A good first post is supposed to explain the name of the Substack, give a little background on the author, and describe the kinds of topics that will be discussed in future posts, all to further the goal of convincing you, the potential reader, that it is worth spending your most valuable currency on – that is, your attention.
I will tackle the first part today and call it good enough, leaving the rest to be revealed in future posts. But if you look closely, or perhaps a second time with hindsight, you might see that there are hints here about the other two.
The Intentional Taxonomist is a play on the title of what is probably the most famous book on business taxonomy ever published: The Accidental Taxonomist by Heather Hedden. While the set of “famous books on business taxonomy” is not large, it was a pleasant surprise to find that it also was not empty, as it gave me something to riff off of.
That said, I am as much an accidental taxonomist as Heather or any of the characters in her book, having stumbled into the business unwittingly and taken on the sobriquet somewhat reluctantly. (I’ll return to the story of how it became my nom du plume and playa name another time.) But, since intentionality is a concept I hold dear, I decided that it was best to accept that which I could not change, and to approach taxonomy with great intentions.
Some of you may have gotten this far, reading on a lark or as a favor to me, wondering what the heck taxonomy is and why on earth you might care about it or the ramblings of someone calling themselves, of all things, a taxonomist, no matter what his intentions. Wikipedia defines taxonomy as “the practice and science of categorization or classification” and a dryer, more boring definition could hardly be imagined. A more user-friendly definition might be “the art of lumping and splitting” and here the link is worth following.1
But still, if this Substack were actually about taxonomy and how to do it, you might be forgiven for closing the browser window with all due haste and never coming back. My brand consultant warned me that this was a risk when I proposed the title.
But that’s not what this is about. Or at least not directly. This Substack is about how I – and perhaps to some degree how we all – make sense of the world. Making sense of the world is a grand and perhaps futile endeavor, one that implicates such diverse topics as the nature of reality, space, time, physics, math, logic, games, deception, truth, beauty, perception, qualia, valence, consciousness, intelligence, rationality, self-reference, computation, chaos, uncertainty, music, harmony, language, narrative, metaphor, analogy, humor, memory, philosophy, epistemology, semiotics, and, yes, taxonomy.
To me, these are all compelling and important topics in their own right. But if you are still not convinced and worry that it may be too dry and academic to be enjoyable, this Substack is also about drugs – mind-altering, psychotropic, entheogenic drugs and what they can teach us about how to make sense of the world. Occasionally, we may also find ourselves discussing love, sex, happiness, pain, suffering, awe, wonder, meaning and emptiness.
A theme of what I’ll write is that making sense of the world is important because it is a prerequisite for living a meaningful life with purpose. Exactly how much sense must be made of the world is up for debate, but it is clear (to me at least) that some sense must be made for us to find meaning, for our beliefs to be credible, for our goals to be aligned with our values, for our curiosity to be satisfied, and for our time here to be well spent.
So I hope you’ll come along with me – and I hope I’ll muster the necessary perseverance to stick with writing it – as I try to make sense of making sense of the world. I’m not sure where it will lead, but as usual that should be half the fun.
Let the lumping and splitting begin!
It might be unsurprising that I think this is best comic ever drawn and may be one of the funniest things ever written. It has everything: taxonomy, self-reference, meta relations, word play, and a good punch line. And the allusion to Tolstoy in the mouseover is just icing on the cake.
(I’ll return to the story of how it became my nom du plume and playa name another time.) -- this sounds like something i want to hear more about !