Labels are a means that accidentally become an end.

It takes time for an observer to absorb nuance.

Continuously varying phenomena are a kind of (one-dimensional) nuance.

We'd love to be able to understand each thing we interact with--each person, each living thing, each object--as its own, fractally nuanced thing.

But we don't have time; we have to interact with too many things, and the number of things we have to interact with has exploded in the modern age.

So we create discrete buckets and then we put the real things into those buckets.

The buckets might also be called labels--it's a replacement concept for the real thing.

People start off with labels because they're extremely useful. But then we over-rely on them.

The bucket is an illusion that we created for ourselves for convenience.

It obscures the underlying nuance, making a fractally wrinkled thing appear smooth, simple.

The bucket is a cage, preventing the nuance from escaping.

We don't just come up with buckets ourselves; others create buckets that we all coordinate around and use.

Morningstar Ratings.

Letter grades in academic contexts.

Perf designations in any company's perf process.

The more people that use a given bucket, the harder it is to avoid using the bucket.

But buckets can create misleading illusions.

Imagine a smoothly varying dimension, with object A infinitesimally below a bucket boundary and object B infinitesimally above the bucket boundary.

A and B get different bucket labels despite being practically identical.

We think of A and B as discontinuously different. We might assign different processes for each bucket, as though they are inherently different.

But the buckets are made up; they are a fiction.

What is real is what's in the bucket.

The bucket is what we all coordinate on with everyone.

So the bucket becomes the real thing, it goes from being a means to an end.