Lexicon

I have alot of terms or phrases I use often that I don’t much see in common circulation. For some, the meaning is clear from the phrase, others are tied up in personal anecdotes or otherwise have an opaque meaning, so I thought I’d put them into a list to make for easy reference for others. This will grow over time as I invent more or identify the ones I use as being uncommon.

• The Adam Connover Problem, or Connover Paralysis: Learning new information that should change your behaviour but doesn’t because of some other force of social psychology such as tribalism or tradition. An unwillingness to adjust habit to accommodate new understanding, which is a form of functional ignorance. Named for a production interview w/ Adam Connover of Adam Ruins Everything, where he admits to still buying a diamond engagement ring despite knowing both the custom and the entire industry to be scams.

• Aesthetic Persona: Character design as characterization, physiognomy. Atmosphere, but for a person instead of a place. The combination of style, attire, expressions, movement, etc especially where evocative or consistent. From this ancient and unlist’d Digibro video.

• Affirmative desire: The question “do you want [object or activity]” could be read 2 ways: as an offer for the thing, or as a query about whether your feelings are non-neutral. If you instead ask if they have an affirmative desire, you’re excluding neutral feelings from “yes”.

• The Aine Snapback: You give people alot of leeway, forgive personality problems, and make a stack of exceptions for them that builds up unreasonably high, then when they leave your life you come to your senses and it becomes suddenly apparent how many things you were choosing to overlook. The resulting snarl and how it alters your opinion is the Aine Snapback ^{pronounced Anya} named for someone we used to know that was a particularly clear example upon the parting of our company.

• African Orphan Fallacy: An appeal to worse problems, but with a more evocative name. Used to call out arguments of the form “you shouldn’t complain about [thing] because others have it worse” as though that some how negates that what you’re complaining about is a problem. Also applies to the inverse, that you shouldn’t be happy because others have it better.

• Authoritarian ratchet: Arguments for safety real or imaginary are easy to make and are taken seriously, arguments for freedom or fun are easily dismiss’d. Rules and restrictions pile up, and it’s a one-way street because think of the children. This mechanism is human psychology for always and only increasing constriction and reducing freedom is the Authoritarian Ratchet. It’s been a know force for a long time, but the catchy name was inspired by this Hello Internet episode.

• Automation Crash: The future decline when human labour is even more worthless than it currently is, and humans become unemployable but there’s no change in social structure ^{like Universal Basic Income} to support the newly redundant. Probably not an abrupt event, but I predict there will be an enormous gap between when most jobs cease to exist and when a new economic system replaces it.

• Belief in magic: A special category of superstition: the belief in the entanglement of events without a line of action between them. If you think that [team] lost because you didn’t cheer for them, you believe in magic. I couldn’t find my original source for this idea, but here’s a related link. Note that my old research isn’t something I include in this because there is a mechanism for it, though not one that’s part of the Standard Framework.

• The Blur: In school you have an intensely striated view of age. Every school year is a different bracket to you. Once you get out, the way you think about your own age bracket opens up considerably, and this opening is the blur. If you’re homeschool’d or particularly socially open, you’re drastically more likely to be in the blur at all times.

• Bradying: As an argument gets repeat’d, the argument is reduced to its simplest and usually most inflammatory form. A special class of straw man argument, usually this is not out of malice nor a lack of understanding but merely the meandering path of rephrasings. If many revisits or a particularly long conversation has lead you to discussing an argument other than my original, you’re Bradying me. Doesn’t always have to be misrepresenting the argument to its originator, but is often the case and a clear example. Named for the frequent habit of Brady Harran when talking with CGP Grey on Hello Internet.

• Brain Cracking: The act of ruminating on an idea, hyping it up in your mind until your internal construct reaches an impossible pedestal. From Ze Frank’s The Show.

• Brain Hacks: Any of a series of exploits in psychology ^{especially where biologically motivated} that manipulate thought or behaviour, often circumventing rationality via shortcuts. Fallacies, marketing tactics, hormone manipulation tricks, etc. By far the most evil of these is tribalism, which usually takes the form of post-hoc reasoning to justify an existing behaviour because action begets belief, or to derive ideology from a group, class, or trait.

• Breakup Letter: A letter, note, or journal entry etc you write to yourself with a description of why you swore off of someone or something with the intent to look at it if you waver in your resolve or otherwise reconsider, often including events, attributes, conflicts, or your mental & emotional state. A good counter to the McRib Conspiracy. Taken from the show How I Met Your Mother.

• Chaotic: Operates by an order that’s difficult to understand or follow, often where tiny variations cascade into massive changes in output such as in a hash function or a double pendulum. Many fractals are chaotic.

