Face Superiority Effect

A facial feature is recognized faster and more accurately embedded in a complete upright face than in isolation — a counter-featural advantage whose direction proves that a configural, whole-based processing system, not part-by-part analysis, mediates recognition.


Faceted Vocabulary

Describe a referent by selecting one value per orthogonal, independently combinable axis (material, period, function) instead of matching a single precoordinated heading, so N facets of M values express an N×M space while you maintain only the sum of the value lists.


Fallacy of Accident

The inferential mistake of applying a general rule mechanically to a case that satisfies its terms but lies outside its intended scope — treating a defeasible generalisation, carrying an implicit ceteris paribus clause, as an exceptionless universal.


Fallacy of Composition

Infer that a predicate established for one or all parts must hold of the whole they form, without a warranted preservation rule across aggregation, interaction, scale, configuration, or shared constraints.


Fallacy of Division

Catch the inferential error of attributing a property true of a whole to each of its parts, by testing whether the predicate is one a part can hold in isolation or one that exists only in the aggregation, configuration, or interaction of parts.


Fallacy of Homogeneous Networks

The implicit assumption that all nodes, links, OSes, versions, and configs across a distributed deployment are uniform — a missing degree of freedom in the system's model of its substrate that stays latent until deployment crosses a boundary where the uniformity breaks.


Fallacy of Infinite Bandwidth

Catch the distributed-systems assumption that the network carries whatever data an application generates for free, by reclassifying bandwidth as a finite, shared, budgetable resource and tracking bytes per operation against the capacity of the path.


Fallacy of One Administrator

Reason about a deployed system as though one authority governs every node it depends on, when it actually crosses many independently-governed administrative domains — so failures concentrate at the unmodeled seams between them.


Fallacy of Stable Topology

The design-time assumption that a distributed system's addressing and routing graph stays fixed over an interaction's lifetime — dropping the time argument from G(t) — so every cached reference becomes a latent bet that its referent has not moved.


Fallacy of the Reliable Network

The design-time error of programming a best-effort channel whose packet-loss probability is positive as if it were zero — assuming every message is delivered, ordered, and never dropped, reordered, or duplicated.


Fallacy of the Secure Network

The mistake of deriving trust in a distributed system from network position — inside the VPN, behind the firewall — rather than from cryptographic verification, treating a known routing path as if it were a verified identity.


Fallacy of Zero Latency

The design-time assumption that a remote call returns as fast as a local one, dropping the per-hop round-trip term L from the cost function, so that an operation making n network calls is budgeted as free when it actually costs at least n·L and compounds under sequential fan-out.


Fallacy of Zero Transport Cost

Reject the design-time assumption that moving data between nodes is free by restoring the per-byte cost term to the cost function, so payload volume becomes an explicit design variable budgeted alongside latency.


False Consensus Effect

Agents overestimate how widely their own beliefs and behaviors are shared, projecting a self-anchored prior across a non-randomly sampled population.


False Discovery Rate

The expected proportion of false rejections among all rejected hypotheses, conventionally V/max(R,1), used as an at-scale error criterion that accepts a controlled fraction of false discoveries in exchange for power.


False Equivalence

The fallacy of treating two things as comparably weighted on the dimension a judgment turns on, when they in fact differ by an order of magnitude or by kind — by highlighting a genuine shared feature and suppressing the difference that actually controls.


False Fame Effect

The finding that a previously seen non-famous name is later misjudged as famous — because prior exposure produces real processing fluency that, once the memory of its source is lost, gets misattributed to fame rather than to having been seen.


False Precision

The measurement-communication fallacy of expressing a quantity with more significant figures or tighter bounds than the underlying evidence supports — a mismatch between the form of the claim and its warrant, read by audiences as unearned precision of knowledge.


False-Uniqueness Effect

The social-cognition finding that people underestimate how common their own virtues are among peers, biasing peer-prevalence estimates downward for positive, identity-relevant traits in order to preserve a sense of distinctiveness and positive self-evaluation.


Fan Effect

The memory finding that verifying a stored fact about a concept gets slower and less accurate as more other facts are attached to it, because a fixed activation budget spread across a concept's associations ('fan') leaves each one less to cross the recognition threshold.


Fault

A frictionally-controlled discontinuity in rock across which the two sides slip under tectonic loading — decomposed into discontinuity, stress field, and friction law, from which the friction regime selects quiet creep versus locked stick-slip rupture, and geometry fixes earthquake style and size.


Feasible Region

Turn an optimization problem's list of constraints into a single geometric set — the intersection of everything they permit — whose shape (empty, convex, bounded, its boundary) governs whether a solution exists, where it sits, and which methods will find it.


Feature Creep

Explain why a product accretes capabilities past net benefit as a governance failure, not a quality one — an approval gate that judges each addition in isolation against its stated cost while structurally blind to the compounding global cost of all additions together.


Feature Envy

Flag a method whose cross-class field and method accesses to another class outnumber accesses to its own, signalling that the behavior lives at the wrong address and should be relocated to the class whose data it operates on.


Feature Factory

The product-organisation anti-pattern of measuring success by features shipped per unit time while never asking whether any feature changed an outcome — a proxy output displacing the target it was meant to track, Goodhart's Law in the product operating loop.


Feature scaling

The preprocessing step that rescales numerical inputs to a common range so no variable's unit of measurement silently dominates a scale-sensitive method — making the choice of weighting an explicit analytical commitment rather than an accident of source units.


Feldstein-Horioka Puzzle

The anomaly that national saving and investment rates are strongly correlated across countries when frictionless capital mobility predicts near-zero — turning the regression slope into a continuous gauge of de facto capital-market integration.


Field (Algebraic)

Guarantee that you can always add, subtract, multiply, and divide by anything non-zero by demanding one axiom package — two commutative-group operations bound by distributivity — which certifies the whole apparatus of linear algebra in a single membership check.


Field Boundary Marker

Route a paper, person, or proposal to the right expert community by committing a labeled research-field category at decision time — bundling a named field, a membership convention, and a routing use — that holds operationally while staying silent on what the work 'really' is.


Fieldnote Backfill

The validity threat by which a delayed field write-up silently fuses direct observation, inference, and gap-filling reconstruction into one undifferentiated register, collapsing the attribution that tells the strongest evidence from the weakest.


Fieldnotes

Record what was observed as close in time and place to the moment as possible, keeping description separate from inference and observer reaction and writing for the analyst's own future self, so perishable context survives the gap between observation and analysis.


File Drawer Problem

Recognize that studies with null results disproportionately go unpublished while significant ones enter the literature, so any synthesis treating the published record as the full population of conducted research systematically overestimates effect sizes toward the filter.


Filter bubble

The algorithmic narrowing of a user's information exposure when a recommender optimizes for short-term engagement on revealed preference — a self-reinforcing feedback loop that no user chose and no user effort can dissolve, correctable only in the ranking pipeline.


Financial Accelerator

The credit-market feedback loop by which a modest shock is amplified — falling asset prices erode collateral, raising the external-finance premium, which cuts investment and depresses prices further — its whole strength read off one elasticity: the premium's sensitivity to borrower net worth.


Firewall Paradox

Prove that three independently motivated black-hole postulates — unitarity, a smooth horizon, and monogamy of entanglement — become jointly inconsistent at the Page time, forcing every theory of quantum gravity to declare which one it weakens.


First-Pass Metabolism

Explain why an oral drug's dose depends on its route by tracking one obligate pre-systemic compartment — the splanchnic-hepatic transit — and the extraction ratio E that sets oral bioavailability as F = 1 − E.


Fiscal Illusion

The public-finance phenomenon in which a financing mechanism obscures the price signal linking public goods to their cost, so taxpayers underperceive the true burden — biasing demand for public spending upward relative to what fully-informed citizens would choose.


Fiscal Multiplier

Compress a fiscal impulse's whole propagation cascade into one estimable ratio — the change in aggregate output over the change in government spending or taxation — driven by the marginal propensity to consume through induced rounds of income, less leakages and offset channels, and conditioned on regime.


Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection

Pin the instantaneous speed at which selection improves a population's mean fitness to a single estimable quantity — the additive genetic variance in fitness — and nothing more.


Fisher's Principle (Sex-Ratio Equilibrium)

Explains the near-1:1 sex ratio of most species not as a group optimum but as the frequency-dependent equilibrium where, whenever one sex is rarer, parents biasing offspring toward it gain more grandchildren until the rarity is erased.


Fishing Effort

Quantify a fleet's extraction pressure on a wild stock as one composite variable that, multiplied by a stock-specific catchability coefficient, yields the fishing mortality driving depletion — the management lever calibrated against maximum sustainable yield.


Fitts's Law

Predict how long an aimed reach takes as a logarithmic function of target distance over target width — MT = a + b·log₂(2D/W) — treating the movement as transmission across a finite-throughput motor channel.


Flight to Quality

Read a scatter of cross-asset crisis moves as one event with one direction — capital fleeing toward the safe end of the risk spectrum — driven by a self-reinforcing amplification loop that safe-asset provision is designed to break.


Flow State

Enter an absorbed, intrinsically rewarding activity state when challenge matches skill and goals and feedback are clear, causing action and awareness to merge, self-monitoring to recede, and time perception to distort.


FLP Impossibility

Prove that no deterministic algorithm can guarantee both agreement and termination for consensus in an asynchronous system with even one crash-fault — by showing an adversarial message schedule can keep the system perpetually undecided.


Fluency

The temporal smoothness of an output stream — speech proceeding at appropriate rate and rhythm without disruptive repetitions, prolongations, or blocks — treated as a dimension of performance diagnosable separately from the content the stream carries.


