
Lumpers and Splitters - philangist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters
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kazinator
People tend to be splitters w.r.t. shit they care a lot about, and lumpers
about everything else.

E.g. "all red wine tastes the same to me, but differently branded 12AX7 vacuum
tubes sound totally different".

"These three Lisp dialects are totally different languages, but everything
else is an amorphous Blub."

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pierrec
I think we might further define two types of lumper-splitter divides:
analytical, and operational. This article explicitly restricts itself to
analytical issues, though I'd say it strays into operational territory in the
"software modeling" section (since it refers to models made with the intention
of immediately implementing them).

The most obvious examples of operational lumper/splitter problems occur in
geopolitics. I'm something of an operational lumper myself, and would love to
have been born in a time when one could claim to be a world citizen. Not gonna
happen anytime soon, though.

However, it appears that I'm an analytical splitter.

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whistlerbrk
Relevant, Prickles and Goo (animated by Matt Stone & Trey Parker, recording of
Alan Watts):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXi_ldNRNtM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXi_ldNRNtM)

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jessaustin
Apparently a lumper wrote TFA, while splitters wrote the equivalent meta-
pages:

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mergism](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mergism)

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Separatism](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Separatism)

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kazinator
As a lumper, I'd like to relate this somehow to the "lumped element" model
view of a system (e.g. circuit with discrete components connected by ideal
wires) versus the "distributed" model. The splitters will chew me out on this,
though, I'm afraid; the analogy cannot hold because of the differences.

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zachrose
Isn't splitting just a way to make distinct lumps within something?

Maybe that makes me a superlumper.

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kazinator
Me, I'm just a member of this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat)

Of no use to the revolution. :)