• Chasing the Dragon: Whether for power or curiosity, I’ve known several people in my explorations of the Wider World that were given to taking risk after risk in the consuming quest for what they sought until they got lost off the edge of the map or the consequences caught up to them in other ways. There are several experiments I avoid in such fields because I could meet the same fate, but I feel the call towards nonetheless. Named for heroin addiction and a metaphor I made once to a lost friend: “You’d do heroin if you thought it might give you teleportation powers.”

• Chemical Inertia: The cause to an emotion is resolved or the situation has otherwise changed so that it no longer applies, but the feeling persists anyway because the brain chemicals of that emotion are still in your system.

• Condorset Death Spiral aka Rock-Paper-Scissors Suicide Pact: You prefer A over B, B over C, but C over A, or some other non-transitive arrangement like a penrose triangle or Escher Stairs. Often comes up in a condorset sort/vote or games with a non-transitive relation between moves/factions. Consider what happens in a 3 player game of Rock Paper Scissors if each player chooses a different throw.

• Consequence Matrix: The model for an argument I make occasionally, a relative of Pascal’s Wager, originally given to me as reason to act on global warming. In that case, you can choose to act or do nothing, and global warming is either real or not. If you act and you’re right to, you saved the day. If you act and you didn’t have to, the only consequence is a waste of effort. If you don’t act and don’t need to, no problem. If you don’t act but you should have, everyone dies. Like Pascal’s Wager it relies on an appeal to consequences, but that doesn’t make it worthless. It’s best use is as a tool for considering the safest action when you don’t have enough information to do better, or where the actual truth is unknowable until you take the action. Lately I use it less because the list of possible outcomes is finitely useful when not temper’d by the weight of probabilities. If you aren’t already in the habit though, it’s worth keeping in mind.

• Contingency deadlock: Both parties in an argument have perfectly valid lines of reasoning and have sources to back up their claims. Both parties are in an unresolvable situation until the sources are properly vet’d, and who wins is contingent upon the actual truth. While a contradiction must be false and a tautology must be true, a statement is contingent if its truth value depends on whether it matches the real world.

• Conversion by Redefinition: Including something or someone under a label by clarifying what the label means so as to include that thing. f.x Racists that insist they aren’t racist can be shown that they are by getting them to agree to a definition that includes them.

• Complex vs complicated: Complicated things have many parts, complex things have many relations or interactions. Complexity is usually an emergent property of a few simple parts or rules that interact to produce patterns or structure. A swiss army knife is complicated, a termite mound is complex. Chaotic systems have complex function and produce what looks like complicated results.

• Common Realm, or Punchosphere: What most people mean when they say “universe”. ^{See Universe below.} The space full of directly observable things. If there’s a “multiverse”, afterlife, etc then the common realm is the part of it you’re from. Also call’d the punchosphere as a take-off from platosphere: the place where the platonic forms and other abstractions are. If you can punch it, it’s in the punchosphere. “Realm” was the best substitute I could find for “universe”.

• Crack your knuckles: Took a while to find an equivalent phrase to “man up” without all the gendering and baggage that’s also evocative of the attitude of steeling your nerves and getting to work.

• Cuts like magic: So sharp that it separates things seemingly without mechanism. If it cuts like magic, you can touch the edge to something and that something simply becomes apart.

• Dark Science: An alternate scientific method of cavalier testing or discovery where rather than only trying to confirm a hypothesis it looks to draw patterns out of the results and then iterate tests on those ideas for confirmation. This is to contrast the strict structure and order of operations in the usual scientific method. Alternately, a proof with limit’d ability to share it such as reading someone’s thoughts by describing them to the subject. It’s definite proof, but not the sort that would be compelling to anyone outside of the direct experience. Stolen from Dresden Codak by Aaron Diaz several years before he actually explain’d what he meant by the term.

• Data Brain, or Databrain: My label for a cluster of attributes including the ability or tendency to fit loads of concepts into hierarchies, remember esoteric details & statistics, process lots of data at once, absorb sprawling lore, and keep track of the many interactions between many related elements in a field. Spoken of as a condition: “I have data brain”. I have a theory that its development is related to early exposure to things like Pokemon, mythologies including comics, or a sports fandom, all of which feature attributes that play to the strengths of databrain. Stolen from Digibro.

• Declarative Transparency: A policy of informing all involved parties of everything that refers to them or they could care about as soon as it happens or the thought occurs, rather than only what directly affects them or what they ask about. My prefer’d method of honesty, but typically only applied to people I care about. Can require a certain fortitude of civility to be told things without importing your old culture for how these things should be said or heard, yet I do think less of and treat differently anyone that elects out of receiving it. You’re only real friends if you can be fully open. Will probably be the subject of its own article at some point.

