Sunday 20 June 2010

Making lists: sorting out eggs in different baskets


The theory

A commenter on the popular post on feelings was quite pleased with the classification of feelings, and other readers seem quite fond of my habit of classifying and sorting things into lists (for other recent examples, see What's in a link? and the terribly listy Different kinds of motives ). And some have asked: "How do you do it?"

The easy answer is: a lot of the time, I don't do it. Please don't think that the content of this blog is all original material! It's a mixture of things I've read elsewhere and my own musings. I should probably link to the sites where I get my ideas from, except that a lot of the time I don't remember. And I often bolt together the ideas of several different people with my own, and post the Frankenstein monster. I don't know what is the politically correct way of presenting that, so I just don't bother.

Still, I sometimes come up with my own classification of something or other (none of the examples above, I'm afraid). Sorting things is a very powerful way of thinking and I'm surprised that how to do it isn't usually taught at schools.


You can classify anything in three easy steps:

1. Write down all the types of that thing you can think about. Let's say you want to classify eggs. You could write down something like: big eggs, small eggs, brown eggs, white eggs, chicken eggs, duck eggs. Most people leave it at this step, and that's why they aren't very good at sorting things out.

2. Ask yourself: Are the categories overlapping? Are some categories included in others? In the eggs example, you could think: "Well, duck eggs are always bigger than chicken eggs. Do I care about the size more or less than I care about the bird? Hmmm, I think what I really care about is the bird. Maybe I shouldn't be talking about big and small eggs at all, and just classify depending on bird." Then you could look at the white and brown eggs and think: "Hmmm, both ducks and hens can have eggs of different colours. Do I care about the colour more or less than I care about the bird? Do I care about the colour at all? Hey, I think I do care about the colour, but I care about the bird more." After you've thought this, you will have a nested list like this:

a. Chicken eggs
a1. Brown chicken eggs
a2. White chicken eggs
b. Duck eggs
b1. Blue duck eggs
b2. White duck eggs

If you do this, you will have a decent classification, but it will leave things out, and that's why you need the next step.

3. Ask yourself: Have I covered all the possibilities? In the eggs example, when you ask yourself that question you'll realise you've opened a whole can of worms! How many different birds are there? At this point, you'll probably want to find some way of restricting the possibilities. Do you care about all eggs of all birds, or just the ones that you have seen sold in the market? Do you care about any possible colour an egg can be, or just the ones you've seen? To make the example easier, let's say you only care about eggs that you've seen sold in the market. Your market may look different to mine, but here is my classification:

a. Chicken eggs
a1. Brown chicken eggs
a2. White chicken eggs
a3. Spotted chicken eggs
b. Duck eggs
a1. Blue duck eggs
a2. White duck eggs
c. Quail eggs - spotted

Classifying gives you the key to solve many problems, that's why so many people love it! But, like any way of thinking, it gives you something but it also takes something away from you. Once you have all your eggs sorted in baskets, you'll find it hard to think about them in any different way.

There's a story about classifying that I love: An anthropologist went to a tribe to do tests on how "primitive thinking" is different from "civilized thinking". He showed the elders of the tribe a heap of several types of their common food and several tools they used to grow food, and he asked them to put them in groups. The elders put each food next to the tool used to grow it. The anthropologist very happily started making notes on how primitive thinking couldn't separate tools from food. Then one of the elders explained: "This is how a wise man would group them." The anthropologist, with a twinge of suspicion, asked: "How would a fool group them?" The elders promptly put all the food on one side, all the tools on the other.

The practice

Experiment 1

Go to the nearest patch of wildlife to your home and start classifying wild flowers. The result of this experiment is more interesting the less you actually know about different types of flowers. Never mind if you don't know the names for all the flowers, invent names for the ones you don't know.

Once you've done this, get a book on wild flowers, identify the flowers you didn't know before, and compare your classification with the one in the book. Which one do you think is better? (Hint: if you think yours is better than the one that generations of experts have found, your ego may need a bit of resizing. Then, you might have found a particularly bad book.) What does the book take into account that you didn't?

Experiment 2

This is quite a useful thing to do with any problem you have, when you can think of many (more than three) possible solutions and you can't make up your mind which one is the best one. Classify the solutions! Classifying solutions can make decisions a lot easier, because one or several of these things may happen:
  • You realise that several of the possible solutions are actually quite similar, and you don't need to decide straight away which of them to choose, you can pick this path and make the final decision later.
  • You realise there is an overlap between some of the solutions, and you can pick two of the solutions at once.
  • You realise you haven't considered all the possibilities, and one of the possibilities you didn't think of before is in fact what you'd prefer.
Give it a try the next time you have one of those problems!

2 comments:

  1. Doly, I think you should make more of an effort to connect the dots between some of these topics and "ecological transition" if you get my drift. You just seem to be going off on too far of a tangent with some of this stuff. I mean, it's kind of cool in a Deepak Chopra way, but I have a hard time seeing the connection.

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  2. Actually I think this is a good way of making us think about how we currently classify sustainability issues. For example, how useful is it to classify carbon emissions separately from pollution? Now we have a multi-million pound industry emerging to manage carbon emissions with money for other pollution related problems being sought after separately. But carbon emission is just one type of pollution. So if we think about 'pollution' as a group of different types of substance emission, and consider the need to manage them in tandem, we would be developing a different set of solutions, than if we just try to address carbon emission on its own. So categorisation is really important for sustainability, I think.

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