Flynn Effect

Track the sustained cohort-to-cohort rise in raw intelligence-test scores — strongest on abstract fluid-reasoning tasks and largely hidden by periodic renorming — together with its later plateau or reversal in some populations.


Focus group

Convene six to ten people under a moderator to discuss a topic so that the interaction itself — the counters, reframings, and drawn-out silent voices — excavates collective meanings no individual held as a formed belief.


Focus-Order Failure

The accessibility defect in which an interface advances programmatic focus (Tab navigation, screen-reader linearization) in a sequence that diverges from the task's semantic order — invisible to visual review, and sometimes placing a confirmation control before the content it confirms.


Focusing Effect (Focusing Illusion)

Systematically overweight whatever attribute attention currently rests on when judging a complex multi-attribute target, so the focused feature dominates the constructed evaluation far above its real causal contribution while everything below the attentional threshold recedes.


Folk Theorem (Repeated Games)

Show that in a sufficiently long, patiently discounted repeated game, almost any mutually acceptable outcome can be held as an equilibrium by credible intertemporal punishment — so repetition both explains cooperation and destroys predictive determinacy.


Foot-in-the-Door Technique

A sequential influence tactic in which securing a small, self-attributed first request raises compliance with a larger related request later — because complying revises the target's self-concept ('I'm the kind of person who does this'), against which the second ask is then evaluated.


Forensic Rhetoric

The Aristotelian speech genre whose subject is past action under judgment — what happened, who is responsible, what remedy follows — fixed by a five-element apparatus (backward time orientation, judging audience, rules of evidence, explanation and exculpation topoi, verdict-form output) that recurs across every institutionalized judgment forum.


Foreshadowing Cue

Plant an unobtrusive early detail whose meaning stays underdetermined across a gap, then let a later pay-off retroactively convert it into something load-bearing — the 'ah, of course' recognition.


Form-Based Code

Regulate land by the physical form of buildings and their relationship to the street — height, setback, build-to line, frontage type — instead of by use, making relational geometry the controlled variable and leaving activity open by right.


Form Facet

Reserve one classification axis in a faceted catalog for genre, document type, or format — assigned independently of topic — so 'what kind of object is this' and 'what is it about' become separate, combinable filters.


Formal Verification

Establish with the rigor of a theorem that an engineered artifact satisfies a precisely stated specification by producing a machine-checkable proof that holds over every input in scope at once, rather than sampling behavior on tested inputs the way testing does.


Format Relation

Bind a resource to the encoding it is materialized in as an explicit, queryable metadata field drawn from a controlled registry, so rendering, routing, and preservation read off the recorded format rather than re-parsing the bytes.


Founder Blind Spot

The venture pattern where a thesis's originator, holding the authority to reroute disconfirming signals, systematically preserves their prior instead of revising it — because revision is uniquely expensive at the authoring seat.


Founder-Market Fit

The early-stage designation for how well a founding team brings a chosen market the specific insight, credibility, network, and motivation it demands before a product has proven itself — where motivation is the one non-substitutable component.


Fourier Transform

Decompose a function into a weighted superposition of complex exponentials, recording each frequency's amplitude and phase — an invertible, energy-preserving change of basis that diagonalizes every translation-invariant operation, so convolution becomes pointwise multiplication.


Frequency Illusion

Explain the felt surge in a thing's frequency right after you first notice it as a change in the perceiver, not the world — selective attention now logs real occurrences while confirmation-biased memory counts hits and discards misses.


Friction Budgeting

The design discipline of treating interaction cost as an explicit allocation variable rather than a uniform negative — concentrating load-bearing friction where it buys reflection, safety, or consent, and removing dead weight elsewhere, under a bounded user-tolerance budget.


Friedman Rule

Set the nominal interest rate to zero — via a steady deflation at the real rate — so that the private opportunity cost of holding money equals its near-zero social cost of production, eliminating the shoe-leather distortion; a benchmark that isolates one welfare cost and prices money at marginal cost.


Friendship Paradox

Explain why your friends have more friends than you as the exact consequence of edge-sampling — reaching a node by following a tie over-represents high-degree nodes by exactly the degree variance divided by the mean.


Fugue

Build a piece from a short distinctive melodic subject that enters voice by voice and returns across the work, so several genuinely independent lines imitate one idea while sounding coherent harmony at every beat.


Functional Communication

Judge a communicative act by whether it accomplishes a needed real-world function with a real partner — request, refuse, greet, comment, ask for help — rather than by its phonological accuracy or grammaticality, reclassifying every non-speech channel as a first-class success.


Functional Fixedness

The cognitive bias in which encoding an object under its conventional category label crowds out inspection of its raw physical properties, blocking the solver from a non-conventional use the problem needs and the object's properties would permit.


Functor

A structure-preserving map between categories that carries objects and morphisms while respecting identities and composition — the two axioms that make it a licence to transport theorems from one category to another along its rails.


Funding Fragility

The condition in which an entity depends on short, revocable, confidence-sensitive financing to sustain long, illiquid positions, so that the same balance sheet supports both a continued-funding equilibrium and a self-fulfilling run equilibrium — and can be killed while technically solvent.


Funnel Plot Asymmetry

Plot each study's effect against its precision and read a departure from the symmetric inverted-funnel expected under unbiased sampling — a gap where small null studies should be — as the visual fingerprint of a publication filter, licensing scrutiny against a fixed set of causes rather than a verdict.


Gambler's Fallacy

Catch the error of believing a run of one outcome makes the opposite 'due' on the next trial — imposing the law of large numbers' aggregate balance as a within-trial obligation — by first screening whether the trial process is independent.


Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

A reader who finds a source riddled with errors in their own field turns the page and trusts it on an unfamiliar topic, because the error was filed as topic-specific news rather than propagated to a source-level prior.


Generation Effect

The memory regularity that material a learner actively produces from a cue is remembered better than identical material read passively, because generation forces activation of prior knowledge and wires a richer, more connected memory trace at encoding.


Genetic Assimilation

A phenotype initially dependent on an environmental or plastic trigger becomes increasingly trigger-independent across generations as natural selection shifts heritable variation toward constitutive expression.


Genetic Fallacy

Judge a claim, practice, object, or idea by source or origin information as though it settled present truth, validity, or merit, replacing the evaluation that is owed with an origin story not independently connected to the relevant criterion.


Genre

A historically evolving cluster of cultural artifacts whose recurring conventions set up a contract between producer and audience — an inherited craft toolkit on one side, a reading strategy and evaluative horizon on the other — shaping both how works are made and how they are judged.


Geographic Facet

Treat spatial location as a separable description axis in a faceted catalog — assigning place independently of topic, form, and period, and binding it to a controlled place authority so the same location is referenced consistently and can be filtered on its own.


Geological Lava Flow

A coherent body of erupted molten rock advances downslope from a vent under gravity while cooling, crystallizing, thickening, crusting over, and eventually stopping when heat loss and yield strength overcome the driving stress.


Gibrat's Law

The claim that a firm's proportional growth rate is independent of its current size — which, iterated as multiplicative iid noise, makes log-size a random walk and drives the cross-sectional size distribution toward log-normal.


Gibson's Paradox

The gold-standard-era regularity that long-term nominal interest rates tracked the price level itself, not the rate of inflation — a Fisher-violating correlation that vanished under fiat money, marking it a regime-specific artifact rather than a law.


Giffen Good

A good whose quantity demanded rises as its own price rises — the rare case where a good is inferior and its income effect outweighs its substitution effect, flipping the Marshallian demand curve upward in apparent violation of the law of demand.


Gini Coefficient

Collapse a whole distribution of a resource into one number on a 0-to-1 scale by measuring how far its Lorenz curve bows away from perfect equality.


Global Games

Pick a single prediction out of a coordination game's many self-fulfilling equilibria by giving each player a private noisy signal of a common fundamental and deleting dominated strategies inward until one threshold cutoff survives.


Gloger's Rule

The biogeographic regularity that within an endotherm species more heavily melanin-pigmented forms occur in humid, equatorward ranges and lighter forms in arid ones, read as adaptive covariation of a pigment trait with a humidity gradient.


Go-to-Market Wedge

Enter a broad, defended market through a narrow point where you are sharply superior and incumbents are indifferent, win decisively to accumulate compounding assets, then unfold from that foothold into the adjacent segments it has made addressable.


God Object Anti-Pattern

Diagnose a maintenance mess as concentrated rather than diffuse: one class or service accumulates outlier fan-in and fan-out to become the integration hub, collapsing modularity so all change-cost, comprehension, and new features funnel through that single node.


Gold Plating

Diagnose a delivery overrun as producer-side unilateral scope expansion — quality or features added beyond the authorized envelope without the principal's sanction — whose real cost lives not in the polish but in the unbudgeted second-order burden it drags into downstream processes.


Gold-Standard Erosion

Recognize that a model scored against a mutable reference label can show stable metrics while its real validity silently degrades, because the answer key — not the model — has drifted away from the construct it once operationalized.


Golden Hammer Anti-Pattern

Diagnose a team applying its familiar technology to a poorly-fitting problem because the acquisition cost of an alternative is visible while the misfit cost is diffuse and downstream, so fluency reshapes what counts as the right tool before fit is ever asked.


Golden Rule Savings Rate

Pin the savings rate that maximizes steady-state per-capita consumption at the capital stock where the marginal product of capital equals population growth plus depreciation (f'(k*) = n + δ) — turning savings-policy welfare into a single scalar sign test.


Google Effect

The memory phenomenon in which people encode where information can be retrieved rather than its content whenever they expect it to stay available in an external digital store — a substitution of address for substance, not a general loss of memory.


