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How do you categorize things? Fisher Investments Press author Michael Hanson believes most never think much about it save for organizing their file cabinets once a year, but our categories say a lot about how we see the world and it's a fundamental activity of the sciences.
All sight is done through a lens of some kind. That's literally true (eyes, electronic or organic, all have lenses), and it’s also figuratively true. Brains have a natural tendency to create lenses to bring the world into focus by making categories. We are categorization machines, constantly looking for similarities and patterns to lump things together. Fisher Investments Press author Michael Hanson believes the kind of lens (or category) used, then, can make all the difference in how we see things. This gets treacherous because our minds want to create categories unconsciously—without our knowing. Bad categorizations cause big biases in investing and life generally.
Here's a fact: There is no such thing as a category in the natural world—humans make them up. A category is a not a thing, but a way of seeing things. That makes your choice of categories all the more imperative because categories are really more about interpreting the world than they are about seeing reality.
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