Plausible Mechanism

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

A stated number pulls subsequent estimates toward it, regardless of relevance.

Organized advocacy disguised as spontaneous, independent public support.

A commit containing exactly one logical change, complete and independently sound.

An expansion invented after the fact to fit letters that already existed as a word or acronym.

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

Living bone is continuously resorbed and rebuilt, which is why fractures heal and why healing runs in stages.

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

Imitating the visible form of a practice while the mechanism that made it work is absent.

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

Do not remove something whose purpose you cannot explain.

Prose inside source code, useful only when it records a constraint the code cannot state.

A second person reading a change before it lands, and the practices that make it worth the time.

A recorded snapshot of a project with a message explaining it.

Fraud that obtains trust first, so the victim hands over the money themselves.

A lightweight convention giving commit messages a machine-readable type and scope.

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

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

Documentation that has drifted from the system it describes, and is now worse than none.

A substitution that reanalyzes a phrase into a different but still-plausible meaning.

Narrative carried by placed objects and world state rather than dialogue, completed by the audience's inference.

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

A claim is only worth something if you know what observation would refute it.

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

Words reshaped to resemble familiar parts, and the false origin stories that reshaping invites.

Holding fractured bone still enough, and aligned well enough, for biology to do the repair.

A fracture that stops progressing toward healing, usually because of motion, gap or lost blood supply.

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.

Juxtaposed shots produce a meaning that exists in neither shot alone.

The hypothesis that language shapes thought, and the evidence that has narrowed it considerably.

An object that motivates a plot while remaining substantively irrelevant to it.

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

a placeholder identifier chosen to carry no meaning of its own.

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

Wounds kept moist under an occlusive dressing re-epithelialize faster than wounds allowed to dry and scab.

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.

Color is recoded after the cones into red-green, blue-yellow and light-dark opponent channels.

The range of political positions treated as acceptable to hold at a given moment.

Pressure applied to a confined fluid is transmitted undiminished throughout it.

Tolerance and withdrawal are pharmacological adaptations, distinct from addiction and from harm.

designing or marketing a product for a shorter useful life than it could otherwise have.

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

Light whose electric field oscillates in a preferred orientation, and the filters that select for it.

The recorded origin of a change or a claim — who made it, when, and on what evidence.

Local anesthetic placed around a nerve or plexus to interrupt conduction from a whole region, and the rebound that follows.

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

A family of vitamin-A derivatives that act on nuclear receptors, arranged in a potency ladder that is not a ranking of usefulness.

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.

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

A design lineage in which high difficulty is a deliberate authorial position, sustained by making every death legible.

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

Collapsing a branch's commits into one before merging, trading granularity for a clean main history.

The future cost of a present shortcut, metaphorically accruing interest.

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

A closed loop that moves heat by boiling and condensing a working fluid at two pressures.

Tissue fed by a single terminal or retrograde vessel has no redundancy, so injury there heals badly.

How bodies chemically dispose of foreign compounds, and why those pathways differ enough between species to make one animal's food another's poison.