Governed Relation Vocabulary

Close a metadata graph's allowed links into a standards-governed vocabulary in which every relation type fixes direction, inverse or symmetry behavior, and the action a consumer may safely take when following it.


Government Failure

The patterned ways government intervention produces outcomes worse than the market failure it meant to correct, derived by modeling the state as self-interested actors under institutional constraints — capture, rent-seeking, electoral myopia, bureaucratic bloat — and set symmetrically against market failure on one comparative surface.


Grain Boundary

The high-energy interface where two misoriented crystal grains meet — a broken-periodicity region that becomes the preferential locus for diffusion, segregation, nucleation, and cracking, and whose quantity and quality set a material's strength and failure behavior.


Graph Data Type

The programmatic abstraction representing entities as nodes and relationships as edges behind a traversal/mutation/query interface — insulating algorithm code from the in-memory layout so representation becomes a profiling-driven swap, not a rewrite.


Graph Database

A persistent store whose native model is nodes and edges with index-free adjacency — so following a relationship is a pointer dereference, not a join, and k-hop traversal cost tracks edges touched rather than total dataset size.


Graph Duality

Pair a planar graph with a dual by placing a vertex inside each face and joining faces that share an edge, so vertices swap with faces and problems translate across a lossless table — paths become cuts, colorings become face colorings — letting you solve whichever side is easier.


Greater Fool Theory

The transaction logic in which a buyer knowingly pays above what they judge an asset is worth, betting purely on a higher-paying successor before they must exit — individually rational under a long enough mania, yet collectively self-terminating once the supply of willing buyers is exhausted.


Greenhouse Effect

Atmospheric gases let in short-wave sunlight but absorb and re-radiate the surface's outgoing infrared, so the planet must warm to a higher equilibrium temperature to balance its energy budget — an effect split into a calculable forcing and a contested feedback response.


Greenspun's Tenth Rule

The aphorism that any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, bug-ridden implementation of half of Common Lisp — because features a language withholds do not vanish but migrate inside the program as defective re-implementations.


Grey Swan

A high-impact event whose category is foreseeable and reasoned about in advance but whose specific timing, magnitude, and form are unpredictable — the intermediate cell that calls for scenario planning and stress testing, not antifragility or actuarial insurance.


Grid Cell

Supply the brain's spatial metric with entorhinal neurons whose firing fields tile the environment as a hexagonal lattice — a reusable coordinate scaffold, updated odometrically by path integration and stacked into modules, sitting beneath the place-cell layer that supplies location identity.


Grim Trigger

A repeated-game strategy that cooperates every period until the opponent defects once, then switches to permanent defection forever — the severity-maximal, zero-forgiveness deterrent that sustains cooperation whenever the discount factor is high enough.


Gross Domestic Product

Compress a whole economy's heterogeneous output into one scalar by summing the market value of final goods and services produced within a geographic boundary over a fixed period, cross-checked by three coincident production, expenditure, and income identities.


Ground-Truth Drift

The model-evaluation failure in which the operational definition of the correct answer drifts on a clock the monitoring apparatus cannot see, so metrics keep scoring against a moved target while the dashboards stay green — invisible because every detector consumes current ground truth as its reference.


Groundwater Overdraft

Diagnose an aquifer's decline as a stock-flow mismatch with embedded irreversibility — extraction outrunning the small recharge flow while the abundant stored stock creates a false sense of plenty, with part of the drawdown crossing thresholds no future pumping can buy back.


Guess 2/3 of the Average

A single-shot game where each player picks a number closest to two-thirds of the group's mean — its Nash equilibrium of zero is never reached, and because each level of iterated best-response leaves a distinct numerical signature, the modal guess reads off a population's depth of strategic reasoning.


Guilt by Association

Discredit a claim by the disreputable company it keeps — treating shared supporters, origins, or venues as a verdict on content — a relevance failure that lets no truth-value flow along co-occurrence edges without an independent causal or evidential link.


Habitat Fragmentation

The landscape-ecology process by which continuous habitat breaks into isolated patches, decomposed into three separable mechanisms — area loss, isolation, and edge amplification — each thresholded against a species' biology and each mapping to a distinct conservation instrument.


Haitz's Law

The empirical LED regularity that light output per package rises ~20x per decade while cost per lumen falls ~10x — a log-linear trajectory arising because half a dozen loss terms improve multiplicatively, used as a roadmap and a below-trend diagnostic until efficiencies hit their thermodynamic ceilings.


Haldane's Rule

Predict which sex of a species hybrid breaks down first: when one F1 sex is absent, sterile, or inviable, it is almost always the heterogametic one (XY or ZW), because its single sex chromosome cannot mask accumulated incompatibilities.


Haldane's Sieve

Explain why new beneficial mutations that are dominant fix far more often than recessive ones — because while rare an allele sits almost only in heterozygotes, so selection sees a dominant from its first copy but is blind to a masked recessive, which usually drifts to loss before homozygotes form.


Halo Effect

Explain why a judge's positive impression of one salient attribute of a target inflates ratings of its structurally unrelated attributes — treating a same-judge same-target rating correlation as an upper bound on, not an estimate of, the true trait correlation.


Halting Problem

Turing's proof that no general algorithm can decide, for every program-input pair, whether the program halts or loops forever — established by a diagonal argument that builds an adversary doing the opposite of any claimed decider's prediction about itself.


Hamiltonian Mechanics

A reformulation of classical mechanics that represents a system by conjugate coordinates and momenta in phase space and generates its entire dynamics from a single scalar Hamiltonian through symplectic flow — making conservation, symmetry, and solvability systematic calculations.


Hamilton's Rule

Predict when an allele for a costly social behaviour spreads by relocating the accounting from organism to gene: it is favoured whenever rB > C — the relatedness-weighted benefit to relatives exceeds the cost to the actor.


Handoff Loss

Locate post-transition failures at the transfer relation itself: work crossing a boundary between actors arrives degraded because a bounded artifact cannot carry the sender's tacit state, so downstream decisions run on an impoverished reconstruction.


Hardy-Weinberg Principle

Fix the exactly computable genotype baseline (p², 2pq, q²) a diploid population would reach under no evolutionary forces, so that any observed deviation becomes diagnostic evidence of which force — selection, drift, inbreeding, or technical error — is acting.


HARKing (Hypothesizing After the Results are Known)

The research practice of building a hypothesis by inspecting already-collected data and then presenting it as if it had been specified in advance, silently inflating the reported false-positive rate because the test's independence assumption is violated.


Harmful Algal Bloom

An aquatic failure mode in which algae or cyanobacteria escape nutrient, grazing, and light controls and accumulate to biomass that damages through three coupled pathways — toxin release, decomposition-driven hypoxia, and benthic shading — trailed by a slow, hysteretic recovery.


Harrod-Domar Model

Estimate an economy's sustainable growth rate as its savings rate divided by its capital-output ratio (g = s/v), giving a two-lever policy arithmetic and exposing a knife-edge equilibrium with no mechanism to return the economy to its warranted path.


Hartley's Law

Fix the maximum information a noiseless bandwidth-limited channel can carry as H = 2WT·log₂(M) — the product of a linear sample-rate factor (bandwidth) and a logarithmic resolution factor (distinguishable signal levels).


Hash Table

Store key-value pairs in a fixed-capacity array by computing each key's index with a hash function, so the address is derived from the content and lookup, insertion, and deletion run in expected-amortised O(1) independent of collection size.


Hawk–Dove Game

Model an anti-coordination contest with mutually destructive escalation as a 2x2 game whose entire equilibrium is fixed by the cost-to-prize ratio V/C — predicting a structural, tunable rate of costly conflict among fully rational players who would all prefer peace.


Hazard-Control Decay

Track the widening gap between what a safety control's paperwork says it does and what it actually does under hazard, so that a control certified sound by audit can be found silently unprotective before it fails.


HAZOP Guideword Miss

The structural failure in which a HAZOP's finite guideword-times-parameter-times-node grid never generates the deviation that later causes an incident, because the hazard fell outside the schema's coverage boundary and was never identified, safeguarded, or risk-assessed.


Headline-Body Mismatch

Diagnose a news artefact as carrying two truth-values indexed to consumption depth — the headline claiming more than the body supports because the two surfaces are written by different actors under opposed incentives, so the headline-only majority acquires an unwarranted belief.


Heap

Keep the single most extreme element instantly readable at the root of a partially ordered tree, so insert and extract cost only O(log n) under continuous churn by declining to maintain any more order than the extreme requires.


Heaps' Law

The empirical regularity that a corpus's distinct-word-type count grows as a sublinear power of the token count, V = K·N^β with β below 1, so vocabulary rises without bound ever more slowly and can be extrapolated across scale from two fitted parameters.


Hedonic Treadmill

The pattern in which subjective well-being rises or falls after a life change but drifts back toward a temperamentally stable baseline over weeks to years, because a gain-control mechanism recalibrates affective evaluation against recent experience.


Heisenbug

Name the software defect whose failure vanishes under observation because attaching a debugger, adding a print, or disabling optimization perturbs the timing window or interleaving it rides on — so disappearance-under-observation is the diagnostic tell, not evidence the bug is gone.


Hemizygosity Exposure

A recessive allele or incompatibility is phenotypically exposed when its locus is present in only one copy, because no homologous allele exists to mask its effect.


Hempel's Paradox

Expose that treating confirmation as yes/no forces the absurd conclusion that a white shoe confirms 'all ravens are black' via the contrapositive — dissolved by grading confirmation, so a non-black non-raven confirms only by a vanishing likelihood ratio.


Heteroglossia

Bakhtin's condition of a text in which multiple distinct social voices coexist within a shared utterance space and dialogically interanimate one another — each voice's meaning partly constituted by its tension with the others rather than resolved into a single authorial voice.


