Discovering Clay Shirky via Mr. Alan Cooper Quoting Him On the Perils of Categorizing Things In Advance

I keep wanting to refer back to this truly insightful tweet from Alan Cooper. Twitter is not a great place to keep things that will be useful for a long time. It can be grueling work to find a specific old tweet. As a result, here is the content of his tweet about the challenges of categorizing things in advance for documentation purposes:

“categorizing things in advance forces the categorizer to take on 2 jobs that are quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling.”

and here is a screenshot of the tweet as well:

Screen Shot 2014-03-30 at 10.34.43 AM

 Thank you Mr. Alan Cooper for this wonderful little statement. As a result of wanting to frequently bring this quote to people’s attention I wanted to post this on my site. And after assembling the above it occurred to me that HE had put this in quotes himself. I didn’t notice that before! This was apparently not an original thought of his own but something somebody else said that he was sharing.

Naturally, the next thing to do was to sick Google on the quote and see what popped up.

Maybe I’m not smart enough to be following Alan Cooper on Twitter since I totally missed that the above tweet was quoting Mr. Clay Shirky from some talks that he gave in 2005 collectively titled, “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags”. I am guessing these “talks” are well known in certain circles.

I wanted to share this little revelation about discovering the work of Clay Shirky. This is how I have learned throughout my whole life. This is how I know what I know. Looks like I have some reading to do!

Follow these guys on Twitter: @MrAlanCooper and @CShirky

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