• Deity vs God: A god is a thing you worship, a deity is a powerful thing. Any object or person, real or fictional, can be a god if it is sufficiently revered. A deity is still a deity when no one knows of them. A pedantic distinction arrived at by the etymology of each word.

• Dialogue Hardmode: I’m a very eager conversational partner most of the time. I’m very willing to seek out an idea that challenges me, I clarify often what I’m thinking or feeling, and I clear up misconceptions where I see possibility for them to exist on both sides. This also extends to casual friendly conversation; I take a keen interest in others. If you’re talking to me and I don’t do most of the work by translating what you have to say and interrogating your idea, you’re playing on hardmode. In social situations, this means you need to know what the implications of your words are and how to account for them. In an argument this means you need a rocksolid line of reasoning, usually from first principles, or I’ll tear you apart. Normally I consider this unfair ^{like suddenly taking a flotation device away from a kid in the ocean} and I don’t want to give the impression I’m stubborn, so this is rare.

• Digital Umwelt: Regular umwelt is the idea that creatures with different senses occupy different perceptual worlds from one another. Digital Umwelt is the idea that seeing the same content through different means can be radically different experiences. You reading this sentence on a desktop computer probably has alot in common between browsers, but you could be reading it on WordPress or Reddit, my own handcoded site at some point in the future, with extensions like Reddit Enhancement Suite or Stylish, with an ad or script blocker, or with direct rich browsing such as opening this text in the Element Inspector and hot modding the text to be a different colour. That’s to say nothing of differences between devices or apps used to browse any of those, or the different places on the internet common to your own ecosystem. 2 commenters talking to one another may have drastically different Digital Umwelten, which occasionally shows artifacts in how you communicate. Did I write Umwelten because it looks german, or because I’m typing this on a Dvorak keyboard and the N & S keys are adjacent. Am I typing this on my phone where that makes sense as a possibility, or was I touchtyping?

• Dimension: I only ever mean this in the mathematical sense as some perpendicular factor, even in my fiction. f.x Music is 3 dimensional in that it has time, pitch, and volume. More generally I’ll refer to any arbitrary set of dimensions as a space, so any particular piece of music is a shape in music space. “Parallel dimension” is buzzword nonsense. When I have to refer to such a concept, I usually say world, place, or especially realm.

• Diplomancer’s Paradox: Sufficient speechcraft is functionally mindcontrol, and gives you total responsibility. If you can predict how your words will be received, then what you say and how will determine how others think and feel. At a sufficiently high skill level, anything you say or choose not to say violates free will. If you choose not to decide, you still have made the choice for someone else and therefor violated their free will.

• Discovery channel version: Taking a concept, boiling it down to an imperfect metaphor, then taking the metaphor as literally true and exploring the implications of those inaccuracies results in the Discover Channel version of something. Gravity is not a liquid, quarks don’t literally have colour, etc. The Discover Channel Version never clarifies that it’s speaking figuratively.

• Dyer’s Eve: Sheltering someone to “protect their innocence”, leaving them unprepared for life outside of that protection and thus causing great difficulty adjusting or even functioning. Often comes with spite for the “protectors” post-revelation for making the experience more difficult, traumatic, or painful. Named for the Metallica song that explores the same concept.

• Emotional Reasoning: Where motivated reasoning tries justifying an existing belief or services an external incentive, emotional reasoning gives authoritative weight to a feeling as though it were a premise in a line of thought or assumes that feeling to be justified and builds both conclusion and premises ^{usually in that order} to service that feeling. Popular examples are “scary things must be untrue”, “infuriating things must be true”, “[family member] would never lie”, or “desirable outcomes are therefore likely”.

• Eros & Thanatos: There are 2 basic categories of psychological drives, to go towards something good or away from something bad. Generally I use this as a litmus test to evaluate the healthfulness of a desire, where Eros is preferable to Thanatos. I use this phrase to gesture vaguely at the concept, inviting the listener or reader to apply the metric to the situation.

• The Fundamental Assumption of Science: Science is the study of the rules and measures which govern the external objectively existing universe. The Fundamental Assumption is that there is an external universe to be measured. A functional response to hard skepticism or solipsism, related to Pascal’s Wager.

• f.x: Abbreviation of “for example”. Always lower case, with the sentence understood to start after it as normal. f.x This sentence is a self-demonstrating example. Also written f.ex periodically.

