Philosophy
Maps, notes, and explorations in philosophy.
- The Halo Effect — a reader's summary
Edward Thorndike's 1920 army-officer ratings, the 1977 experiment that caught the effect working below conscious awareness, and why a verified badge or a clean thumbnail still gets read as proof of everything else about a person.
- Rizz — a reader's summary
A Bronx Twitch circle's 2021 in-group word, the disputed “charisma” etymology Oxford attached to it, the June 2023 Tom Holland clip that made it spike, and the December 2023 Word of the Year that beat out “prompt.”
- Touch Grass — a reader's summary
The gaming-forum insult for marathon screen time, its pandemic-era jump to an all-purpose comeback, Merriam-Webster's October 2024 dictionary entry, and the July 2023 Elon Musk tweet that turned it back on his own platform.
- Glazing — a reader's summary
The Discord-and-Twitch slang for excessive flattery, its 2024 dictionary entries, and the April 2025 week Sam Altman admitted GPT-4o “glazes too much” — turning a meme word into a named AI training failure.
- The Sunk Cost Fallacy — a reader's summary
Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer's 1985 theater-ticket experiments, the Concorde fallacy nickname, and why “I've already put so much in” keeps winning arguments about when to quit.
- The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon — a reader's summary
The 1994 forum coinage for suddenly noticing something everywhere, Arnold Zwicky's 2005 “frequency illusion” rename, and why the name has nothing to do with what it describes.
- The Uncanny Valley — a reader's summary
Masahiro Mori's 1970 hypothesis that near-perfect human likeness triggers revulsion, its 35-year wait for an English translation, and why AI video and voice reopened it.
- The Mandela Effect — a reader's summary
Fiona Broome's 2009 name for a shared false memory, the Berenstain Bears and Monopoly Man variants it produced, and why cognitive science already explained it before the multiverse theory did.
- The Barnum Effect — a reader's summary
Bertram Forer's 1948 classroom experiment that gave every student the same “personalized” sketch lifted from an astrology column, Paul Meehl's 1956 name for it, and why horoscopes, quizzes, and flattering AI chat lean on the same gap.
- Roko's Basilisk — a reader's summary
The 2010 LessWrong thought experiment about a future AI that punishes those who knew of it and didn't help build it, Eliezer Yudkowsky's ban that turned it into a meme, and the decision-theory rebuttal that undercuts it.
- Sturgeon's Law — a reader's summary
Theodore Sturgeon's 1950s retort that “ninety percent of everything is crap,” born as a defense of science fiction, and how it became the default shorthand for grading online content in bulk.
- The Backfire Effect — a reader's summary
Nyhan and Reifler's 2010 finding that correcting a false belief can sometimes deepen it, David McRaney's blog that turned it into a household term, and the 2019 replication that found genuine backfire is the exception, not the rule.
- Illusory Truth Effect — a reader's summary
Hasher, Goldstein and Toppino's 1977 finding that repetition alone makes a claim feel truer, Lisa Fazio's 2015 result that knowing better doesn't fully protect you, and why the feed is a near-ideal delivery mechanism for it.
- Hanlon's Razor — a reader's summary
“Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity” — a 1980 joke-book submission, its older echoes in Robert Heinlein, and why it now moderates online arguments about intent.
- Chesterton's Fence — a reader's summary
G.K. Chesterton's 1929 parable of a fence across a road, and how a century-old essay became a standing rebuttal in online arguments about removing things nobody remembers building.
- Gaslighting — a reader's summary
The 1938 stage thriller the term is named after, its 1960s-70s move into clinical vocabulary, and Merriam-Webster's 2022 word-of-the-year recognition of how far it has spread.
- Motte-and-Bailey — a reader's summary
Nicholas Shackel's 2005 name for a rhetorical retreat — bold claim, modest fallback under pressure — and the 2014 blog post that carried it from academic philosophy into everyday online argument.
- The Dunning-Kruger Effect — a reader's summary
David Dunning and Justin Kruger's 1999 Cornell study on why the least skilled overrate themselves most, and the statistical-artifact critique that has been reshaping the debate since 2020.
- Moral Panic — a reader's summary
Stanley Cohen's 1972 study of Mods and Rockers, the folk devil it named, and the recurring five-stage pattern behind every new medium's scare — comic books to brain rot.
- Poe's Law — a reader's summary
Nathan Poe's 2005 creationism-forum post that hardened into an internet adage — why parody of extremism is indistinguishable from the real thing without a wink, and why AI text makes it worse.
- Brandolini's Law — a reader's summary
The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: Alberto Brandolini's 2013 tweet, its debt to Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, and why generative AI widened the gap it describes.
- NPC — a reader's summary
A video-game term for a scripted background character, repurposed in 2018 as a political insult — and the Twitter suspensions for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that followed almost immediately.
- Philosophical map
The major philosophers placed on two axes — time and influence.
- Philosophers & their ideas
Every philosopher from the map, with their main ideas — one card per idea.
- The factory as institutional fact
Searle's social ontology applied to factories — and to the AI agents now writing institutional facts. Also in Business.
- Seeing Like a State — a reader's summary
James C. Scott's 1998 classic on why grand schemes to improve the human condition fail. Also in History & Politics.
- The Gulag Archipelago — a reader's summary
Solzhenitsyn's 1973 masterwork: its clandestine history, author, main ideas, critiques, and impact on the world's political sentiment.
- The Construction of Social Reality — a reader's summary
Searle's 1995 classic: its history, author, main ideas, critiques, and afterlife.
- The circles of interest
Politics as a trade-off of resources across circles around the individual — a methodology, ten probes, a research program. Also in Politics.
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — a reader's summary
Shoshana Zuboff's 2019 book on behavioral data, prediction products, and a new form of power. Also in History & Politics.
- Bernard Stiegler — technics, attention, and care
The bank robber who became the philosopher of technology: technics as originary, tertiary retention, the pharmakon, and the economy of attention — a guide to his work.
- Dead Internet Theory — a reader's summary
The forum theory that most of the internet is now bots talking to bots — its murky origins, and why generative AI made it feel less like paranoia.
- Brain Rot — a reader's summary
Oxford's 2024 Word of the Year: the claimed cognitive cost of short-form content, its surprisingly 19th-century pedigree, and why the panic keeps recurring.
- Parasocial Relationships — a reader's summary
The one-sided bond between an audience and a media figure, coined in 1956 for radio and TV, now the default relationship shape of creator platforms and AI companions.
- AI Slop — a reader's summary
The term for low-effort, mass-produced generative content flooding feeds and search results — why it's an epistemic problem, not just a taste complaint.
- Doomscrolling — a reader's summary
The compulsive habit of scrolling bad news past the point it informs or comforts — its 2018 coinage, the 2020 dictionary entries, and why willpower alone doesn't stop it.
- Main Character Energy — a reader's summary
A pejorative role-playing term inverted by a May 2020 TikTok trend — and the “main character syndrome” backlash that followed it back to critical use.