Hindsight Bias

The tendency, once an outcome is known, to inflate its perceived prior probability and misremember one's own judgment as closer to it than it was, because outcome knowledge is folded into the memory of the prior situation and reconstructs rather than retrieves it.


Hold-up Problem

Explain why parties who would both gain from a relationship-specific asset fail to build it: once the investment is sunk the counterparty can renegotiate against the exposed investor, and it is the anticipation of that squeeze — not the squeeze itself — that quietly distorts investment beforehand.


Holdout Problem

The bargaining failure in which a complementary surplus requiring unanimous consent lets any pivotal, non-substitutable party refuse agreement and extract a disproportionate share as the price of consent — making rational extraction, not bad faith, the equilibrium.


Homophony

Read a multi-voice passage as a hierarchy of attention — one line carrying the principal melody while the rest defer rhythmically and supply its harmonic context — a vertical relationship that fixes the texture and selects the voice-leading machinery to analyze it.


Horizon of Expectations

Explain a work's reception as the aesthetic distance between its actual features and the reconstructible set of generic and cultural expectations its first audience brought, so the same fixed text registers differently as that horizon drifts over time.


Hostile Media Effect

The perception finding that opposing partisans exposed to the same neutral coverage of a contested issue each judge it biased against their own side — via selective categorization and different standards, amplified by prior commitment — so symmetric complaint is a signal of balance, not slant.


Hotelling's Law

The result that two share-maximizing suppliers competing for uniformly distributed consumers who patronize the nearest provider converge on minimum differentiation — both clustering at the median — a share-maximizing yet welfare-minimizing equilibrium whose predictions shift in signed directions as its base-case assumptions are relaxed.


Hotelling's Rule

Treat an unextracted unit of a nonrenewable resource as a non-dividend asset, and require its net price — spot price minus marginal extraction cost — to compound at the interest rate, so the owner is indifferent between extracting now and holding for later.


Human Capital

Treat the knowledge, skills, experience, and health embodied in people as an investable capital stock — with a cost, a discounted return stream, and a depreciation rate — so schooling and health spending become commensurable investments rather than consumption.


Human Factors Analysis and Classification System

Classify an operational accident through four ordered causal strata— organizational influences, unsafe supervision, preconditions for unsafe acts, and unsafe acts—so investigation climbs past the visible operator error and routes intervention to the layer that generated it.


Humphrey's Law

Consciously attending to a well-practiced automatic skill degrades it — declarative monitoring reinvested into a proceduralized pathway fragments and slows execution, which is why the expert chokes while the novice, who has no such pathway, does not.


Hybrid Warfare

Read a conflict as one orchestrated campaign that blends conventional force, irregular, cyber, informational, and economic instruments — each calibrated to stay below or straddle the threshold that would trigger a proportionate response — so its aggregate effect exceeds any single instrument's.


Hydrothermal Circulation

The geophysical convection loop in which cold fluid descends into permeable rock, is heated at depth, becomes buoyant, and rises to vent — chemically exchanging elements with the rock along the way, which is what distinguishes it from pure thermal convection.


Hypoxia

Define oxygen shortage at the tissue level, where availability falls below what aerobic metabolism requires — so five upstream causes converge on one cellular state of oxidative-phosphorylation failure, lactate fallback, and active HIF-mediated genetic remodelling around the deficit.


Hyrum's Law

With enough users of an interface, every observable behaviour will come to be depended upon by someone regardless of the formal contract, so the cost of changing an observable is set by its dependent count, not its documented status.


Idempotent Consumer Pattern

Build a message consumer so that processing the same message any number of times has the same effect as processing it once, by remembering each message's ID in a dedup store and committing the business effect inside the same atomic boundary.


Identity Threat

The anticipated devaluation of a positively-valued self-aspect when a situational cue makes it salient — activating a defensive response that competes with the very task or belief-revision the situation demands, and wins often enough to leave measurable costs.


Idiosyncratic Reaction

Classify a rare drug harm as a distinct causal category — dose-independent, qualitatively different in kind, and confined to a small biologically-defined susceptible tail — so it is understood not as too-much-drug but as uniform exposure meeting a heterogeneous responder population.


If-by-Whiskey

Take no real position on a contested issue by splitting its loaded term into two opposite-valence conditionals, asserting an unobjectionable stance on each and indexing neither to the actual case — so every audience hears what it wants while the speaker commits to nothing.


IKEA Effect

The bias in which people value objects they built themselves above identical objects built by others — triggered specifically by successful non-trivial creator-labour, visible only in the creator's own valuation, and gone for third parties.


Illusory Superiority

The aggregate finding that a clear majority of people place themselves above their reference group's median on desirable traits — mathematically impossible — because unconstrained self-rating shifts each person slightly upward until the summed biases overflow the distributional ceiling.


Image (of a Function)

The set of values a function actually produces — im(f) = {f(x) : x in X} — a subset of the declared codomain that records what a map reaches rather than what it could in principle reach.


Image Decontextualization

The misinformation failure where an authentic, unaltered image circulates stripped of the time, place, attribution, or sequence that fixes its meaning, so an audience reads it as evidence of a situation it never recorded.


Imageability

Kevin Lynch's property of a physical environment that lets inhabitants build a vivid, navigable mental map of it, decomposed into five element classes — paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks — plus the integration that binds them into one coherent image.


Implicit Egotism

Transfer an agent's default positive evaluation of self to otherwise neutral targets linked to that self — names, birthday digits, possessions, places, or roles — so association alone tilts preference without deliberate self-reference.


Implied Reader

Recover the audience a text constructs for itself — the knowledge it presumes, inferences it expects, and role it assigns — by reading its formal choices about what to explain and what to leave implicit, distinct from author and actual reader.


Impossible Trinity

A monetary authority can hold at most two of a fixed exchange rate, free capital mobility, and independent monetary policy because interest-rate parity and balance-of-payments adjustment make the third a residual.


Impostor Syndrome

The pattern in which a demonstrably capable, externally-validated person keeps a private conviction that their competence is fake, because a non-updating self-assessment channel rereads each new success as proof the deception still works rather than as evidence of ability.


Impression Management

Shape how an audience evaluates an actor by first deciding which public image is worth pursuing, then selecting, displaying, and suppressing self-relevant cues to construct that impression under the audience's expectations and constraints.


Imputation Leakage

The model-evaluation failure in which a missing-value repair step is fit across the train/test boundary, so its parameters encode facts about the held-out rows — inflating performance that survives into the test metric, because imputation, mentally filed as data cleaning, is really a model.


Incident Command System

A pre-rehearsed, standardised organisational template that converts a chaotic multi-agency emergency into a legible, scalable command structure within minutes — fixing sections, span of control, terminology, and a planning rhythm in advance so responders instantiate an organisation rather than design one.


Incident Objectives

The short ordered list of specific, measurable, owned, time-bounded aims an Incident Commander sets each operational period, re-aiming the response periodically under uncertainty and driving the planning cycle's assignments, tactics, and period-end verification.


Inclusive Fitness

Redefine the quantity natural selection maximizes as an organism's own reproduction plus its effect on relatives' reproduction, each relative weighted by the coefficient of relatedness r, so a costly helping behaviour is favoured whenever rB exceeds C.


Income Effect

Split a consumer's demand response to a price change into the part driven purely by the shift in real purchasing power — separating it from re-optimization toward cheaper substitutes — so a good's Engel-curve slope classifies it as normal, inferior, or Giffen.


Income Elasticity of Demand

Collapse a good's whole income-demand relationship into one unit-free ratio of percentage change in quantity to percentage change in income, so its sign and position relative to one classify it as inferior, necessity, or luxury.


Incumbent Backlash

The pattern in which a market entrant threatening entrenched rents provokes established actors to mobilise accumulated non-market power — lobbying, litigation, certification, distribution control — on battlegrounds where the entrant's technical merit is irrelevant.


Inferior Good

Classify a good by the sign of its income elasticity: one whose demand falls as income rises (η_Y < 0), because a rising budget lets the consumer shift toward a preferred substitute now within reach — with the Giffen good as its extreme tail.


Infill Development

Direct new construction to vacant or underused land inside the existing serviced area rather than extending the urban footprint outward, treating already-built infrastructure as sunk capital that added density amortises, and scoring the choice on servicing cost, driving, and edge land conversion.


Inflation

Track the shrinking purchasing power of a currency by measuring the annualized percentage change in a weighted price index, isolating the common price movement shared across a basket from the relative-price shifts that carry allocative information.


Information Avoidance

Actively decline information that is freely available because the anticipated content carries disutility — affective pain, identity threat, or an unwanted obligation — so the resulting non-knowledge is a chosen decision, not an absence.


Information-Scent Failure

Diagnose a navigation failure as the surface cues a user reads before clicking — link text, labels, snippets — failing to predict the destination's content, so the user invests a click on a wrong prediction and backtracks, hunts, or abandons.


Initiative Loss

The failure mode in which an actor's decision cycle becomes structurally subordinated to an opponent's tempo, so every move is a forced reaction — a trap that faster reacting only deepens, recoverable only by changing the move-space.


Injection Weakness

The software-security failure in which untrusted data crosses into a control channel and a downstream interpreter executes it as command, query, or instruction — a collapse of the data/control boundary that a legitimate, often credential-free, input channel is enough to exploit.


Inner-Platform Effect

A system built on top of another tends to re-implement the host's facilities inside itself, badly, because the embedded sub-system's customisation surface is narrower than the host's while the requirements arriving at it are not bounded by that narrowness.


Innovation Accounting

The lean-startup practice of measuring an early-stage venture's progress by validated learning — a ledger of leap-of-faith assumptions confirmed versus outstanding — rather than by vanity financial metrics that move with spend without updating belief in the model.