• Going to Scarborough Fair: Getting an abortion. The herbs parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme named in the folk song Scarborough Fair are all abortifacients that induce menstruation ^{and ease cramps} if consumed in sufficient quantities, whether directly or in a tea.

• Groovy: The quality of music being nice to listen to without taking a deep read of it. I enjoy the sound of many popular songs that I also hate the substance of them ^{if you can even call it that} so much that I almost regret knowing english. Normally my first few listens of a song are just for grooving, and on subsequent listens I’ll richly analyze it.

• Get Action: Peak work; employing the desire or capacity to crack your knuckles and put the metal to work whether decision, determination, need, etc. Requires “get” in the phrase in some form as in “you got action” or “there’s someone that can get action”. Often used as a rallying cry. From the Digibro song of the same name.

• Get lost: To be given to a pursuit so completely that returning to “normal” life is discard’d as a concept. Usually seen in the context of Chasing the Dragon, especially “adventuring” in the Wider World’s outer reaches. Originally coin’d to describe lucid dreaming and how I suspect that if I ever became able to, I’d never want to return to waking.

• Grok: A full and complete understanding of something. If you read or hear a successful rigorous definition, you grok it. There’s also a shade of nuance to it as a verb of interacting with a meme: it pushes on your mind and augments your language, but any use or even the understanding of it by you also acts upon the meme to change it slightly. Grok is an old SciFi term from Stranger in a Strange Land that originally means to understand by empathy or intuition so completely that you become part of it and it you.

• Hard Senses / Soft Senses: Hard senses are always on, soft senses you must pay attention to in order to get perception from. Originally coin’d to refer to extra soul perception etc, can also refer to things like your awareness of your own clothes, or the feeling of the air pressure on your skin. You can become aware of it if you pay attention, but normally it gets filter’d out.

• Hammer Time: Abruptly setting aside time for meditation, even for a few seconds to accomplish something. At the time of this writing I’ve been using this for hunger suppression so that I can concentrate. Stopping everything for 3-5sec and focusing on my hunger, then minimizing it to prevent it from being a distraction generally lasts about 20-30 minutes each time.

• High vs low level: Conventionally the “level” here is the amount of training, knowledge, or expertise. A high level statement about something can exclude layfolk by its use of technical jargon or narrowly specified meanings. Alternately, the “level” is the number of abstractions on what is happening or being refer’d to. In that sense organic chemistry is a lower level discipline than psychology, and Python is higher level than Assembly.

• Homunculus Answer: A response to a question where the same or a similar question can be fairly ask’d again. This usually arises when asking for clarification from someone that doesn’t understand what information you’re after. f.x How do you go about [task]? “We’ll make a plan.” Which includes? “We list our goals and decide how we want to accomplish them.” By following what steps? etc. Where a homunculus argument for which this is named tries to explain something by using the phenomenon it’s trying to solve, a homunculus answer is a reframing of the initial conditions that lead to the question.

• Hookshot: In debate, You want to make a statement and the challenge to that statement is obvious yet tedious to defeat. Instead, start by preemptively raising and defeating the retort, then introducing your point. In conversation, discussing or explaining the required reading before introducing your real point or topic. Often a good hookshot is several layers deep before getting to the real subject, but makes the discussion proper much more effective and rewarding. I’ll often raise the subject that my question is in the neighborhood of rather than asking a trial balloon question ^{TVTropes link} directly, as it would be too obvious. Related to the guided discovery method of teaching, not related to The Legend of Zelda.

• Horseshoe of Politics: Any dichotomy whose extremes more closely resemble eachother than the “moderate” position. Named for the United States’ political climate.

• Inbetweener Problem: A system that has spans or tiers of functionality will often have problems at the edges. Whether it’s skill level, intellect, strength, etc there will often be jumps in functional requirement, and transitioning across those gaps can be very difficult. The Inbetweener Problem describes those gaps, where operating within a span will be easy and functional, but transitioning between them will be difficult. Often comes up in competitive games like Overwatch or Blazblue, where a player may have enough skills to totally stomp anyone in their class but only half the skills necessary to move up to the next bracket. Originally coin’d to describe the mental and social functionality of people that are becoming smarter with time, able to see the opportunities or greater ideas they want to express but lacking the skills to deliver properly.

• Interruption stunlock: You interrupt someone ^{reading, working, speaking etc} causing them to pause, then every time they try to resume what they were doing you start to speak again, leaving them stuck. Comes from attacks in videogames that stun slightly after hitting, allowing for an endless cycle of damage.

• Kiting: Using a series of escalating or tangenting responses, usually questions, to create a long conversation where you don’t have to do much of the talking yourself. Described in Conversation & Response Types. Named for the practice of drawing aggro and leading an enemy around w/ hit & run tactics in mmo and crpgs.

