It’s tricky because it’s not about a single tree of categories. There are multiple types of relationships (A causes B, A build B, A manages B, A does something to B, A describes B, etc.) which form multiples hierarchies (a holarchy). This means that the space of concepts (objects/categories) is multidimensional, sort of around 10-dimensional (exact number is irrelevant, just to illustrate). As a result, people cannot perceive/imagine the holarchy (and there actually are overlapping and conflicting alternative holarchies) the way they can a category tree. They also can’t easily think about all the dimensions (since their number is bigger than the “magic number”). And there is also no way to really talk about this. System thinking, ontologies, etc. are not good enough at the moment.
What happens as a result is that you need people to spend decades building their own understanding of this world (essentially do something similar to what Chapman calls remodeling—https://metarationality.com/remodeling ). Example of LW understanding of this is in Rationalism before the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/?commentId=oZtsFc5oCMA9Zk5Tg , but I would argue that the LW and the rationalist community still hasn’t integrated the existing thinking (all the threads) on the topic, including stuff that has been out since the 1960s. Which is an interesting problem/opportunity.
It’s tricky because it’s not about a single tree of categories. There are multiple types of relationships (A causes B, A build B, A manages B, A does something to B, A describes B, etc.) which form multiples hierarchies (a holarchy). This means that the space of concepts (objects/categories) is multidimensional, sort of around 10-dimensional (exact number is irrelevant, just to illustrate). As a result, people cannot perceive/imagine the holarchy (and there actually are overlapping and conflicting alternative holarchies) the way they can a category tree. They also can’t easily think about all the dimensions (since their number is bigger than the “magic number”). And there is also no way to really talk about this. System thinking, ontologies, etc. are not good enough at the moment.
What happens as a result is that you need people to spend decades building their own understanding of this world (essentially do something similar to what Chapman calls remodeling—https://metarationality.com/remodeling ). Example of LW understanding of this is in Rationalism before the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/?commentId=oZtsFc5oCMA9Zk5Tg , but I would argue that the LW and the rationalist community still hasn’t integrated the existing thinking (all the threads) on the topic, including stuff that has been out since the 1960s. Which is an interesting problem/opportunity.