Agreeing to a common yardstick for measuring the important stuff in any domain necessarily privileges the items that score high on that metric, regardless of those items’ overall suitability. IQ tests privilege people who are good at IQ tests, Nielsen Ratings privilege 30-and 60-minute TV shows (which is why MTV doesn’t show videos any more — Nielsen couldn’t generate ratings for three-minute mini-programs, and so MTV couldn’t demonstrate the value of advertising on its network), raw megahertz scores privilege Intel’s CISC chips over Motorola’s RISC chips.
Ranking axes are mutually exclusive: software that scores high for security scores low for convenience, desserts that score high for decadence score low for healthiness. Every player in a metadata standards body wants to emphasize their high-scoring axes and de-emphasize (or, if possible, ignore altogether) their low-scoring axes.
It’s wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable.
2.7 There’s more than one way to describe something
“No, I’m not watching cartoons! It’s cultural anthropology.”
“This isn’t smut, it’s art.”
“It’s not a bald spot, it’s a solar panel for a sex-machine.”
Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something. Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas.
And that’s just not right.