I might quit, if I ever found out what a Lumper was.

#15 | Posted by Zed at 2025-10-19 01:55 PM | Reply

He's referring to Darwin's letters to Hooker. Lumpers and Splitters.

Basically, he's dumbed it down as a way to dismiss people he doesn't agree with.

Which is, ironically, a lumper thing to do.

A later use can be found in the title of a 1969 paper "On lumpers and splitters ..." by the medical geneticist Victor McKusick.[4]

Reference to lumpers and splitters in the humanities appeared in a debate in 1975 between J. H. Hexter and Christopher Hill, in the Times Literary Supplement. It followed from Hexter's detailed review of Hill's book Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England, in which Hill developed Max Weber's argument that the rise of capitalism was facilitated by Calvinist Puritanism. Hexter objected to Hill's "mining" of sources to find evidence that supported his theories. Hexter argued that Hill plucked quotations from sources in a way that distorted their meaning. Hexter explained this as a mental habit that he called "lumping". According to him, "lumpers" rejected differences and chose to emphasise similarities. Any evidence that did not fit their arguments was ignored as aberrant. Splitters, by contrast, emphasised differences, and resisted simple schemes. While lumpers consistently tried to create coherent patterns, splitters preferred incoherent complexity

Oneironut is essentially accusing everyone to the left of him seeing patterns that don't exist, while his brilliant ass sees a complex universe.

From a guy that gets 99% of his news and thoughts from twitter...