who's important? who cares?

David Toub asks who's important? who cares?

I think that people always want to categorise things; it's part of our basic pattern recognitory mindset. When we try to classify however we often get caught up in our own constructs. I'm talking here about hierarchical classification versus categorization versus any other method of classifying. A debate is raging right now about "tagging" given the proliferation of services such as flickr and del.icio.us. The debate centers around the idea that tagging provides a flat namespace that gets corrupted/polluted when the same tag can have multiple semantic values. Tim Bray gives the example of military "drills" versus oil "drills". Because the system that we invented (tagging in this case) is built in a certain way it constrains us to act (and even think sometimes) in a way that is congruent with it's physical design.

I was talking to a friend the other day and he mentioned that a guy we have know for years and years (and never particularly liked) happened to be around and start beatboxing (vocal percussion where you make the sound of drums and cymbals with your mouth). It turns out that the guy was quite good at it. So my friend asked the guy for his number and then felt all bad that he had known the guy for years and never asked.

Each person presents a number of facets to the world and some of them may be interesting to you and others won't be. I don't think it's fair to beat yourself up just because you didn't like someone before discovering a certain facet of theirs. I'm sure that had I met Beethoven or Mozart when they were kids I wouldn't have hung out with them much: they would have been too much into music and I would have wanted to talk about and do other things.

Our faults are what make us unique. If we all were perfect we would all be identical (assuming there is a single definition of perfect). The difference between a master and an apprentice is that the mast selects which faults to show and which to hide which gives their practice a unique flavour that is hard or impossible to duplicate. The apprentice spends so much time fussing with the tools and are not able to choose which of their faults to hide which makes their practice unpolished and rough.

So to categorize people is to either deny that there is anything more to them than the single aspect which we are considering as a basis for categorization or to say that we don't care about the other aspects of the person. Now, when we are doing studies on fertility rates by geographical area it is obvious that we don't care about professions, but if we are looking at ranking people there are often a lot more aspects involved in the ranking than simple seniority or even a simple qualitative assessment of skills.