• Leaky Boots Economics: Refers to the mindset of systems of flow in economics, especially how having lots of resources and being aware of certain options allows several categories of expenses to be reduced or eliminated. On a more personal level, cheaper items wear out faster than the expensive versions in money per time, making cheap things more functionally more expensive that pricey things. Named for the observation of Terry Pratchet by way of Sam Vimes. A Leaky Boots analysis is determining whether a cheap disposable is actually more efficient than a longterm quality item. Probably deserves its own article.

• The Lesson of Tomoyo: If you love someone, you want them to be happy even if they aren’t with you. Therefor you should try to help them to be happy without trying to possess them. Named for Tomoyo from Cardcaptor Sakura, a girl that helps her best friend the eponymous Sakura to be with Syaoran instead of herself.

• The Lysander Paradox: I am a good liar. Holding that information back would be dishonest by omission & therefor untrustworthy, but telling you would reduce your trust in me despite being an honest act. How can you trust someone when they tell you they’re a good liar?

• Made of Meat: Driven by lower urges such as sex, drugs, or food as primary motivators, often to the exclusion of all else. Slave to biological motivations running on autopilot without examination of actions or habits. Lacking desires with mental substance. Referenced in I am not made of meat. The emphatic form is Stalk of Meat, where being made of meat is the entirety of their substance, and their only larger purpose is as a self-perpetuating resource for others. Feed for the machine grown on industrial scale. Once upon a time I used “human” to refer to this concept, along with tribalist and anti-intellectual willfully ignorant traits etc. This only changed because I wasn’t being understood.

• Magic Object: Often when teaching, especially in physics, it’s helpful to cut out the interactions between the many laws at play in the real world so that you can illustrate a principle particularly clearly. A magic gas might not have the chaotic perturbations and fluctuating densities, a magic wedge has no friction, a magic rock might not experience air resistance, etc.

• Mandatory Gratitude: The practice of giving someone a gift, service, etc and then requiring gratitude, especially lavish, of a particular form, or where the expectation of gratitude was the primary motivation. Often reducible to “how dare you not fawn at my feet for this present you didn’t ask for that I put no thought into and am getting you out of ceremonial obligation!? Don’t you know what I do for you?” When I get someone a gift it’s because I want them to have it, not because I want a thankyou card in the mail despite delivering it in person.

• Metaphor Shear: Becoming acutely aware of the truth behind the abstraction and the real processes the imaginary artifice is hiding. Acquired from this Brows Held High video on Black Mirror.

• Moe: A niche aesthetic appeal implying soft smouldering affinity (romance optional) adjacent to cute, protectiveness, awkward, & intrigue. Not really my word or an uncommon use, I’m just deeply satisfied I was able to provide a rigorous definition.

• The McRib Conspiracy: Refers to a set of related concepts, forgetting the reason behind your own opinion and the artificial scarcity that feeds on it. There’s something you haven’t tried in so long that you can’t remember why you decided you hate it, and you think it can’t be that bad, thus you are fool’d into trying it again and remembering. Sometimes it’s a seasonal item, and the limit’d release is design’d to trigger that reaction in a wide swath of people, then it’s removed from circulation before the low opinion of the item really sets in and dulls the purchase wave. The name came from this Digi Daily.

• Mysticical: Draped in metaphor, symbolism, ritual, or hidden knowledge; not meant to be clearly understood, often having layers of interwoven ceremonial meaning. For all the Wider World and Alternate Framework stuff I’m into, I this obtuse difficulty that tries to elevate things as being more important or foster superstition. Especially things that are ephemeral or “true, but not literally true”.

• Near the metal: Having fewer layers of abstraction; close to the operating mechanics or principles in action. Related to programming, a low-level program is written manipulating more fundamental parts rather than bundled or abstract’d ideas. A procedure that’s near the metal generally requires a deeper understanding of what’s actually happening, a kind of intentional metaphor shear.

• NewType: Someone who through a combination of transferable skills and intuition has an immediate ^{or at least extremely accelerated} proficiency at something, especially when involving skill or awareness. Alternately, someone who can understand something thoroughly on an initial encounter. Has significant crossover with Sparks, but without the overtones of discovery or invention. Can be used sarcastically. May have a preface descriptor to restrict the domain f.x “Kirito, videogame newtype and indestructible super-god”. From Mobile Suit Gundam, the latter definition being lift’d from a retelling by Digibro.

