I tend to be a big fan of pg's posts even his more controversial ones, but I must admit the use of four quadrant categorization turned me off here. It's not a problem with the idea he's trying to convey. It is valid, at least in some contexts. The issue here is more about lazy communication, sloppy emphasis, too coarse thinking.
Shoehorning concepts into quadrants is information theoretically very suboptimal, and usually has bad Bayesian fit from concept to reality. It's a visual trick often used in superficial business presentations that to be frank, is a bit of an insult to readers. It assumes they haven't already thought of the two simplest dimensions of the problem. It's probably a fine tool for early intros on simple subjects to newbies, but it's a bit condescending when used on more complex concepts with more sophisticated audiences. It ignores millennia of knowledge of the subtlety of language, taxonomies and ontologies that go way back at least to Aristotle's Categories.
Yet people jump to it really quickly. I had smart people pitch to me on two separate occasions, startup ideas that were specialized domain search engines where "get this, we would have two sliders that would allow people to get more results from one of these four quadrants". They thought they had found the best dimensions to categorize their domain's data and could beat much more flexible and expressive combinations of natural language keywords to zone in on things relevant to users' inquiries. It's a weird reflex.
Shoehorning concepts into quadrants is information theoretically very suboptimal, and usually has bad Bayesian fit from concept to reality. It's a visual trick often used in superficial business presentations that to be frank, is a bit of an insult to readers. It assumes they haven't already thought of the two simplest dimensions of the problem. It's probably a fine tool for early intros on simple subjects to newbies, but it's a bit condescending when used on more complex concepts with more sophisticated audiences. It ignores millennia of knowledge of the subtlety of language, taxonomies and ontologies that go way back at least to Aristotle's Categories.
Yet people jump to it really quickly. I had smart people pitch to me on two separate occasions, startup ideas that were specialized domain search engines where "get this, we would have two sliders that would allow people to get more results from one of these four quadrants". They thought they had found the best dimensions to categorize their domain's data and could beat much more flexible and expressive combinations of natural language keywords to zone in on things relevant to users' inquiries. It's a weird reflex.