me: *getting extremely Pissed Off about distinctions* my brain: well there are good distinctions and bad distinctions
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a good one is the distinction between plain weave and twill fabric: the method of construction at the micro level produces different effects at the macro level (visible diagonal pattern, better drape etc. - denim is twill for example)
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plus once you have the distinction "twill" you can see how it's used to build more complex patterns (the diagonal bits here are twill arrangements, varying which of the contrasting threads is emphasized in different parts of the leaves - I don't know who the artist is sorry)pic.twitter.com/lBULf9rZuF
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one that's making me mad is, within the nebulous concept of "social capital," the distinction between "bridging" and "bonding" capital
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"bonding" social capital means associations where similar people bond; "bridging" social capital means associations that bring different kinds of people together
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but in practice, almost every association does both, and which is emphasized may vary by the week. meanwhile, researchers confidently classify e.g. choirs as bridging capital, because supposedly only a shared love of music brings people to them, transcending e.g. social class
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but I think choirs in real life probably vary a lot in how much bridging vs. bonding they are doing. everybody is both similar to and different from everyone else, and it really depends on what you choose to emphasize - the clean-looking distinction gets grimy in messy reality
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maybe the goodness or badness is mainly in the use - to pick out parts of reality and make use of them, or to use them as an alibi for avoiding complexity
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this speaks to a general pattern where one way to analyze a thing is "is it X or is it Y?" and another way to analyze things is "no, that's BS, everything is some X and some Y". and I shrug and say "should we not analyze things as 'how much X and how much Y' ?"
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Replying to @MorlockP @literalbanana
I wonder if there's a baysian effect. People have a prior that it is not X or less X, but the probability/proportion that it is X is sufficiently high compared to the prior. That is, the prior that it is not X makes the amount that it is X seem more significant.
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