What is category debt?

Category debt is a concept in personal epistemology: Lazy or inconsistent categorization creates a growing mess that eventually must be cleaned up.

Example: Your team's project tracker has a 'Status' field with values like 'Active,' 'In Progress,' 'Ongoing,' 'Started,' and 'WIP.' Five labels that mean the same thing, added by five different people over two years. Nobody cleaned it up because each addition took five seconds and 'everyone knows what it means.' Now you need to report how many projects are actually active. You can't. You have to manually audit 400 entries, interview the people who created them, and guess at intent. The five seconds saved each time have compounded into days of cleanup — plus every decision made using that corrupted data in the interim.

This concept is part of Phase 12 (Classification and Typing) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for classification and typing.