Here's the new quotes thread.
Rules:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
I am sure that this quote indicates that categorizing options too far is detrimental. The Sequence on Reductionism's summary states 'complicated things are made of simpler things' but categorizing all the simple things together despite their belonging to separate complicated things should indicate a fallacy. It also indicates that the entirety of the options available are not considered properly if they're grouped too much.
You can go too far with that though. Separating categories is only useful insofar as we care about the differences between them. If you don't want to get shot and don't care why you're being shot, then there's not much sense in separating options that lead directly to that outcome.
Obviously there are a lot more than 149 options. You could stick the barrel into your mouth, for instance, using either your left or right hand. But if you start counting this way it's obvious that these options are useless and a waste of brain space. A good decisionmaker needs not only to be aware of the options available to them, but to be able to dismiss the bad options with a minimum of wasted thought.