Innovation Theater

The organisational pathology of performing the outward forms of innovation — labs, hackathons, accelerators, innovation officers — while none of it has a named, traversable path into capital allocation, capability, or product, so the labelled activity is structurally decoupled from what the organisation actually does.


Innovator's Dilemma

The pattern in which a well-run incumbent, by rationally listening to its best customers and enforcing gross-margin discipline, systematically defunds disruptive innovations and is displaced by entrants whose separate performance trajectory eventually intersects the mainstream.


Input Manipulation Attack

Recognize an adversary crafting inputs to a fixed decision system so it produces a preferred output, by taking as the unit of analysis the gap between the input manifold the system was specified against and the manifold the attacker can construct.


Insecure Deserialization

Recognize the weakness where a runtime reconstitutes an untrusted serialised byte stream into behaviour-bearing objects because the parser's own semantics execute code during the parse — safe only if the parser's power sits strictly below the runtime it feeds.


Instrumental variable

Recover the causal effect of a confounded treatment by finding a quantity Z that moves the treatment, reaches the outcome only through it, and is independent of the confounders — then reading the effect off the ratio of Z's reduced-form to first-stage effects, importing randomization the analyst never performed.


Integer Overflow

The failure mode where an arithmetic result exceeds a fixed-width integer field's range and the runtime silently writes back a wrapped value with no trap or flag — so downstream code trusts a number that is no longer what the computation demanded.


Inter-Annotator Agreement

Measure whether independent raters applying the same coding scheme to the same items converge, using a statistic that subtracts the agreement expected by chance from the marginal label distribution.


Intercultural Communication

The field and practice of managing communicative exchange between parties operating from distinct cultural frames, diagnosing where the same surface utterance carries different presuppositions and repairing the gap below the words that translation alone cannot close.


Interest Rate

Price the use of money over time as a percentage of principal per period, the single factor that discounts any future cash flow into a present-value equivalent and, through a web of arbitrage conditions, binds every rate in an economy into one coherent system.


Interface segregation principle

The SOLID rule that clients should not depend on interface methods they do not use — decompose a fat interface into role-specific ones sized to each consumer's usage footprint, so a contract change's blast radius is read off the boundary rather than the call graph.


Interior

Grade membership in a set by robustness rather than bare inclusion: a point lies in the interior only if some open neighborhood of it fits entirely inside the set, giving it room to spare in every direction.


Intermediate disturbance hypothesis

Species diversity peaks at intermediate levels of disturbance because two filters collapse it at the extremes — competitive exclusion when disturbance is too rare, differential mortality when it is too frequent — leaving an inverted-U with an interior maximum.


Intermediate-Scale Option (the "missing middle")

Diagnose a hollowed-out middle of some continuum — building size, price tier, credential level — not as revealed preference for the extremes but as the artefact of a specific removable rule that burdened the intermediate, so the fix is to change the rule rather than serve the extremes.


Internal validity

The property of an empirical study that warrants its causal claim within its own sample and setting — whether the observed intervention-outcome association is genuinely produced by the intervention rather than by confounders, selection, or bias — established by ruling out a closed catalog of named threats.


Interpersonal Communication

Study meaning as co-constructed turn by turn in dyadic exchange, reading every utterance on two simultaneous layers — content and relational — and tracking a small running state (common ground, face, repair) whose updates give the trajectory.


Interpreter

Execute a program directly from its source or intermediate form by looping fetch-decode-act over one unit at a time against maintained runtime state, producing no standalone binary — so the engine must be present at every run and pays a per-instruction dispatch cost.


Intertextuality

The condition of a text whose meaning is partly constituted by its relations to other texts — allusion, quotation, parody, generic convention — where a competent reader's recognition of the relation is itself part of what the text says.


Interviewer Leading

Treat every recorded answer as the sum of the respondent's underlying state and the elicitation channel's own response function, since the act of asking — wording, presupposition, anchoring, order, interviewer affect — contributes content to the answer rather than transparently retrieving it.


Introspection Illusion

People overweight felt access to their own reasons and intentions while judging others from behavior, so absence of an introspectable motive is mistaken for absence of that motive or process in oneself.


Invasive-Species Release

Explain a species' runaway spread not by its biology but by its arrival in a habitat missing the predators, pathogens, and competitors that had bounded its population in its native range.


Invention (Rhetorical Canon)

Systematically canvass the arguments available in a case by visiting a fixed catalogue of topoi in turn, treating coverage of that space — not the quality of any one argument — as the standard of adequacy, before any choice of what to advance begins.


Inverse Agonist

A ligand that binds a receptor with constitutive activity and selectively stabilizes its inactive conformation, driving output below the unliganded baseline — occupying the negative end of a signed efficacy axis, distinct from an antagonist that merely blocks.


Iron law of oligarchy

Michels's thesis that large democratic organizations inevitably develop entrenched professional leadership — not through betrayal but through three structural forces (technical necessity, mass passivity, leader self-interest) — so the 'iron' resolves into whether counter-mechanisms engage.


Iron triangle of health care

A health system's three objectives — access, quality, and cost — stand in a trilemma bound by production economics: within a fixed productivity frontier, improving any two forces worse performance on the third, so any all-corners promise is really a frontier-shifting productivity claim.


Irony

Produce meaning from a legible gap between two levels — said versus meant, character-knowledge versus audience-knowledge, expectation versus outcome — that an interpreter holds simultaneously, which is what manufactures the effects of complicity, critique, pathos, or humor.


Irrelevant conclusion

Prove a sound argument for a proposition that is not the one at issue, then treat it as settling the contested claim — a relevance failure caught by restating the question before grading the answer.


Irrelevant speech effect

The finding that serial recall of verbal material is impaired by to-be-ignored background speech — even foreign or reversed — because changing-state speech-like sound gains obligatory, pre-attentive access to the phonological store and competes with the subvocally rehearsed task codes.


IS–LM model

A two-curve diagram fixing short-run equilibrium in a closed economy: the downward IS curve where the goods market clears and the upward LM curve where the money market clears cross at one point (r*, Y*) that pins down the interest rate and output jointly.


Is-Ought Problem

Hume's principle that no purely descriptive premises can by themselves deductively entail a normative conclusion — so any move from 'is' to 'ought' requires an explicit, defensible bridging value premise, and its absence marks a category error.


Island Biogeography Theory

Predict the equilibrium species count of an isolated habitat patch as the crossing point of two opposed rates — immigration falling and extinction rising with richness — positioned by the island's area and its isolation from a source pool.


Island Rule

The evolutionary generalization that terrestrial vertebrates on islands converge on an intermediate body size — large mainland lineages shrinking to insular dwarfism, small ones enlarging to island gigantism — as one tendency pulling from both sides toward a relocated selection optimum.


Isostasy

Explain how the lithosphere adjusts vertically over a deformable denser substrate until buoyancy balances mass columns, producing crustal roots, load-driven subsidence, and post-unloading rebound.


Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

The prisoner's-dilemma stage game (payoffs T > R > P > S) played over many observed rounds, where a high enough continuation probability lets the threat of future punishment deter present defection — turning the one-shot game's unavoidable mutual defection into sustainable cooperation.


J-Curve Effect

Explain why a policy's early signal reverses sign — an initial deterioration then a larger, delayed improvement — via a time-elasticity gap between a fast price channel and a slow quantity channel, gated by the Marshall-Lerner condition.


Jailbreak Adaptation

The dynamic in which a distributed community collectively probes a deployed AI system's policy boundary, turns each bypass into a shared public good, and so out-iterates the deployer's update cycle — making the contest a rate race no single patch can win.


Janzen-Connell Hypothesis

Tropical tree diversity is maintained because host-specific enemies accumulate near adult conspecifics, so seedling survival rises with distance from the parent and falls with local conspecific density — a frequency-dependent penalty on local abundance that makes dominance self-undermining.


Jeffreys-Lindley Paradox

The result that a frequentist significance test and a Bayesian posterior-odds comparison of the same data against the same point null can reach opposite verdicts, with the disagreement growing without bound as sample size increases — because the two answer different questions.


Joint Information System

The NIMS/ICS crisis-communication structure that integrates public messaging across responding agencies into one consistent voice — treating message inconsistency as a hazard in its own right and holding the joint output coherent while leaving each agency's substantive authority intact.


Joy's Law

Recognise that most of the smartest people work for someone else — relevant expertise is distributed across the whole field and any one firm holds only a small, size-insensitive fraction — so invest in mechanisms that access external talent rather than hoarding headcount.


Just-in-Time

Replenish each production stage only when the next one consumes its input, deliberately shrinking buffers so disruption propagates instead of hiding — a coupling that pays off only when paired with the variability-reduction work that earns it.


Just-World Hypothesis

People hold a motivated belief that the world is fair; when undeserved suffering they cannot remedy threatens it, they restore the belief by re-perceiving the victim as deserving, producing victim-blaming rather than empathy.


Kairotic Window

Treat effectiveness as the coincidence of a fixed message with a bounded interval of audience receptivity (kairos, not clock-time), so an act delivered outside the window is premature or stale and cannot be rescued by improving its content.


Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency

Judge a policy efficiency-improving if the gainers could in principle fully compensate the losers and still stay ahead, reducing the whole welfare ledger to the sign of one scalar — aggregate willingness-to-pay minus willingness-to-accept — whether or not compensation is paid.


Kappa effect

A psychophysical illusion in which the perceived duration between two stimuli lengthens when they are farther apart in space and shortens when closer, because the perceptual system reconstructs elapsed time from spatial layout under an implicit constant-velocity prior.


