It makes sense to me that particularly &#x27;salient&#x27; things get their own dedicated category, despite being a subset of some other category.<p>Consider racism. Most (or at least much) of the time it&#x27;s really just a more salient and specific version of the &#x27;in-group bias&#x27;. And I&#x27;d argue that on an academic level, researching and discussing it as the latter is vastly preferable to using the much more loaded concept of racism. But on a societal level it perhaps makes sense that we treat &#x27;racism&#x27; as a category in itself.<p>Personally I think discussing whether x is &#x27;just&#x27; a subset of y is less valuable than carefully delineating the contexts in which we use particular terms. For example, I wish that on a societal level we&#x27;d consider &#x27;innate&#x27; differences a bit of a taboo, but that on an academic level we could go wild researching, say, IQ differences of particular populations without it being coopted by politically motivated individuals.<p>I vaguely recall Steven Pinker (almost?) making that argument in The Blank Slate, and even though I&#x27;ve never read Anathem, I understand one theme is the idea of having academics locked up and doing research similar to orders of monks isolating themselves from the world.<p>At the risk of this becoming (even more of) a ramble, I can&#x27;t help but wonder what effect our increasing interconnectedness and the inability to do something in isolation has on all of this.