Knowledge/Domain
Knowledge, language, and acting together.
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A controlled vocabulary for classifying things, and the choice between hierarchy, facets, and free tagging.
Meaning & Society·33 connections
Writing so that the intended reader can find, understand, and use the information the first time.
Meaning & Society·27 connections
Coordinated action toward a shared goal, and the free-rider problem that makes it hard.
Meaning & Society·23 connections
Categories are organized as graded resemblance to a best example rather than defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.
Making a system countable and administrable, at the cost of the local knowledge that made it work.
Meaning & Society·22 connections
A threat to social values amplified by media past any proportion to actual harm.
Meaning & Society·20 connections
Information modeled as entities and the typed relationships between them.
Meaning & Society·17 connections
The hypothesis that language shapes thought, and the evidence that has narrowed it considerably.
Fraud that obtains trust first, so the victim hands over the money themselves.
Meaning & Society·16 connections
Words reshaped to resemble familiar parts, and the false origin stories that reshaping invites.
Meaning & Society·15 connections
A good whose value to each user grows as more people use it.
The range of political positions treated as acceptable to hold at a given moment.
Regulators coming to serve the industries they oversee, and why the word is often overused.
The experimental claim that reminders of death increase defense of one's worldview and self-esteem.
A collection of interlinked pages that anyone with access can edit, named for the Hawaiian word for quick.
Repetition of a claim raises its perceived truth and prominence, and the perceived prominence drives further repetition.
Meaning & Society·13 connections
The automatically-derived list of pages linking to the current one.
Large-scale production coordinated by modular tasks and volunteer contribution rather than price or hierarchy.
A substitution that reanalyzes a phrase into a different but still-plausible meaning.
A blend of two idioms into a third, and the family of errors that reveals how fixed phrases are stored.
the movement for consumer and independent-shop access to the parts, tools, and information needed to fix a device.
An unconditional cash payment to every member of a population, and its contested design and evidence.
A misheard phrase reanalyzed into something else that still makes sense, most often from song lyrics.
Meaning & Society·12 connections
A note-taking method built on small single-idea notes linked to one another.
Organized advocacy disguised as spontaneous, independent public support.
Meaning & Society·11 connections
The observation that posting a wrong answer online gets a faster correction than asking a question.
The boundary between what exists in a work's world and what is shown only to the audience.
A cost or benefit of a transaction that falls on someone outside it.
The convention that a detective story must give the audience every clue it needs to solve the case.
A pedestrian offense whose 1920s American origins are widely read as an effort to shift blame for road deaths onto pedestrians.
designing or marketing a product for a shorter useful life than it could otherwise have.
Divergent interests and unequal information between whoever delegates and whoever acts.
Hardin's parable of shared-resource collapse, and Ostrom's evidence that it is not inevitable.
An expansion invented after the fact to fit letters that already existed as a word or acronym.
Meaning & Society·10 connections
The convention that a conspicuously introduced story element must pay off later.
A noun classification system that forces agreement across a sentence and correlates only loosely with meaning.
Professional wrestling's maintained fiction that staged events are real.
Spending resources to capture existing value instead of creating new value.
A cliché reduced to a reusable template with swappable slots.
Words that habitually appear together more often than chance predicts, independent of any grammatical rule.
Meaning & Society·9 connections
An object that motivates a plot while remaining substantively irrelevant to it.
A macroeconomic account holding that a currency issuer is constrained by real resources and inflation rather than by revenue.
Tenants collectively withholding rent to force negotiation with a landlord or policymaker.
A word repeated aloud until it briefly stops registering as meaningful.
A pronunciation or usage that reveals group membership, historically used as a test with lethal stakes.
Timed text accompanying video, with conventions that differ deliberately from written prose.
The hypothesis that visible disorder invites serious crime, and the long dispute over whether the evidence supports it.
Meaning & Society·8 connections
A recurring character reduced, across a long run, to a single exaggerated trait.
Juxtaposed shots produce a meaning that exists in neither shot alone.
Folding, slitting and sealing a letter so the sheet becomes its own tamper-evident envelope.
One favorable trait leaks into judgments of a person's unrelated traits, and one unfavorable trait does the same in reverse.
Meaning & Society·7 connections
An inert treatment produces a real improvement because of the expectation and ritual around it, not any active ingredient.
People treat what others are doing as evidence for what the correct action is, especially under uncertainty.
People holding a minority opinion go quiet as it seems to lose ground, which makes it look even weaker than it is.
A personalization system narrows what a person sees to what they already agree with, without their choosing it.
Meaning & Society·6 connections
People believe persuasive media sways other people far more than it sways them personally.
We explain other people's behavior by their character, and our own by our circumstances.
Meaning & Society·5 connections
A cohesive group suppresses its own doubts to preserve unanimity, and makes a worse decision as a result.
Trying enough analyses on the same data until one crosses the significance threshold, then reporting only that one.
A 78-card symbolic system used for narrative interpretation, and a well-structured combinatorial vocabulary.
The more people who witness someone in trouble, the less likely any one of them is to help.
Meaning & Society·4 connections
A society reflexively judges its own culture as inferior to a foreign standard, regardless of actual merit.
Compulsively consuming a stream of bad news past the point of being informed by it.
A gain in circumstances raises the baseline it's measured against, so well-being drifts back toward where it started.
After experiencing outcomes that don't respond to effort, an organism stops trying even once escape becomes possible.
A sentimental longing for the past that reliably improves present mood, distinct from clinical homesickness.
A one-sided bond a viewer forms with a media figure who does not know they exist.
Studies that find a significant, interesting effect get published far more often than studies that find nothing.
An inert treatment produces real harm or side effects because the person expects harm, not because of any active ingredient.
Meaning & Society·3 connections
An attempt to hide information draws more attention to it than the information would have gotten alone.