 The oldest person in the world keeps dying. Sometimes he lives until he's 120 years old and then he dies and then he turns into a woman. And then she lives for a while and then she dies and then sometimes she'll turn back into a man. The oldest person in the world never stays dead. Now that might seem kind of silly and you probably suspect something fishy is going on here. That doesn't make much sense what I just said. However, it gets at a really deep point in philosophy that comes up all the time that I talk about frequently. Misunderstanding the relationship between abstract and concrete. It sounds like this particular semblance of words sounds like I'm referencing something. The oldest person in the world. It sounds like I'm referencing something concrete. However, when I talk about the oldest person in the world, I say things like the oldest person in the world keeps dying. What does that mean? Well, what it means is what the actual concrete referent of the oldest person in the world is. References a person and then that person dies which means somebody else becomes the oldest person in the world. Maybe it changes from male to female. And then that person goes on living for a bit and then that person is the oldest person in the world. And then that person dies and then the oldest person in the world applies to somebody else. Now that doesn't mean we're actually talking about the oldest person in the world transmogrifying into different genders and then being reincarnated. It's simply a label. It's an abstraction that we use to reference different things at different times. Can you imagine the imprecision of thinking about the world this way to think that we're talking about one person? The oldest person in the world is referencing one person. Now if you see the errors of that way of thinking, then I urge you use that lens to see where it comes up in other areas of thought, especially economics and politics where people misunderstand the label for the thing that the label is attached to. Let me give you an excellent example. How many times have you heard this phrase? The rich keep getting richer and the poor get poorer. Or they'll say things like the rate at which the rich get richer is increasing at a rate faster than the rate at which the poor get richer. And it sounds like, oh man, you have this upper class of people that are getting wealthy and the poor class just isn't getting as wealthy. It sounds like there's this struggle between the classes. You hear this all the time, especially in leftist rhetoric. But this is the same abstraction error, I call it. Because whenever you actually look at the data, when these people are talking about the rich getting richer and the poor not getting richer as quick as the richer getting richer, it's always they're talking about quartiles. They're not actually talking about individuals. They're talking about the top 20% of wage earners versus the bottom 25%, 20 or 25% of wage earners. Those are abstract categories. They're not actually individuals. When you analyze the data and you look at the storylines of individuals, what you find is you have individuals from the bottom quartile going all the way up to the top quartile and then falling in the middle and then going to the bottom and jumping around. Similarly, you have people from the top falling into the bottom quartile and they all jump around. There's all kinds of movement of actual individuals between all these quartiles. It's not just some aristocratic elite wealthy people that are somehow getting wealthy disconnected from everybody else in society. It appears that way because people are making abstraction errors. What's actually happening is there is some shred of truth to say that the top quartiles rate of income is increasing faster than the bottom quartiles. But that's only when we're dealing with averages and you're not actually tracking individuals. What matters when we're talking about politics or economics is the plight of individuals, not abstract groups that don't actually exist. It's one thing to say an aristocratic group is getting richer at a faster pace than the rest of society. That's what it sounds like when people are talking about it, but in reality that is not what's going on. It's the exact same error to think that the oldest person in the world keeps on dying. These are just two pronounced examples of what I call abstraction errors, but really you see them all over the place. It's not just in politics, it's also when people are talking about cultural phenomena, especially when they're talking about ethnic groups. They talk about ethnic groups as one abstract blob as if somehow white people or black people or some acting entity that you can somehow describe. Not realizing that when people are talking about those things they're talking about abstractions. What is abstract is not concrete. If you actually want to have careful analysis of anything you have to get through the abstractions to see what the label is attached to. You have to get through the abstractions to see the actual plight of the concrete individuals that you're talking about. This is why I see individualism in a very positive light. Not just politically because I like libertarian ideas, not just economically because I think it promotes economic well-being, but I think it's metaphysically accurate. An enormous amount of error is throughout the social sciences in treating groups of people as groups rather than as individual people. The last area in which you see this abstraction error that I'll just give you a little tidbit now is of course in mathematics. Imagine I say the set of all positive integers. Ooh, that sounds like I'm talking about something, doesn't it? One, two, three, four, five, and so on. Let's put all of those integers together into a set and let's say we can reference and meaningfully talk about the set of all positive integers. Well, I'm sorry to say modern mathematicians make claims like that all the time. They use language in that particular way and unfortunately they make abstraction errors. And though it seems kind of esoteric, it will become clearer and clearer just how pernicious these abstraction errors. It is not the case that there is such a thing as the set of all positive integers. It sounds like you're referencing something. It sounds like you're referencing something. We were talking about the top 20% or the oldest person in the world, but really when you dive into it there is no such thing. And if you develop a complex theory based on some properties of the set of all positive integers, you're going to make just as many errors as if you develop your theory based on the notion of the oldest person in the world is somehow an immortal being that dies and then still gets reincarnated.