Karst

Diagnose a landscape where acidic groundwater has dissolved soluble bedrock into a self-reinforcing hidden conduit network, so the surface no longer maps the subsurface drainage and porous-media terrain rules are suspended.


Kerckhoffs's principle

Design a cryptosystem to stay secure even when the entire algorithm is public, confining secrecy to the key alone — because a leaked key is cheaply rotated while a leaked algorithm cannot be replaced without rebuilding the whole system.


Kernel

The set of inputs a structure-preserving map sends to the identity of its target — the map's null directions — collected as a genuine subobject that carries the map's information loss and, via triviality, rank-nullity, and the isomorphism theorem, controls injectivity and reconstructs the faithful part.


Kettle logic

A defensive pattern in which an arguer offers several mutually contradictory defenses at once — each sufficient alone but jointly self-undermining — so the scatter is itself evidence that none is relied upon and the aim is deflection by volume, not vindication.


Kewpie doll effect

The pattern in which a configural set of juvenile features — big cranium, large low-set eyes, small nose and chin — pre-consciously cues the caregiving system, even in non-living entities, so response magnitude tracks how far the configuration exceeds any real infant rather than what the object is.


Key Informant

Gain deeper access to how a social system works by recruiting participants for their structural position — gatekeeper, broker, marginal participant, long-tenure incumbent, recent entrant — treating each account as positionally biased and structurally informative rather than population-representative.


Keyboard Accessibility

The design property that every interactive function in a GUI can be operated with the keyboard alone — making the keyboard a channel-redundant, complete alternative to the pointer, and the upstream contract every assistive technology depends on.


Keyboard Trap

The accessibility failure where a keyboard-only user moves focus into a UI element that receives focus but never yields it — an absorbing state in the focus-navigation graph, invisible to mouse users because a click supplies the exit edge they lack.


Kin selection

A costly gene can still spread when it makes its carrier help relatives who likely share that gene, as long as the relatedness-weighted benefit to them (rB) outweighs the cost to the actor (C).


Kinetic depth effect

The perceptual recovery of vivid 3D structure from the 2D motion of a stimulus that looks flat when static — the visual system solving an underdetermined inverse problem by adding motion as constraint under a rigidity prior.


Kinetics

Describe how fast a chemical system moves among states by relating each species' rate of change to concentrations, temperature, and catalysts through rate laws — keeping the rate-and-path question separate from the thermodynamic endpoint the system is approaching.


Kondratiev wave

The contested hypothesis that capitalist economies exhibit roughly 40-60-year cycles of expansion and contraction, driven by clusters of general-purpose innovations whose diffusion generates a long upswing, saturates, and gives way to a depressive phase in which the next techno-economic paradigm gestates — a heuristic placement ladder more than a predictive model.


Koomey's law

The empirical trajectory by which computations delivered per joule dissipated have doubled about every 1.57 years (slowing to ~2.6 after Dennard scaling broke in 2005), tracking the energy cost of a logical operation toward the Landauer floor.


Kranzberg's first law

Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral: an artifact's valence is not fixed by its properties, but neither is it zero, because by reshaping what is cheap, easy, or possible it takes a context-indexed position even when no actor intends it to.


Kuznets curve

Read income inequality's response to development as an inverted-U — rising early as a dispersion force (sectoral transition) dominates and falling late as a compression force (skills and redistributive institutions) overtakes it — while checking whether the falling limb is developmental or merely contingent institutions.


Kuznets swing

Read a roughly 15-25-year cycle in construction and investment as the interaction of two coupled lags — a slow demographic demand pulse against the multi-year build lag of long-lived capital — placing it as the medium octave between the short business cycle and the long Kondratiev wave.


Label Ambiguity

Diagnose a headline accuracy figure as a blend of two measurements — model capability in the class interior where annotators agree, and mere adjudication agreement in the boundary zone where reasonable experts split — by stratifying metrics on the inter-annotator agreement rate.


Label Shift

The distribution shift in which the label marginal P(Y) changes between training and deployment while P(X|Y) stays fixed, so a classifier's discrimination survives but its calibration and thresholds miscalibrate — correctable by re-estimating the deployment prior rather than retraining.


Lady Macbeth effect

A proposed and replication-contested pattern in which contemplating one's own wrongdoing increases the desire for physical cleansing, and cleansing after a transgression reduces the felt need for moral repair — as if the brain conflates moral and physical purity through a shared schema.


Laffer curve

Tax revenue is a non-monotone function of the rate — zero at 0% and zero at 100% — so a mechanical effect raising revenue and a behavioural base-erosion effect eroding it produce an interior revenue-maximising peak at rate 1/(1+e).


Landing-Page Test

A lean-startup demand test that publishes a page describing an unbuilt offering as if it existed, then counts costly commitment signals (sign-ups, pre-orders, deposits) from representative traffic against a pre-committed threshold — a necessary-not-sufficient gate that can kill a weak idea but never confirm a strong one.


Landslide-Dam Failure

The two-stage natural-hazard cascade in which mass wasting dams a valley, impounds a lake, and later fails — releasing a downstream outburst flood usually larger than the landslide, because the unengineered barrier is itself the hazard's storage element.


Language Sample Analysis

Elicit spontaneous language under naturalistic conditions, transcribe it with a standardized coding scheme, and score it separately across morphology, syntax, lexicon, pragmatics, and discourse against age norms, so the diagnosis reads off the dissociation profile across levels rather than any single score.


Larval Dispersal

The process by which sessile marine organisms release a transport-adapted larval stage into the water column, where currents carry it far beyond adult mobility before a cue-triggered settlement decision — so a population's demographic, genetic, and ecological scale is set by the larva, not the adult.


Last-Mile Distribution Failure

Diagnose why supplies present at a staging area cause the same harm as supplies absent — the final-leg disaggregation takes longer than the consequence window allows — splitting trunk-delivery success from the tactical-delivery success the metrics conceal.


Latent Condition

Name the dormant, pre-staged weakness in a system's defence layers — laid down by upstream decisions far from the sharp end — that produces no harm until an operational circumstance aligns it with an active failure to complete a path to an accident.


Latent-Path Activation

Explain harm that arrives while every factor is individually in-range as a previously inert causal path going live only when a rare conjunction of gating states closes every edge along it at once.


Lava Flow (Anti-Pattern)

Explain why obsolete or unused code hardens into a codebase when uncertain dependencies and inadequate verification make deletion seem riskier than indefinite retention.


Lazy Class

The code smell in which a class (or function, module, package) carries too little responsibility to justify the overhead it imposes — the defect living in the economy, not the behaviour, so a correct, clearly-named boundary can still be flagged when its carried value fails to clear its enumerable tax.


Lehman's law of conservation of familiarity

Hold the mean change shipped per release of a long-lived software system roughly constant, because the producer and consumer communities have a bounded capacity to absorb novelty, and overdrawing it forces a corrective contraction.


Lehman's law of conservation of organizational stability

Observe that a long-lived software organization's long-run work rate returns to a band set by structural parameters no matter how you push the local dials — staffing, hours, pressure — so durable throughput gains require restructuring, not loading.


Lehman's law of continuing change

The empirical software-evolution law that an E-type system — one embedded in a moving real-world environment — must be continually adapted or it progressively becomes less satisfactory, because its fitness is relational (the gap between what the code does and what the world now requires) and that gap widens monotonically while the code stands still.


Lehman's law of continuing growth

State that a long-lived software system must continually expand its functional content to retain users, because satisfaction is judged against a rising competitive reference point — adaptation alone holds fitness constant while rivals grow past it.


Lehman's law of declining quality

Read software quality as the system's fit to its present environment rather than its intrinsic defect count, so an unchanged, bug-free release still degrades in the field as the surrounding world drifts away from the conditions it was built for.


Lehman's law of increasing complexity

Observe that the structural, behavioral, and conceptual complexity of an evolving software system rises monotonically under unmanaged change — an entropy-positive default that only deliberate, non-feature restructuring can bend back down.


Lehman's law of self regulation

Treat a long-lived software project as a closed feedback loop that self-regulates around an operating point, so single-node pushes are absorbed and only structural changes to the loop durably relocate its release-size, cadence, and defect-density distributions.


Leitmotif

Bind a short recognisable figure to a referent by repeated co-occurrence so that later occurrences cue that referent — even when absent — into the audience's reading of the scene, with transformations of the figure narrating the referent's fate.


Lerner index

Collapse a firm's market power into one dimensionless number, the markup of price over marginal cost as a fraction of price, L = (P − MC) / P, which under profit maximization also equals the reciprocal of the demand elasticity the firm faces.


Levels-of-Processing Effect

The memory finding that the encoding operation applied to a stimulus — shallow structural, phonemic, or deep semantic — not time on task or intent to learn, determines the strength and durability of the resulting trace, via elaboration and distinctiveness.


Line of Effort

Structure a campaign around a condition to be created rather than terrain by laying out parallel rails of task → effect → effect → end state, each an auditable causal chain coupled to the others only at named handoff points.


Line of Operation

Organise a campaign along physical or force-orientation axes converging on an objective, collapsing an undifferentiated theatre into a few geometric rails on which decisive points, culminating points, and convergences do the planner's bookkeeping.


Linked Open Data Release

Publish a dataset as a machine-traversable RDF graph with HTTP-dereferenceable identifiers, an explicit open license, and outbound links to other graphs — so downstream systems can resolve, link into, and traverse it without bilateral negotiation.


Linus's Law

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow: defect discovery scales with the size and diversity of the pool of independent inspectors examining code — provided they are skilled, motivated, and actually reading it, not merely granted access.


Liquidity Preference

Keynes's claim that agents hold money out of three motives — transactions, precaution, and speculation — so the interest rate is the reward for parting with liquidity, set in the money market where the rate adjusts until money demanded across the three motives equals the supply the central bank controls.