• Off the Edge of the Map: To be in a territory, real or metaphorical, where the intuition or experience you’re familiar with may not apply, for good or ill. The Wider World ^{see below} and the ravings of lunatics are equally off the edge of the map. Regardless of the veracity of what’s said, you’re still there until what you’re saying stops sounding strange. Often said of some of my own beliefs or positions if I don’t introduce them gently or with sufficient preemptive proof, especially when I hint vaguely about details I don’t want to get into at this time. From Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

• Phlogiston Theory: A placeholder explanation for something that fits the best current understanding available but is untrue, especially when knowledge marches on around it and the Phlogiston Theory becomes more complicated in order to keep up but remains unquestion’d as on historical basis as an old truism. Named for Phlogiston, the mythical fire substance meant to explain oxidation in early models of chemistry. A notable example is the complicated heavenly circuits thought to be traversed by planets etc in the geocentric model of the universe, which survived long past the point it should have.

• Possibility Space: The total range of all the options, positions, or configurations. The possibility space of tic tac toe is much smaller than the superiour no tac toe, which in turn is smaller than the possibility space of literature as a medium, which is smaller than the possibility space of videogames as a medium. Often used to compare what a medium is capable of vs its instantiated contents in the world around you, or to discuss AI. Related to a point about the cardinality of “infinite” choice.

• Physical: Anything that can act or be act’d upon according to rules and has medium is physical. Notably this definition includes arrangements, which therefore also includes information and thoughts. God, souls, etc are by this definition also physical.

• Platosphere: The place where platonic forms, abstract objects, and other ephemera reside if they can be said to exist at all. Contrast with the Punchosphere. ^{See Common Realm above.}

• Query: A question that’s specifically a request for information, rather than a rhetorical question or an offer.

• Quid: A unit of any currency, usually the local one.

• Reserved word: Some words are special, and while they may have general meanings, I personally may have a very specific use case or personal definition. Some words I take extra seriously or ascribe additional weight and importance to. 2 notable examples are “friend” and any form of apology. From the concept in programming languages where some are reserved for use by the compiler to signal specific uses in the language.

• Rigorous Definition: A definition that provides a full and complete understanding of something, including all of what it means and excluding all of what it doesn’t, satisfying every question or challenge that could be posed to it.

• See the Ones and Zeros: Awareness of the pattern, tricks, artifice, or construction behind something. Superclass to Metaphor Shear, this also refers to things like games, animation, illusions, or speech tactics, especially when that awareness makes the thing less interesting or special. An obvious example being to see the why the strategy of tic tac toe works, or noticing that pop songs are written to a lyrical formula to be emotionally manipulative. Another Digibroism, and a reference to The Matrix.

• Scanner Darkly: The algorithms have their own mental model of you. If it is accurate and the scanner sees clearly, then it can get at actual fact and there is hope. If it sees darkly, as people do, it’s prey to misconceptions, illusions, fallacies, etc. This is especially bad when the algorithm gets some wrong impression of you, as when the Scanner Darkly decides that you must love and exclusively want to see an artist you hate because you click’d on one video where they appear in the metadata. From the story A Scanner Darkly.

• Scope Error: Problems in reasoning caused by assuming a different scale than what actually applies, especially when assuming that a lesson that only functions in a rare context applies globally to all situations.

• Scoundrel Horizon: The point in time before which you are vanishingly unlikely to find anyone that can reasonably be thought of as a good person because, being products of their time and context, they are bound to have abhorrent beliefs, habits, or endeavors. The focus of a future article.

• Sherlock: Reading the details of someone or something to reconstruct what facts about that person or thing lead to those details, and accurately divine meaning from the mundane that otherwise goes unnoticed. Emphasis on “accurately”. Named for the tendency of Sherlock Holmes to extract long or rich scenarios with seemingly little to go on by tuning into what others miss, realizing their significance, and weaving together the rich tapestry of complex elements. Applies equally to forensic analysis and the reading of microexpressions, provided it’s done on the spot in real time using collect’d knowledge. Correctly telling someone that you see through their facade and narrating their feelings back to them based on their word choice and expressions requires sherlocking them first. Contrast this with the relativistic postmodern art interpretation of seeing any range of meaning in whatever, accountable to nothing, or with various forms of fortune telling.

• Sophisticated: Complicated via decompress’d reasoning, jargon, mystical or circuitous explanation for the purposes of of excluding others. Sophistication creates a educational class division by hoarding knowledge & understanding. More generally, means being tribalistically haughty.

