I quite like the general idea, but the metaphor seems a bit silly and simplistic. I mean, a semilattice is a nice enough structure and all, but it's far from obvious that this is the appropriate one. Why do every two elements have a unique least upper bound - why not more than one (as when you and I are part of the same class and same dorm, but neither the class nor dorm has a common subpart containing both of us) or less than one (as when we live in different places and have no links)? And why don't they have a greatest lower bound? In fact, his structures are I think lattices, and not just semilattices, though I didn't check.
And talking about the sets he talks about the beginning is fairly silly as well - why talk about the set of molecules, or whatever? It's really the sets of people he's talking about through most of it, so why not just focus on them to begin with?
But the author's right - we don't cluster in tree-like ways. It's not clear just what sorts of structures we do form though.
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hypostatization.
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Date: 2005-08-18 04:13 pm (UTC)And talking about the sets he talks about the beginning is fairly silly as well - why talk about the set of molecules, or whatever? It's really the sets of people he's talking about through most of it, so why not just focus on them to begin with?
But the author's right - we don't cluster in tree-like ways. It's not clear just what sorts of structures we do form though.