The mythology of category theory

Yesterday a friend and I had a conversation about category theory, how it can be a useful pattern description language, but also about how people have unrealistic expectations for it, believing category theory can deliver something for nothing.

Later I ran across the following post from Qiaochu Yuan. It felt as if he had overheard my conversation and summarized it in a tweet:

category theory is just some straightforwardly useful stuff for some purposes in some fields! you can elegantly simplify and streamline some proofs. then there is the mythology of category theory, which is some other thing entirely, mostly wishful thinking and projection afaict

His phrase the mythology of category theory" gives a name to this idea that category theory can deliver specific outputs without specific inputs. It helps to distinguish CT as a scrapbook of patterns from CT as sorcery.

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