• Spark: The Spark of Genius & Inspiration, a quality in people that drives a need and ability to discover, understand, and create. Alternately, a person with the Spark. Where a smart or curious person may know and appreciate fact or method, Sparks are prone to being swept away in a desire to participate in the majesty of everything, and are easily addict’d to epiphany and paradigm shifts. Sparks like Nietzsche’s Ubermensch create themselves as the result of a desire for personal improvement. The transitional state of being a pre-spark is often a difficult one as it comes with enough insight and understanding to notice or cause problems but not enough to solve them with full effectiveness, and as such social problems are common before the breakthrough point. Sparks see richer colours, analyze things as a consequence of looking at or considering them to the point of reverse-engineering the mechanisms behind things on a first encounter, are able to vividly picture a complete design or sequence and then rapidly iterate on it mentally to accurate real-world results. Those first 2 are also common traits in pre-sparks. At the risk of stepping off the edge of the map, Sparks also have a different palette of emotions which contains analogues to the conventional ones as well as at least one that only accessible to them and pre-sparks which despite not being exclusively STEM-related we refer to as “FOR SCIENCE!”, science madness, or maniacal glee. If that sounds familiar, you’re likely at least a pre-Spark. A simple observational test to confirm is that Sparks have red soul threads instead of cyan. Especially because of the extra details, meaningfully distinct from a NewType. Yes I’m aware this makes me sound like a total chunibyo, but having labels for these things appeases my databrain. The term was taken from the comic Girl Genius because of the amount of crossover between it and the cluster of traits I had been observing in some of my Wider World projects for a few years. Probably deserves its own article at some point.

• Stall of the Void: Hesitance to take an action because it’s irreversible, and the resulting anxiety it brings. First made known to me by Hello Internet.

• Standard Framework: The set of beliefs about the world as understood by the present scientific community and the layman. The default assumed worldview of anything you see in public, with some extra scientific rigor thrown on top. If an alternate theory is proposed, even if it’s correct and comes from other scientists, it’s only part of the Standard Framework when it becomes the dominant idea in academia. Generally includes atheism, evolution, global warming, the Copenhagen model of quantum mechanics, general relativity, etc. Any alternate framework generally needs declaring outside of its home context, so I might preface a statement “In the Christian Framework…” rather than just asserting something, even if that’s what I believe.

• Stardust & Moonlight: Literally what we’re made of. Stardust being the remains from dead supernovas and moonlight as a metaphor for inspiration & passion. From the Newyear’s toast I always give: “Top of the year; stardust and moonlight.”

• Stipulated Abstract: Declaring a model or question as abstract rather than literal allows the exclusion of many what-ifs and to get stubborn conversants to actually engage with what is being said instead of trying to get out of it.

• Strange Game: Any situation where available options are all terrible, so the best response is to refuse participation otherwise disregard the supposed boundaries of the situation. A rejection of “lesser of 2 evils” logic. Named for the scene from War Games.

• Sunday school version: Related to the Discover Channel Version, a simplification by cutting out the mechanics or other supporting details to get at the essence of the story. A common practice of Sunday Schools, religious teaching for children, but also common in explanations of technology that try to be more accurate than the Discovery Channel version. f.ex In the sunday school version, Noah built an ark and put 2 of every animal on it, but in the actual story he took his family and the animals were sent to him in pairs by god, along with 7 pairs of each ritually clean animal good for food and enough supplies to feed all these animals.

• Supernanny Syndrome: With infinite power comes infinite responsibility, and the steward’d populous grows dependent and then complacent. A deity that is call’d upon to summon the plurality of problems regardless of scale has succumb to supernanny syndrome. Part of the Tom Bombadilism cycle.

• Sword Art Online Syndrome: There are 2 basic ways to look at score-based criticism of media, how good the good things about it are vs the good minus the bad. A work has SAO Syndrome if it rates highly by the first mindset but very low by the second.

• Taxonomic vs descriptive language: A taxonomic language fits lots of things into categories, often in a hierarchy, a descriptive language describes the different traits or elements of something. The Procato Colour Index is a robust descriptive language for describing colour in terms of hue, saturation, and brightness. Names for all types of rock is a taxonomic language. TV Tropes is mostly taxonomic. Both enrich the way you process the world, but in different ways.

• Thermian Argument: An attempt to use diegetic reasoning to refute criticism of authorial choices. A thermian argument fundamentally misses the point of what it’s meant to respond to because the thing being criticized is not from a point of view within the work, it’s the decision of how the work was made. Directly stolen from Dan Olsen’s Folding Ideas

• Time-abortion: Preventing someone’s existence by killing them as a child or by preventing their parents from conceiving them.

