We like to put things in categories: public versus private company; for profit versus charity; professional versus amateur; creator versus consumer; journalist versus blogger; teacher versus student; and so much more. Of course not all categorizations are binary. In academia, for instance, we have the faculties (e.g., chemistry, biology, physics) and degrees (Bachelor, Master, Doctor). 

Categories are a way of aggregating information. If I tell you that a company is public that is a shorthand for communicating a lot of information about the company such that it is likely to have audited financials, file quarterly reports, shares that are traded on an exchange, and so on. At a time when communicating information was costly it made a lot of sense to organize the world around categories. 

Now, however, with the marginal costs of computation and communication nearly zero, we can reveal the underlying information and replace categories with continuums. For instance, companies can publish as much or as little of their financials and operating data as they want. Third parties can then publish scores on the basis of that information, including a transparency score, which replaces the previous binary breakdown between public and private companies. 

Similarly instead of using thee-tiered academic degrees as categories for how much someone has (supposedly) learned, we can publish our papers, analyses, projects, test results etc. That again allows for third parties to evaluate how much knowledge or mastery of a particular subject we have achieved on a fine grained scale.

Because we as humans still need to process and store some of this information in our heads we may super-impose existing or new categories on these scores. For instance, we might call someone a novice or an expert. But the more information is ultimately accessible the less these categories will be used by themselves for decision making.

As an important corollary we should rethink a lot of regulation to move away from categories established and maintained by regulators and towards standards of information publication. If we did this right it would let us get rid of the often arbitrary distinctions that exist today and result in many distortions. This would have the added benefit of vastly simplifying regulation.

We like to put things in categories: public versus private company; for profit versus charity; professional versus amateur; creator versus consumer; journalist versus blogger; teacher versus student; and so much more. Of course not all categorizations are binary. In academia, for instance, we have the faculties (e.g., chemistry, biology, physics) and degrees (Bachelor, Master, Doctor). 

Categories are a way of aggregating information. If I tell you that a company is public that is a shorthand for communicating a lot of information about the company such that it is likely to have audited financials, file quarterly reports, shares that are traded on an exchange, and so on. At a time when communicating information was costly it made a lot of sense to organize the world around categories. 

Now, however, with the marginal costs of computation and communication nearly zero, we can reveal the underlying information and replace categories with continuums. For instance, companies can publish as much or as little of their financials and operating data as they want. Third parties can then publish scores on the basis of that information, including a transparency score, which replaces the previous binary breakdown between public and private companies. 

Similarly instead of using thee-tiered academic degrees as categories for how much someone has (supposedly) learned, we can publish our papers, analyses, projects, test results etc. That again allows for third parties to evaluate how much knowledge or mastery of a particular subject we have achieved on a fine grained scale.

Because we as humans still need to process and store some of this information in our heads we may super-impose existing or new categories on these scores. For instance, we might call someone a novice or an expert. But the more information is ultimately accessible the less these categories will be used by themselves for decision making.

As an important corollary we should rethink a lot of regulation to move away from categories established and maintained by regulators and towards standards of information publication. If we did this right it would let us get rid of the often arbitrary distinctions that exist today and result in many distortions. This would have the added benefit of vastly simplifying regulation.