Comment by TheCoreh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheCoreh | Hacker News Reader

The obsession with taxonomy and categorization really ruins a lot of subjects in school. It kinda makes sense _why_ they are covered like this: It's really easy to “split” the syllabus into even chunks; it is a good fit for the memorization-based study techniques that are pervasive and it leads to a very “homogenous” learning experience regardless of the maturity and interests of each student.

My main problem with it is that it leads to very rigid thought structures devoid of curiosity or contextualization: The belief that the map is the terrain; that the universe is static, predetermined and discretely categorized under conveniently human terms; that scientific knowledge is either divined or standardized by a class of bureaucrats; that things are sorted over a “rank” of lesser to greater according to a direction towards objective progress.

It also generally sucks out a lot of the “fun” of learning about the world (though I understand sometimes taxonomy/categorization _can_ be fun in its own right).

As an example, grammar only really “clicked” with me when I was already in college: I was finally able to see it outside of the “prescriptive memorization hell” that I was subjected to in school, and instead perceive it under descriptive terms of Computer Science.

It seems that taxonomy is what you would like to learn only after the subject piqued your interest, in my experience, looking back at early school years. Prior to gaining interest, it felt like such a drudgery. After that, however, it’s like an map to navigate the subject matter. It becomes fun in itself, as you point out. I guess it’s a level of abstraction preferred by folks with expertise, but less so by beginners.

I agree. I know many who were driven away from appreciating biology due to its excess of nomenclature and memorization thereof. It's made worse because few terms reveal much depth of meaning about what it labels. Biology is made superficial because the language of the subject describes only surface, no depth.

That's not biology's fault. No language could hope to convey the full ‘personality’ of each character in a tale as rich and complex as unfolds in Lewis' “Life of a Cell”.

But maybe biology is ripe, now that we understand enough of its major 'characters' and their 'behaviors', for us to introduce more abstract models of biology using concepts and language that make for more intuitive players and their relationships. In this way, we might tell a more comprehensible and engaging narrative based on a much smaller set of reusable base models — the way that applied math expands on the concept of a computable function or the way electrical engineering builds on gaussian processes that model signals.

At the very least, I would LOVE for each chapter in a molecular bio textbook to be split into two parts — a short overview of the topic that follows with only the major components and activity described, and only then, to dive into the details. Seeing a city from high above it is an enormous help before trying to appreciate it on foot.

I sympathize, also being bad at and unhappy doing this kind of study. But to be fair to biology, its fundamental thing is the incredible variety of creatures in the world; their stunning diversity as well as similarities, family resemblances, and interactions.

> obsession with taxonomy and categorization

Virtues of the bored

> grammar only really “clicked” with me when I was already in college

For me, it was when I took Spanish in high school. I finally had a reason to know the parts of speech.

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