• Time-murder: Comes in 2 varieties. The gentler sort used by the Weeping Angels of Doctor Who is to send someone so far into the past that they die naturally before the present. Note that this isn’t meaningfully distinct in most cases from sending them into the future, where they don’t arrive until long after your field of concern, then live to death. The alternate, somewhat more final version is to drop someone in the future and then prevent that future from happening, resulting in a total erasure. The latter being the original thing I meant by the term.

• Time orphan: Refugee from an alternate timeline they can’t return to, such as Marty McFly. If you go back in time and kill your parents then they can’t possibly have you, but the material you’re made of as you do it should still persist in the present moment and into the future. Averting your own now-alternate future therefore shouldn’t cause you to vanish, you just become a time orphan.

• Tom Bombadilism: With infinite power comes no responsibility because no one can compel you and your goals become arbitrary. Being a deity means you are capable of solving many problems, but often that means they aren’t really problems for you. The sufficiently powerful may no longer empathize with or care about the world outside their own goals. Named for the Arch-mythologized character Tom Bombadil, a being of ridiculous power who spends all his time goofing off in the woods.

• Trivially distinct: The difference which makes no difference and is therefor not really a difference. There might be something that distinguishes the 2, but it doesn’t really affect anything, such as the colour of paint on the bullet that pierces your spine or the sexual orientation of your EMT. Counterpoint to meaningfully distinct.

• Trunchbull Defense: Doing something so ridiculous or outlandish that nobody believes it happen’d as a means of avoiding reprimand. The strategy used by the eponymous Trunchbull to abuse children in the book Matilda.

• Universe: The continuum of all real things, and the space where they are. If it can be said to exist, it does so in the universe. This means the concept of “alternate universes” is nonsense, because the universe is the name for the topmost level that contains everything else.

• Utopian: Many would-be reformers ^{“SJWs”, “feminists” etc} have a general blurry desire for changes, but not an actual end goal. Anyone I call a utopian has a set of values and conditions for an ideal future, a stated goal rather than a vaguely direction’d want, and either acts as someone already in that better future or especially tries to share that goal with others and urge them to similar action. Partial credit if you have an end-state society but only act or urge others to act in a transitional way rather than directly embodying those values, such as setting quotas rather than true post-discrimination casting.

• Vague vs Ambiguous: Something is vague if it has clear examples that are and are not, but the dividing line is blurry. Something is ambiguous if it has multiple meanings and which one is being used is unclear. The edge of a cloud is vague, skywater cloud vs remote data storage cloud is ambiguous.

• Valid: Of internally consistent reasoning. Expand’d slightly from the classical definition to apply to more than just strict logic.

• Victim Olympics: The oneupsmanship of claiming to have worse problems, or a game of social currency where the winner is the victim of the other and therefor deserving of sympathy and the alignment of the masses.

• ViHart’s Problem of Context: An unclear communication referencing something only works if the audience also knows what’s being referenced. If you know what a song is supposed to sound like in high fidelity, hearing it through a bad sound system might not detract from the experience. Another listener not knowing what it’s supposed to sound like will have a completely different, much worse experience, perhaps even being unable to follow the melody or mentally autocompleting in different instruments to try and make sense of what they’re hearing. Named for the mathemusician genius ViHart because of a video in which the problem appears.

• Walkthrough Review: A review by way of commentary punctuating a recap in summary of what is usually a work of fiction where the reviewer touches on events in the work in a mostly chronological order, often with a thesis or further analysis at the end. Once the dominant form of review on the internet by the likes of Channel Awesome, Chez Apocalypse, The Spoony Experiment, etc, it’s given way in the last few years to the analytical essay that lacks such a close adherence to the plot structure of the subject or even confinement to a single work. While not hard to make, I have a soft spot for the format when it’s done reasonably well by someone interesting.

• Want to not: The counterpoint to affirmative desire. For the question “Do you want to [activity]”, a response of “no” could mean a neutrality, or it could mean negative. Saying “I want to not do that” is slightly off-beat in its structure but firmly expresses with clarity.

• Which One Is Hikaru Game: You win the Which One Is Hikaru Game by demonstrating an understanding of another person beyond what they’ve explicitly shown you. From the scene in Ouran Highschool Host Club when Haruhi explains how she correctly identified Hikaru, demonstrating herself to be a true friend.

• Wiki limbo: The attention-hole of going from article to article absorbing information as each new thing draws attention, usually straying far afield in topic from the original intent. Common side effect of visiting TV Tropes or other highly integrated informational archives, such as this list.

• Worship: Intense focus of attention and mental effort, often but not exclusively accompanied by reverence. Includes fandom and sport.

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Given the nature of this page, I’ll only be marking edits when I change a definition, not when I add one.