Glossary
Plain definitions of the words this site uses in a particular sense.
Words marked with a dotted underline anywhere on the site link here; hover over or focus on one to see its definition without leaving the page.
Terms
- abstraction
- A simplification that leaves out details so we can think or work faster, like an average or a map.Read the full idea →
- accountability
- The duty to show and justify to others what one has done, often in figures.
- achievement subject
- For Byung-Chul Han, the person nobody forces to work who drives themselves without rest until they exploit themselves.
- AI agent
- An AI system that does not just answer but carries out tasks on its own: opening programs, looking things up, sending messages.
- AI model
- The program that results from training an AI on vast numbers of examples until it learns to produce similar output. “Frontier models” are the most advanced ones of the moment.
- app
- Short for “application”: a program on a phone or computer that handles one particular task.
- area
- One of the five themes the questions are grouped into.
- artificial general intelligence (AGI)
- An AI able to do well at almost any intellectual task, not only the ones it was built for. Whether it already exists, and how we would tell, is disputed.
- artificial intelligence (AI)
- Computer programs that produce text, images, code or answers by learning from huge numbers of examples — ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are well-known ones.
- audit
- A formal review that checks, through records and indicators, whether an organization does what it should.
- automation
- Having a machine carry out a task without a person doing it.Read the full idea →
- benchmark
- A standard test used to compare how well different AI systems perform.
- bias
- A leaning, often unnoticed, toward certain uses, results or ways of seeing, and against others.
- chatbot
- A program you talk with in writing; today it is usually an artificial intelligence assistant.
- constraint
- A limit that forces things to be done a certain way.Read the full idea →
- conviviality
- For Ivan Illich, the quality of tools that people can use in their own way and for their own ends, without relying on experts.
- dashboard
- A screen that sums up in charts and figures how something is going —sales, grades, traffic— without showing the data behind them.
- delegation
- Handing a task to another person or to a machine.Read the full idea →
- distributed knowledge
- Knowledge spread across many people, which no one holds completely on their own.Read the full idea →
- epistemic
- Having to do with knowledge: how we know what we know, and how we could be wrong.
- evidence
- What is offered to show that something is true.Read the full idea →
- expertise
- What someone with long practice in a field knows, which lets them see quickly what a beginner misses.Read the full idea →
- falsifiability
- An idea is falsifiable if some possible fact could show it is false. Karl Popper argued this is what makes a theory scientific.Read the full idea →
- feed
- The list of posts an app or social network picks, orders and refreshes endlessly for each person.
- feedback loop
- When the result of an action comes back to correct the next one, the way a thermostat or a teacher's corrections do.Read the full idea →
- friction
- The effort or difficulty a task demands. Sometimes it is wasted time; sometimes it is exactly what teaches us.Read the full idea →
- Gestell
- Martin Heidegger's terms: Gestell (enframing) is the technological way of looking that treats everything as a resource; Bestand (standing-reserve) is what things become under it: supplies kept on call.
- Goodhart's law
- When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure: people learn to improve the number rather than what the number stood for.Read the full idea →
- GPS
- Global Positioning System: satellites that let a phone or a car know where it is and suggest a route turn by turn.
- harness
- The checks, tests and guardrails built around a powerful but unreliable tool — such as an AI model — so its output can be used safely.Read the full idea →
- institution
- A lasting organization or practice with its own rules: a school, a hospital, a court, a profession.Read the full idea →
- institutional memory
- What an organization remembers about its own past — often stored in rules whose origin nobody recalls.Read the full idea →
- judgment
- The ability to decide well in a particular case, especially when no rule tells you what to do.Read the full idea →
- knowing-in-action
- Donald Schön's terms: the know-how shown in doing something skillfully, and the rethinking that happens mid-task, without stopping to theorize.Read the full idea →
- knowledge work
- Work whose main product is information or decisions: writing, analysing, programming, teaching.Read the full idea →
- legibility
- James C. Scott's word for making something easy to see, count and control from above — even when that means simplifying it.
- mediation
- When a technology stands between us and something else — seeing a city only through a GPS app, or friends only through a feed.Read the full idea →
- metis
- A Greek word James C. Scott uses for practical, local know-how learned through experience that does not fit into written rules.
- normal science
- For Thomas Kuhn, everyday research that solves problems within a paradigm without questioning it.
- optimization
- Adjusting something to improve one chosen measure — speed, cost, clicks — often at the expense of what the measure leaves out.
- paradigm
- Thomas Kuhn's word for the shared assumptions, methods and model examples a scientific community works inside, and does not question while they keep working.
- paraphrase
- Saying in other words what someone said. On this site paraphrases are ours and carry no quotation marks; exact quotations are in quotation marks, with their source.
- path
- A guided sequence of questions and ideas meant to be read in order.
- Polanyi's paradox
- Michael Polanyi's observation that we know more than we can tell, as with riding a bike or recognizing a face.Read the full idea →
- position
- On this site, an idea someone holds about a question, shown with its author and its source.
- prompt
- The instruction or question you type into an AI assistant.
- protocol
- A fixed list of steps that says what to do and what to check each time, so the result does not depend on who does it.
- proxy
- Something easy to measure that we use in place of what we actually care about — a test score in place of learning, likes in place of quality.Read the full idea →
- radical monopoly
- For Ivan Illich, the dominance of one product that makes doing without it all but impossible, like the car in a city built for cars.
- representation
- Anything that stands in for something else: a map, a report, a number, a description.Read the full idea →
- spectacle
- Guy Debord's word for a social life in which images and appearances take the place of direct relationships.Read the full idea →
- spreadsheet
- A program of rows and columns, such as Excel, that does sums with the data typed into it.
- tacit knowledge
- What we know how to do but cannot fully put into words, like riding a bike or recognizing a face.Read the full idea →
- tool
- Here, any technology that does part of a job for us — from a calculator or GPS to a search engine or an AI assistant.
- verification
- Checking whether something is true or works, instead of taking it for granted.Read the full idea →
- vita activa
- For Hannah Arendt, active human life and its three activities: labor (keeping ourselves alive), work (making things that last) and action (acting together with others).