Liquidity Trap

The regime where the central bank's short-rate lever stops working because the rate has hit its effective lower bound and cash and short bonds become perfect substitutes, so added base money is hoarded rather than spent and the transmission to demand is severed even as the lever still moves.


Liskov Substitution Principle

Certify that a subtype can safely replace its supertype only when it honours the supertype's full contract toward clients — weakening preconditions, strengthening postconditions, preserving invariants — regardless of taxonomy or compilability.


Litotes

Assert something by negating its contrary — 'not bad' for good, 'no small feat' for a substantial achievement — so the gap between the stated-weak negation and the conveyed-strong meaning does the work, typically intensifying under a culturally trained convention the audience must share.


Logos

Persuade through the apparent rational structure of an argument — premises, evidence, and inferential steps — so an audience reads the force as grounded in reasoning rather than in the speaker's character or its own emotion.


Long Parameter List

The code smell in which a function requires many separately-supplied inputs at its call boundary because internal complexity was offloaded onto callers — the defect being not the count but hidden co-variation structure that belongs inside the interface.


Look-Elsewhere Effect

Discount an exciting best-of-many find by the size of the search that produced it — converting a local p-value at one scanned peak into a global p-value asking whether any peak this extreme would occur anywhere, via the trials factor.


Lord's Paradox

Show that two arithmetically correct analyses of the same pre-post data — raw change scores versus baseline adjustment — can reach opposite verdicts about an effect, because adjustment is a causal-modeling choice and the two answer different questions depending on whether baseline is itself caused by group membership.


Lorenz Curve

Read a whole distribution's inequality off a single curve by plotting the cumulative share of a quantity against the cumulative share of its ranked holders, so the sag below the perfect-equality diagonal shows how concentrated it is and whether two distributions can be safely ranked.


Lotka's Law

The bibliometric regularity that the number of authors producing exactly n papers is roughly proportional to 1/n², so a small prolific head accounts for most output and a vast single-paper tail contributes little — characterizing a field by a fitted exponent, not an average.


Lucas Critique

Refuse to trust a macroeconometric model's historical coefficients for policy evaluation unless they are deep, regime-invariant parameters, because reduced-form relationships are themselves functions of the policy regime and shift the instant policy shifts.


Make-to-Order

Begin conversion of inputs into a finished good only after a confirmed customer order, placing the forecast-driven/order-driven decoupling point as far upstream as it will go so finished-goods inventory vanishes and the customer absorbs the full conversion-cycle wait.


Make-to-Stock

Produce finished goods ahead of any order against an aggregate forecast, placing the decoupling point as far downstream as it will go, so customer wait collapses to the order-to-pick interval at the price of holding cost and a binding forecast bet.


Malthusian Trap

The demographic-economic dynamic in which productivity gains trigger population growth fast enough to absorb them, pinning long-run living standards near a subsistence floor through a negative feedback loop — until either technology outruns demographic absorption or the feedback's sign reverses.


Mandela Effect

The phenomenon of shared false memories — many people independently recalling the same wrong detail — explained not by coordination or the paranormal but by schema-driven reconstructive memory running in parallel, so convergence without a communication channel is exactly what gist-over-verbatim coding predicts.


Mandelbug

Reclassify a chaotic, irreproducible software defect as deterministic-but-undersampled — triggered by a rare joint configuration of hidden state — so effort shifts from finding the right breakpoint to sampling that joint state until the configuration is caught.


Maneuver Warfare

Win by targeting the enemy's cohesion and decision-making rather than their mass — out-cycling and dislocating their command-and-control through five coupled commitments (schwerpunkt, OODA dominance, gaps-and-surfaces, mission command, maneuver) so their force cannot be brought to bear.


Manipulated Media

A representational artifact whose link to the source event it purports to depict has been silently broken — through deceptive production, attribution, or context — while it retains the surface markers audiences use to infer authenticity.


MapReduce

A distributed-computation model that processes oversized datasets in two stages — a stateless map over each record and a key-scoped associative reduce — so that once the programmer honours that contract, the runtime handles parallelism, fault tolerance, and locality, with the shuffle as the single cost-governing synchronization point.


Marine Heatwave

Turn a noisy ocean-temperature record into countable events by flagging where daily sea-surface temperature stays above the 90th-percentile climatology for five-plus days, so cumulative thermal dose — not peak — predicts ecological cascade.


Marine Protected Area

Recover a marine ecosystem with a purely negative, spatial lever — a legible perimeter plus an enforced use-restriction that lifts chronic extraction so the system's own already-present recovery machinery runs — its success set by five design parameters, not by drawing the line.


Marine Protected Area Network

A deliberately designed spatial arrangement of ocean reserves whose combined performance — through spacing calibrated to larval dispersal, habitat representation across nodes, and replication against single-node failure — exceeds what any single reserve of equal total area could achieve, because conservation outcomes are set by network architecture, not aggregate area.


Marine Snow

Treat the downward flux of aggregated particulate matter from the surface ocean to depth as the biological carbon pump's transport limb — where the load-bearing step is aggregation, once a floc's settling velocity overtakes the column's turbulent mixing and it sinks coherently.


Mark-to-Market Cliff

The discontinuous worsening of a financial position when a continuously-marked value crosses a contractual threshold, waking a dormant clause whose enforcement — forced selling, collateral calls, cross-default — pushes the reference further in the direction that tripped it.


Market power

Gauge an actor's ability to profitably set price above (or wages below) the competitive level by reading the slope of the downward-sloping residual demand curve it faces, quantified as the price-cost wedge (P − MC)/P.


Market Pull

The innovation situation in which articulated demand-side need — customers naming a problem and willing to pay — directs the search of developers and investors and pulls solutions into existence; the demand-side pole of the push/pull dichotomy, keyed to where the binding constraint sits.


Martha Mitchell effect

Diagnose the trap in which an evaluator discounts a true but improbable report as delusional purely on its low prior probability, never testing whether its external referent is real.


Mass Assignment

The web-application vulnerability in which a request-binding layer writes all client-supplied fields directly to a domain object with no allow-list, letting a caller set server-managed attributes like role or owner_id simply by naming them.


Mass Wasting

Predict whether a slope fails by comparing resisting to driving force on a specified shear surface as a single factor-of-safety ratio, stable above unity and failing below it, with gravity as the sole transport agent.


Matching

Cast a pairing problem as a largest (or minimum-cost, or perfect) set of pairwise vertex-disjoint edges on an explicit graph, then split on bipartiteness to select the theorems and polynomial-time algorithm that solve it.


Matching pennies

Force randomization with the smallest strictly-competitive game — a matcher wins on agreement, a mismatcher on difference — where the best-response cycle admits no pure equilibrium and each player must mix to leave the opponent indifferent.


Matrix

Encode a linear map, a system Ax=b, a bilinear form, or a graph's adjacencies as one rectangular array under a single arithmetic, so derived quantities like rank and a menu of factorizations (LU, QR, spectral, SVD) read the structure off directly.


Maverick Spend

Read off-contract buying not as indiscipline but as rational channel selection — local units declining a coordination tax that exceeds the central channel's marginal value — so the lever is closing the friction differential, not policing, and enforcement-only pushes spend further underground.


Maximum sustainable yield

The largest catch removable from a renewing population indefinitely, which under logistic growth peaks not at maximum stock but at half the carrying capacity — a static optimum that is dynamically unstable from above and so a dangerous target under measurement uncertainty.


McGurk effect

Show that speech perception is intrinsically multimodal: a face articulating /ga/ over an audio /ba/ is heard as /da/, because the auditory and visual streams are fused into a single percept — by reliability-weighted, coherence-gated combination — before the result reaches awareness.


McNamara fallacy

The decision-making error in which the measurable progressively displaces the important through a four-step ratchet — measure the measurable, arbitrary-value the rest, presume it unimportant, then declare it nonexistent — until an institution optimizes a proxy while its true objective silently drifts away.


Meander Cutoff

Read a river's sinuous life cycle as a single feedback in which outer-bank erosion both lengthens the loop and narrows its neck until a flood breaches it, abruptly capturing flow through a shorter steeper path and abandoning the loop as an oxbow.


Means-End Analysis

A greedy problem-solving heuristic that repeatedly finds the most significant difference between the current and goal states, applies the operator that most reduces it, and recurses on any unmet preconditions as sub-goals.


Media Convergence

Explain the reshaping of media not as individual channels dying but as a shared digital substrate dissolving the boundaries between print, broadcast, telephony, and computing, with the erosion propagating up technological, industrial, and cultural layers.


Media Ecology

The media-studies framework (Innis, McLuhan, Postman) that treats media not as neutral channels but as environments whose form — independent of content — shapes perception, cognition, institutions, and culture over decades, asking what the substrate of saying makes possible, natural, or invisible rather than what is being said.


Media Event

Mark off a pre-planned, reverently-broadcast live ceremony from ordinary news by the way its audience's simultaneous co-attention — each viewer knowing millions watch and that they know it — is what constitutes the rite and reconstitutes an imagined polity.


Media Richness Theory

Match a task's ambiguity to a medium whose cue capacity, feedback immediacy, language variety, and personal focus are sufficiently rich, diagnosing under- and over-richness as channel–task mismatch.


Media Synchronicity

Match a communication medium to a task by decomposing the medium into five capabilities and reducing the task to one bit — convergence (build shared meaning fast and jointly) versus conveyance (transmit information the receiver processes at their own pace) — so higher synchronicity is not always better.


Median Voter Theorem

Under majority rule with single-peaked preferences on one policy dimension, binary competition converges to the median voter's ideal point, because that position is the unique Condorcet winner — any platform away from it is beaten by one moving closer.


