> it's just one side is ignorant of the distinctions being made.
> No, Lumper-vs-Splitter doesn't simply boil down to plain ignorance.
If I can boil it down to my own interpretation: when this argument occurs, both sides usually know exactly what each other are talking about, but one side is demanding that the distinction being drawn should not be important, while the other side is saying that it is important to them.
To me, it's "Lumpers" demanding that everyone share their value system, and "Splitters" saying that if you remove this terminology, you will make it more difficult to talk about the things that I want to talk about. My judgement about it all is that "Lumpers" are usually intentionally trying to make it more difficult to talk about things that they don't like or want to suppress, but pretending that they aren't as a rhetorical deceit.
All terminology that makes a useful distinction is helpful. Any distinction that people use is useful. "Lumpers" are demanding that people not find a particular distinction useful.
Your "apparent L's" are almost always feigning misunderstanding. It's the "why do you care?" argument, which is almost always coming from somebody who really, really cares and has had this same pretend argument with everybody who uses the word they don't like.
I mean, I agree. I think most L's are either engaged in a rhetorical performance of the kind you describe, or theyire averse to cognitive effort, or ignorant in the literal sense.
There are a small number of highly technical cases where an L vs S debate makes sense, biological categorisation being one of them. But mostly, it's an illusion of disagreement.
Of course, the pathological-S case is a person inviting distinctions which are contextually inappropriate ("this isnt just an embedding vector, it's a 1580-dim! EV!"). So there can be S-type pathologies, but i think those are rarer and mostly people roll their eyes rather than mistake it as an actual "position".
> No, Lumper-vs-Splitter doesn't simply boil down to plain ignorance.
If I can boil it down to my own interpretation: when this argument occurs, both sides usually know exactly what each other are talking about, but one side is demanding that the distinction being drawn should not be important, while the other side is saying that it is important to them.
To me, it's "Lumpers" demanding that everyone share their value system, and "Splitters" saying that if you remove this terminology, you will make it more difficult to talk about the things that I want to talk about. My judgement about it all is that "Lumpers" are usually intentionally trying to make it more difficult to talk about things that they don't like or want to suppress, but pretending that they aren't as a rhetorical deceit.
All terminology that makes a useful distinction is helpful. Any distinction that people use is useful. "Lumpers" are demanding that people not find a particular distinction useful.
Your "apparent L's" are almost always feigning misunderstanding. It's the "why do you care?" argument, which is almost always coming from somebody who really, really cares and has had this same pretend argument with everybody who uses the word they don't like.