrads) don't typically critique the textbooks for those subjects. it's as if all the knowledge therein is complete and accurate, and research happens at some amorphous fringe beyond the textbook knowledge. it's intellectually "dead" to those learners, not that the subjects themselves are dead.

That may (how shall we know?) have been the point they intended to make, but the statement we have to work with is: "Any field of knowledge that has been dissected into a taxonomy must be dead."

Is there some nuance of uncertainty in there I'm not picking up on?

The word "dissected" is doing a lot of work there. "Any" makes it, arguably, hyperbolic. Obviously we can't take too literally any statement about a field being alive or dead. Research is alive in these fields but pedagogy is mostly not.

ah, can we know anything at all then? can any statement, no matter how forcefully and obviously effused, be absolutely uncertain?

but i digress... as fun as the debate may be, hn is probably not where we solve epistemic dilemmas.

Well,we can put a man on the moon with less computing power than we carry in our pocket, and that's far from the most impressive thing we've accomplished in a long long list.

> hn is probably not where we solve epistemic dilemmas.

The repulsion to things like logic and epistemology on a programming website isn't the type of thing I believe we should strive for or celebrate, but I certainly can't disagree with your assessment.