Falsifiability

Reviewing work with an explicit mandate to refute it, from a perspective that did not produce it.

The statement in a test that must hold, and the only part that can actually fail.

any headline phrased as a question can safely be answered "no".

The hypothesis that visible disorder invites serious crime, and the long dispute over whether the evidence supports it.

The mapping between characters and bytes, and the source of a specific family of invisible bugs.

The convention that a conspicuously introduced story element must pay off later.

The tendency to search for, interpret, and recall evidence in ways that favor what you already believe.

Two things moving together is evidence for a causal link but never proof of one, or of its direction.

A build check that fails when coverage falls below a threshold, and what that pressure produces.

The observation that posting a wrong answer online gets a faster correction than asking a question.

Refractive index varies with wavelength, so a medium bends colors by different amounts.

A statement of the form "the last one" or "nothing else does this" — load-bearing, and only as good as the search behind it.

The convention that a detective story must give the audience every clue it needs to solve the case.

Reaching a defensible order-of-magnitude answer by decomposing a question into estimable factors.

Wildcard pattern matching over filenames, similar enough to regular expressions to mislead.

The measurement that arbitrates, as opposed to the artifact that merely reports.

Fluent, confident output that is not grounded in anything real.

A coordinate system in which an undisturbed body moves at constant velocity, and none is privileged.

Professional wrestling's maintained fiction that staged events are real.

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.

Reverse-engineering the computation a trained network learned into human-legible features and circuits.

A macroeconomic account holding that a currency issuer is constrained by real resources and inflation rather than by revenue.

A conditional-probability puzzle in which switching wins twice as often as staying.

Defending a modest claim while trading on a bolder one made under the same name.

Prefer the explanation with fewer assumptions, not the one that is simplest to state.

A causal explanation that was inferred rather than tested, and reads as more rigorous for being specific.

without a clear signal of intent, sincere extremism and parody of it are indistinguishable.

Categories are organized as graded resemblance to a best example rather than defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.

A previously working behavior that a change has broken.

Regulators coming to serve the industries they oversee, and why the word is often overused.

Spending resources to capture existing value instead of creating new value.

The smallest set of steps that reliably produces a fault, and the unit of real debugging.

The energy a rolling tire loses to deformation, and why more pressure stops helping.

Escalating past the visible symptom until you find the layer that actually produced it.

Explaining a problem aloud, in full detail, to a listener who cannot help — and finding the fault while explaining it.

The claim that pre-industrial night sleep came in two blocks separated by a waking interval, and the dispute over how general that was.

The two error rates of a test, and why neither answers the question a person actually asks.

A failure that produces no signal, so the absence of an error reads as success.

The rate at which tissue absorbs radiofrequency energy, measured in watts per kilogram.

The experimental claim that reminders of death increase defense of one's worldview and self-esteem.

Writing a failing test first, making it pass, then improving the code with the test as a net.

Reading a truncated result as if it were the whole result, so every counterexample is invisible.

The proposed dip in affinity as a likeness approaches, without reaching, the human.

A statement that holds only because its subject set is empty — a green result that measured nothing.

Recording the intent of a change durably before applying it, so a crash can be recovered.