“ taxonomy is not automatically a great category for regular usage.”

This is great, and I love the specific example of trees as a failure to classify a large set into subsets.

Something that’s not exactly the same problem, but rhymes, is that of genre classification for content discovery. Consider Spotify playlists. There are millions of songs, and hundreds of classified genres. Genres are classified much like species/genus taxonomies— two songs share a genre if they share a common ancestor of music. Led Zeppelin and the Beatles are different, but they both derive from traditions of electric guitar which grew out of the blues which… and so on. So we say Led Zeppelin and the Beatles are the same genre, “Rock”. You can do this kind of classification in much greater detail to carve out new genres and subgenres.

However when it comes to utility and discovery, genres underperform. Despite being the same genre, there are few parties which shuffle between the melancholic “Yesterday” and the screaming “Ramble On”. People seek songs which are similar to others in strategy, NOT in tradition. As you said:

“tree is a strategy. Wood is a strategy. Fruit is a strategy. A fish is also a strategy”

Successful user created playlists on Spotify (ones which are public with lots of likes) tend NOT to use genre. The tend to be called something line “rainy tuesday drive home from work”, or “music school nerds playing ALL the notes”. Rather than carve out a subset using genre (a playlist is a subset of music), they define it by strategy.

A failure in taxonomy.

Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. It’s common to procrastinate on thinking hard about these things because it might require you to acknowledge that you were very wrong about something in the past, and perhaps wasted a bunch of time based on that (e.g. dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god).

I strongly disagree with this, for the reason that words are not reality. For most people, their relationships and their gods are load bearing for unarticulated reasons. arguments are going to outcompete your sacred pillars in the world of words and arguments. Challenging yourself to stare into the abyss (aka reduce your unarticulated beliefs) is more likely than not to conclude that your sacred beliefs are somehow wrong. in high dimensional space odds are that there is some suboptimal dimension.

• [Do nothing], and people will be able to get access to the critically necessary items, but it will be much harder and more expensive because there is low supply and high logistical difficulty.
• [Pass laws forbidding/punishing sharp price increases in times of trouble], and people won't be able to get anything at all, because someone erected an artificial barrier to trade.

This is a false dichotomy, evidenced by the fact that presently in the US we have laws against price gouging,  AND people are generally able to access critical items in times of emergency. 

You're right to say that a law which defines price gouging in a rational, unambiguous way is inevitably going to fail.  You can't expect strict price ceilings, price increase percentages, etc to work.  There are too many edge cases-- what if prices really do increase that much, what if it's not adjusted for inflation over time, etc. It's the same as the pornography problem: how do you define the thing you wish to ban?

But: just because you can't rigorously define an abstract evil doesn't mean you can't ban it. "I know it when I see it" is a perfectly suitable solution for banning antisocial vices. 

Moreover, it's important for bad things to be explicitly declared bad.  The oversimplified, mimetic version of Option A is "price gouging is allowed".  You can argue that there's no difference between banning it or not (which i disagree with), but even if there is no difference, there is a negative consequence to a widespread belief that "X (vice) is encouraged by society".

Instead of flatly offloading responsibility the "throw me out whenever" way, invite the other person to discuss the modalities of the question together, by e.g. raising the question of when you should leave and then figuring out together what factors this depends on and how you want to make that decision

This fails the sniff test of "bad moods as a fragility test for social norms".  You critique Ask Culture for responsibility offloading, but ignore its upside-- much greater computational kindness than "inviting the other person to discuss the modalities of the question together". The primary characteristic of a bad mood (I'm using this term for "normal" bad moods like hungover, tired, caffeine crash) is lowered computational capacity.  

I wonder if Responsibility Offloading and Computational Kindness can be thought of as a position/velocity tradeoff; i.e, that one can not perfectly have the one without losing the other. 

People often act like this, and they tend to assume they're doing the other person a favor by being so open and flexible. After all, this way the other person will have to make no trade-offs and can spend their time exactly as they please. The problem with this however is that it's computationally unkind: it offloads all the effort

Computational kindness by this definition is equivalent to Emotional Labor, no?