Medical Error

Classify a preventable failure of a planned clinical action—commission, omission, wrong plan, or correct plan executed incorrectly—whether or not harm results, and analyze it through the care process and defenses that allowed it or caught it.


Medication Error

Any preventable deviation in the medication-use pipeline that could expose a patient to unintended pharmacologic action, whether or not harm results — a defence-in-depth failure whose harm rate is the product of escape probabilities across every stage, so leverage lies in downstream catch rates, not upstream error counts.


Meeting Inflation

The organizational pathology in which coordination meetings multiply until they consume more capacity than the work they coordinate — driven by coordination cost scaling super-linearly with dependency density while each scheduler prices a meeting linearly.


Membership Inference Attack

Determine whether a specific record was in a model's training set by reading the systematic behavioural gap — lower loss, higher confidence — between the samples it saw and statistically matched samples it did not.


Memory (Rhetorical Canon)

The fourth classical rhetorical canon: the orator's living, indexed archive of arguments, examples, and passages — acquired before performance, organized for retrieval, and reachable under the pressure of a live occasion, not rote recall of a fixed script.


Memory Management

The policy and machinery by which a running program acquires regions of a finite address space at the point of use and safely releases them once no longer reachable or owned — bridging the gap between logic-driven allocation and reachability-driven reclamation against a memory budget.


Mental Rotation

The cognitive process of imagining an object rotating continuously through intermediate orientations to align it with a comparison object before judging a match — diagnosed by reaction time that scales linearly with angular disparity.


Mere Ownership Effect

The finding that merely possessing an object — even briefly, even when assigned at random — raises a person's evaluation of it, because the self's positive bias transfers to whatever gets tagged 'mine' ('mine is good because I am good').


Merge Conflict

Halt an automatic merge and hand the decision to a human exactly where two branches diverged from their common ancestor on the same region, because a three-way merge over text can rank a one-sided edit but has no syntactic basis to choose between two competing edits whose correctness lives in intent it cannot see.


Mesoscale Eddy

Treat a rotating ocean structure 10-500 km across as a discrete carrier that seals a water parcel inside closed streamlines and translates it across the mean flow, so basin-scale heat, salt, and nutrient transport becomes bookkeeping over a census of carriers rather than a diffusive smear.


Message Sidedness

Specify whether a persuasive message presents only the favoring arguments (one-sided) or also acknowledges and rebuts the opposing case (two-sided), a design variable that trades larger immediate attitude shift against more durable resistance to later counter-persuasion.


Metabolic Inactivation

The enzymatic transformation of a biologically active substance into a less-active product that ends its effect — organised into phase-I functionalisation and phase-II conjugation, it sets a drug's half-life and makes interactions and variability a bookkeeping question over shared enzymes.


Metamorphism

Read a rock's solid-state mineral and textural transformations as a legible record of the temperature, pressure, and fluids it passed through — recovering its conditions and tectonic history from equilibrium silicate assemblages via facies, index minerals, and thermobarometry.


Method-as-Metadata

The cataloging move of recording how a resource was produced or what procedure it employs as a first-class, controlled-vocabulary field — orthogonal to topic, creator, date, and form — so a corpus becomes filterable by technique without reading each item.


Microcopy Ambiguity

The HCI failure where a terse interface label admits more than one reading, so the user decompresses it against a prior different from the designer's and acts correctly on the wrong interpretation.


Middle Ground Fallacy

Detect the error of concluding the truth must lie between two opposed positions merely because they are opposed — substituting a positional operation for an evidential one — by asking whether the midpoint keeps its credibility once one position is shown unsupported.


Middle-Income Trap

The growth deceleration where a country that rose from low to middle income via factor accumulation stalls before high income, because the engines of the first regime exhaust while the qualitatively different capabilities of an innovation-led regime are not yet built.


Milestone Theater

Read a green milestone as a signal with its own production economics rather than a fact — the multi-clause readiness it was meant to certify can be marked done with clauses deferred, so test it by asking what would look different had it genuinely been met.


Milk Run

Consolidate many small point-to-point shipments into one high-utilization loop by running a single vehicle on a fixed scheduled circuit of pickup points, trading routing flexibility for an arrival window each point can plan around.


Miller's Law (7 ± 2)

Miller's finding that immediate human recall is capped at a small integer of chunks (~7, later corrected nearer four) — separating a bounded item count from unbounded content per item, so the only way to hold more is to recode the unit, not widen the channel.


Mimesis

The classical aesthetic concept of selective, shaped representation of action or reality in art, where dropping some features and amplifying others is not failed copying but the mechanism that makes the subject more visible than raw experience would.


Min–Max Inventory

An inventory policy that manages stock inside a declared band — replenishing up to a maximum ceiling only once on-hand falls to a minimum reorder point, and doing nothing in between — collapsing continuous order decisions into two scalars per item.


Minority Game

Model any anti-coordination setting as an odd population repeatedly choosing between two actions where only the minority side wins, reading collective volatility off one control parameter — strategy diversity relative to population — that fixes a sharp crowded-versus-dilute phase transition.


Minsky Moment

The financial collapse in which an extended calm endogenously breeds its own undoing — leveraged actors drift from hedge to speculative to Ponzi finance until a modest trigger reveals the hidden fragility and forces a cascade of fire-sale deleveraging; stability is destabilizing.


Misinformation Effect

The memory phenomenon in which information encountered after an event is silently integrated into the recollection of that event — a source-monitoring failure of reconstructive memory that produces confident, sincere recall of things that did not happen.


Missing Denominator

Expose a count that only looks like information by firing one substrate-independent question — out of how many? — since a numerator reported without its reference population wears the shape of a rate while blocking every quantitative inference the reader needs.


Missing Middle Housing

Name the absent band of small multi-unit building types between detached houses and large apartment blocks as a regulatory artifact of single-family zoning, making the bimodal housing stock a diagnosable problem with an enumerable reform target.


Mitigation Neglect

Diagnose chronic underinvestment in prevention as a default of the accounting, not agency negligence: a concrete present cost loses period by period to immediate priorities because the avoided future harm stays invisible until an event forces the same action later at a premium.


Mixed Strategy Equilibrium

Solve a game with no stable deterministic play by having each player randomize over their actions in exactly the proportions that leave every opponent indifferent, so no one can profitably deviate.


Mixed-Use Development

Keep a district alive across the whole day by co-locating complementary land uses whose activation peaks stagger to cover the off-hours, tuned through frontage allocation.


Mode Error

The interaction failure in which the same user action is interpreted differently by a system depending on a hidden mode the user does not perceive — the user acts correctly for the mode they believe is active, and the system, in the actually active mode, does something else.


Model Checking

Verify a system by taking a finite-state model plus a temporal-logic property and exhaustively exploring every reachable state to decide whether the property holds universally, returning a concrete counterexample trace on failure.


Model Inversion Attack

Recover the content of individual training records by treating a deployed model as a constrained inverse oracle — combining predictions-as-evidence with a prior over the input space to solve for the generating input, so 'the model is not the data' becomes a quantitative claim.


Model Skewing

The adversarial AI-security attack in which a stream of individually-unflaggable, region-biased inputs to an online learning loop gradually pulls a model's decision boundary off the deployer's criterion toward one the attacker prefers — capturing a deployment that launched clean.


Model Theft

Clone a deployed model's valuable function from its outputs alone by treating it as a high-bandwidth oracle — querying it, harvesting (input, prediction) pairs, and fitting a substitute — so the IP boundary becomes a price set by extraction cost, not a wall.


Modigliani–Miller theorem

Establish that in a frictionless capital market a firm's total value is independent of its debt-equity mix — enforced by investors replicating corporate leverage on personal account — so every real financing decision reads as that baseline minus a catalog of named frictions.


Modulation

The process by which a tonal work shifts its operative key from one pitch to another mid-piece — most often via a pivot chord readable in both keys — re-anchoring the listener's harmonic reference frame, the destination confirmed by cadence rather than merely brushed against.


Momentum

Capture a system's quantity of motion as the conserved additive vector p = mv, so any interaction — however messy inside — collapses to an algebraic balance where the total before equals the total after up to external impulse.


Money Illusion

The tendency to respond to nominal monetary figures as if they were real, inflation-adjusted amounts — failing to apply the purchasing-power deflator — so behavior tracks the observed nominal quantity over the real one it should weigh.


Money Multiplier

The relation by which one unit of base money supports up to 1/r units of bank deposits through the chained redeposit of fractional-reserve lending — a causal lever where the reserve fraction binds, but only an ex-post accounting ratio where the central bank accommodates reserve demand.


Monophony

Classify a musical texture as one independent melodic line sounding at a time — no harmonic accompaniment, no counter-voice, octave-doubling still counting as one — which loads the entire structural and expressive burden onto that lone line.


Monopolistic Competition

A market structure where many small firms each sell a differentiated product — giving each a downward-sloping demand curve and local pricing power — while free entry erodes any profit until price equals average cost, leaving excess capacity as the standing signature.


Monopsony power

Gauge a buyer's ability to set the price it pays below the competitive level by the slope of the upward-sloping residual supply curve it faces (finite elasticity ε), which yields a markdown of roughly 1/ε and the double distortion of underpayment plus under-hiring.


Monty Hall problem

A worked three-door puzzle in which switching wins 2/3 of the time because the host's reveal was constrained by what he knew — drilling the move of updating on the protocol that produced an observation, not on its bare surface.


Mooers's law

The retrieval-system regularity that a system tends not to be used whenever having the information is more troublesome than not having it — adoption governed by the per-query cost-benefit ratio against a substitute, not the content's absolute value.