Self-Identifying Categorisation

Time to rant.

In spite of doing lots of machine learning/data mining stuff, I really dislike having to categorise things. Especially people. Actually, I hate categorising people. The mere act of categorising people is exactly the act of discrimination, which from the perspective of the liberal is a term that is taboo. It is also a term that has been drilled into my head as being ``not good'' for a multi-racial society, but of course I am alluding to the ``bullshit'' notion of what race is. But I digress.

We are wired for handle ``simple'' knowledge. Part of the power of being a human is the ability to abstract, generalise and then specialise the abstraction to specific instances. For instance, Science is the systematic study of phenomena in the attempt at understanding the underlying principles (generalisation), link up similar principles (generalise) and then try to apply the principles when a similar phenomenon in a completely different domain is observed (specialisation). Lucky for us though, Science, as a whole, is generally quite good at doing this.

The problem comes when we start applying such concepts to people. Especially when we are talking about various abstractions with respect to the way we think and react to the world.

Why would this be a problem, one might ask. There are two reasons that I can think of: first, the abstraction or thus category of the person's thought and reaction patterns is somewhat self-propagating, and second, this categorisation process is often used as the bulwark against any form of criticism. Allow me to elaborate before jumping on my case.

A self-propagating categorisation is as it describes -- one may demonstrate the qualities that might be thought of to be in a specific category X, and when told of the categorisation, it acts as a form of suggestion. Most people are quite suggestible, related to the fact that most people are unwilling to use their reasoning powers if they can do so, and this suggestibility is what causes that categorisation to be perpetuated throughout the life time of the person involved. And this in term helps propagate silly stereotypes -- ``once a thief, always a thief'', ``all X people have the Y behaviour''. This is one reason we have idiots.

Using a categorisation as a bulwark is more subtle and definitely more insidious than the first reason that I proposed. The subtlety comes from the empathetic factor that the self-identification of the categorisation is supposed to elicit -- telling someone that ``I am introverted''/``I am autistic'' evokes certain senses of emotions in most people. It is subtle because short of doing a diagnosis, no one can truly verify if the categorisation is true. The insidious aspect of this is when people learn from the empathetic responses and leverage on it to just be an overall jerk. ``I am introverted'' gets translated to ``well pardon me for treating you with the cold shoulder -- you know I don't like to use up my energy to communicate with people'', while ``I am autistic'' gets translated to ``sorry for being an overall jerk who speaks loud, speaks using my own lingo, and have a general lack of common sense''. A less petty example would be the use of the ``insanity defense'' for people who actually have pre-meditation.

Why rant about this? Annoyance. Just because you self-identify that you are of category X is no excuse that the rest of the world has to figure out how to deal with you. I've seen a few of those ``info-graphics'' where they write about ``How to live with X''. In the entire info-graphic, all I am hearing is basically me, me and me -- how to do things that will please me and only me. It sounds as though being in category X provides the mandate for stagnation, that one who is in category X will not find the middle ground, and anyone who wants to deal needs to do it on one's terms.

I call bullshit on that.

This is the exact same reason why there are many times when I get mad at the whole institution of marriage and the way some women carry themselves. But that is reserved for a special rant some other time. I think I have written enough on what I wanted. Till the next update.