As humans we like to put things into categories. It makes communicating and thinking easier. Scratch that. It makes communicating and thinking possible. Categories go hand in hand with words as providing us with crucial compression of reality. Just like a 1:1 map is completely useless (it is the terrain itself), so would be a need to describe every detail of every person or object before being able to make a point. We would never get anywhere.
Not surprisingly then, categories are everywhere. For instance in venture we tend to put things into boxes such as “B2C” or “enterprise software.” Or in academia people study a discipline like “physics” or “chemistry.” The government classifies workers as “contractors” or “employees.” But here’s the tricky part: the world isn’t static and progress undoes categories.
The admonition to “think out of the box” when it comes to innovation is apt. Such thinking is both a source of progress and necessitated by progress. Here are just some examples. As we have deepened our understanding of what matter consists of, some of the historic boundaries between chemistry, physics and biology have stopped making sense. With computers dispatching labor we have erased many of the distinctions between contractors and employees. Self-service consumer grade software is taking over the enterprise market with product-led growth companies outperforming sales-led companies.
If you are trying to invent the new (or fund it), it helps to let go of existing boxes, instead of trying to jam innovative ideas into them. One of the reasons really disruptive startups often have a hard time raising money is because they often don’t fit an existing category. At USV we have benefited greatly from having a thesis-based rather than category-based approach for that reason.
People and institutions who derive their power from controlling one of the existing categories will fight progress that might undo the importance of the category. For example, in academia the chairs of existing departments resist the creation of “inter-disciplinary” degrees (a coinage that by itself is meant to appease the existing disciplines). They also resist the creation of new departments that represent categories that make more sense on a go forward basis. For example, Information Theory, despite its importance, tends to be spread out and shoehorned into math, economics and physics departments.
The bigger and more important the categories, the more vicious the fights to protect the status quo at all cost. And that is at the heart of the gender and sex wars we are now finding ourselves in. With progress we have started to understand that these categories don’t have the clear dividing lines we imagined – for example, the biology of sex in humans is far more complex than simply what chromosomes you have. And progress allows us to make profound changes, whether that’s hormone therapy, cosmetic surgery, or reproductive technologies. Even without these changes, technological progress has often rendered historic reasons for the category distinction mute. For example, soldiers used to rely on brute strength a lot, but that matters not one bit if you are remotely flying a drone.
The ultimate intervention here will be based on technologies such as CRISPR that allow us to manipulate the genome. It is only a question of time before athletes will show up crushing it in various sports who have been designed to be dominant at those sports (e.g. lung capacity for swimming). If you don’t think that will happen, I suggest reading up on the sordid history of “performance” sports programs anywhere in the world. Any edge that could be had has been exploited in the past and that won’t be any different going forward (especially when the interventions will be extremely hard to detect).
There are people and institutions who derive their power based on a clear distinction between the male and female categories today. They will fight progress all the way. That’s why change will be hard and take a long time. Categories everywhere persist far past their usefulness because of vested interests. Anyone interested in inventing the future instead of clinging to the past will need to overcome that. The work of establishing new categories is hard and success in doing so a huge accomplishment that moves all of us forward.
PS Someone asked me how we could have new categories in sports. To answer this it is important to recognize that we already have some sports that have a single field, such as dressage or ocean sailboat racing. It is equally important to note that other sports have categories in addition to sex, such as weight classes in boxing and wrestling. We simply need to be willing to experiment with categories in other sports as well. One approach could be to have classes based on direct measurement of a key attribute. For example, I love tennis. We now have the tools to measure the speed of balls at all times. Imagine tournaments based on speed classes. Slow, Medium, Fast. If you want to compete in a class you have to stay within the speed limit of that class. It’s just another rule, not really different from that you have to stand behind the baseline to serve. I believe we would have many more interesting matches with these categories than we have today!
