What does it mean that classification reveals what you value?

How you sort things shows what dimensions matter to you.

Example: Two engineers classify the same codebase incident. One files it under 'availability' because uptime is the metric their team is measured on. The other files it under 'developer experience' because they believe the root cause was a confusing deployment process. Same event, different categories — and the difference tells you exactly what each person has been trained to care about. The category isn't describing the incident. It's describing the classifier.

Try this: Pick a system you use to organize something — your notes app, your email folders, your bookmarks, your task board. List every top-level category. Now ask: what is absent? What dimension of reality has no folder, no tag, no label? The things you never created categories for are the things your system has been silently telling you don't matter. Write down three missing categories and ask whether that absence is a deliberate choice or an inherited blind spot.