Systems thinking significantly engages your ontological skills and, first of all, the "Type Engine" which should already be properly running in your head by the time you take this course. Let's say you've been told the following: "Being a leader is a role. What is the role of a leader?" If you don't have a type engine in your head, you'll start making up something ordinary about a leader such as “leaders lead people, they should be role models for other people”; whereas, if you have a type engine, you should be confused. Upon hearing that "Being a leader is a role", you label the leader with the type "role". Then the next sentence actually asks, "What is the role of a role?" because if a leader is marked in your mind as a role, then you keep it in mind and check it for type-matching in the second phrase. The question "What is the role of a role?" should come as a stress, because it makes little sense. Built into your head, the type engine reveals all the absurdities in the text.
On average, the type engine works in the heads of about 10% of people with higher education. We are not sure why the number is so small. What does it take to make it work reliably? There are various hypotheses; one of them is reading a large amount of non-fiction, which requires keeping long chains of reasoning in your head.
What is the idea behind the type engine? The brain supports working with different theories of concepts. One of the simplest theories that makes heavy use of Kahneman's fast S1 thinking is the theory of prototypes, when we imagine some prototype for each object, and then proceed by analogy. In this theory of concepts, all thinking is a continuous processing of metaphors, a search for similarities.
The other theory of concepts is considerably more complex, it’s the theory theory74, where typified/classified concepts are interconnected by relations (which can also be expressed in terms of concepts). It corresponds to slow S2 thinking, formal thinking, and logical constructions. Texts like "The sepulka (a.k.a. scrupt) is a beast. Does a sepulka have a spine?" are analyzed by this very mechanism of thinking. If you know that the beasts have a spine, then labeling the sepulka with the "beast" type is enough to figure out that “Yes, the sepulka has a spine”. If in your mind you didn't label the sepulka with a type, or if you simply didn't keep the sepulka’s type in your mind until the second phrase in this short text, you will be at a loss — how can you answer a question about the presence or absence of a spine in an absolutely unknown object?!