Frictionless Benchmark Reasoning

A precisely stated idealised case yields a sharp invariance, irrelevance, or efficiency result that is then used not as an empirical claim but as a coordinate system against which the real world is decomposed into separately named and measured deviations.


Functional Redundancy (Degeneracy)

Multiple pathways fulfill same function.


Fungibility

Any unit of a class substitutes for any other without loss, erasing individual identity in favor of type and quantity.


Funnel Analysis

Reading per-stage attrition across an ordered sequence to localize where a population is lost and which stage binds the final yield.


Future Or Promise

A first-class placeholder for a value committed to be supplied later.


Fuzzing

Generating inputs from a wider-than-designed distribution to surface latent failures.


Gain Control

A slow secondary loop continuously retunes the gain of a fast forward signalling pathway so it stays in its useful range across changing input statistics.


Gall's Law

A complex working system is reached only through a connected chain of simpler systems that each worked, never by from-scratch design of the whole.


Garbage Collection

Reclaiming resources that nothing reachable from a declared root can still use.


Garbage In, Garbage Out

The quality of a transformation's output is bounded above by the quality of its inputs; no downstream sophistication can repair defects already present in the input.


Gatekeeping

An actor or mechanism at a choke point exercises selective passage control, shaping the downstream distribution in ways the audience cannot directly observe.


Geometric Chronology

Read temporal order from the spatial or geometric structure a sequence of events leaves in a preserving medium.


Goal Shielding

While pursuing an active goal, suppressing access to competing goals that would compromise it, releasing the suppression only once the active goal ends.


Good Regulator Theorem

Every effective regulator of a system must be, or must contain, a model of that system.


Goodhart's Law

When a proxy is placed under binding optimization pressure, its correlation with the construct it was meant to indicate collapses.


Governance

The durable architecture of authority, accountability, and decision rights through which a group makes binding collective choices and resolves disputes internally.


Gradient

Distribution and change over space/time.


Gradual Deterioration

The incremental, often invisible decay of a system as sub-threshold stressors accumulate damage until capacity collapses, posing greater risk precisely because the slow progression is easy to overlook.


Grain of Analysis

The choice of the level of decomposition at which an operation is applied to a phenomenon, relative to the level at which the phenomenon's structure actually exists, where mismatch in either direction silently corrupts the operation's results.


Graph Coloring

Conflict-free labeling so that no two items joined by a conflict edge share a label.


Greedy Algorithm

Committing irrevocably to the locally best choice at each step, with no lookahead.


Green-Beard Effect

Cooperation is sustained by a single observable marker that is both correlated with the cooperative disposition and recognizable by fellow carriers.


Gresham's Law

Under enforced price parity over goods of differing quality, holders withdraw the better good and the worse good concentrates in the channel.


Ground Truth

A reference channel designated authoritative for scoring another, itself a fallible construct.


Group

A set with an associative operation, identity, and inverses — reversible composable transformations.


Group Cohesion

The forces that bind members into a unified group.


Habit

A cue-triggered, automatically executed action sequence that persists under outcome devaluation.


Habituation

Repeated exposure to a stimulus that proves inconsequential progressively reduces the response to it, with stimulus specificity, recovery after a pause, and restoration by a novel stimulus distinguishing habituation from fatigue or sensory failure.


Habituation to Repeated Signal

A signal channel meant to recruit attention to a flagged condition loses its recruiting power as exposure accumulates, through the compounding of receiver habituation and base-rate degradation, until the channel is noisily active but informationally bankrupt.


Harmonic Distortion

Passing a signal through a nonlinear transfer function generates new frequency components — harmonics and intermodulation products — absent from the input, an artifact of the nonlinearity itself rather than of any sampling or discretization.


Hashing

Deterministically reducing any object to a short fixed-size token used as its handle.


Heavy-Tailed Distributions

Distributions where rare, extreme events carry most of the weight.


Hebbian Learning

A connection between two units strengthens as a function of their correlated activity, through a local, correlational, unsupervised, cumulative update.


Helpful-Inflow Displacement

Unsolicited, pro-socially motivated inflow whose coordination cost exceeds its operational value displaces rather than augments the primary work, because a coordinator-gate must absorb the handling cost and the social cost of refusal blocks clean decline.


Hidden Information Reconstruction

An observer combines a system's disclosed outputs with a prior over possible inputs to reconstruct a protected input to whatever resolution the prior permits, so privacy is a property of the (system, adversary-prior) pair rather than of the disclosure surface alone.


Hierarchical Address

A single string whose substring structure encodes a path through a tree, so the identifier simultaneously names an entity and locates it within a containment hierarchy.


Hierarchical Decomposability

Nested decomposition where within-level coupling dominates over cross-level coupling, making complex systems tractably analyzable one scope at a time.


Hierarchy

Organizes elements into levels or ranks.


Higher Order Function

Treating a rule itself as a first-class object that other rules consume or produce.


Holarchy

Nested ordering in which each unit is at once an autonomous whole and a dependent part.


Holdout Set

Reserve a disjoint portion of evidence to score a candidate it never shaped.


Hypothesis Testing (Null vs. Alternative)


Idealized-Substrate Fallacy

Designing against a friction-stripped idealized substrate, then deploying onto a real one where the elided terms dominate.


Identifiability

Whether an internal unknown can in principle be uniquely recovered from the observable signal a system makes available.


Identification

One party aligns belief or action with another because it recognizes itself — its values, memberships, identity — in the other, with persuasion proceeding via self-concept rather than argument.


Identifier Assignment

Mint a durable handle for an entity and bind it to that entity in a public, queryable record, so future reference can route through the handle without re-describing the entity.


Identity Element

A distinguished input leaves every compatible element unchanged under a stated operation, supplying the do-nothing case that makes empty composition possible.


Identity-Providing Kind

A category whose membership fixes what it takes for an instance to remain the same instance over time, supplying persistence criteria rather than a temporary description.


Identity Test

The rule that decides, in a given system, when two presentations refer to the same entity.


Immutability

State that cannot be modified after creation.


Impartiality

Treatment that depends only on relevant features and is invariant under the identity of the party involved.


Impedance Mismatch and Coupling Efficiency

Property differences reduce energy or signal transfer efficiency.


Implementation Intention

Pre-binding a specific future cue to a specific action so that at execution time the cue triggers the behavior without re-deliberation.


Improvisation

Real-time generation of competent moves from an internalized vocabulary, against a backbone of constraint, in response to the developing situation.


Imputation

Filling missing values from patterns in the available data under an explicit missingness assumption, with the imputation uncertainty propagated downstream.


In-Group / Out-Group

Partition of a social field into an identified 'us' and a contrasted 'them'.


Incentive

A deliberately placed payoff signal attached to a behavior at a leverage point.


Incident Response

A system facing acute, time-critical disruption engages a temporary command regime that prioritises stabilisation over diagnosis, accepts reversible degradation, defers root-cause analysis, and compresses decision authority for the duration of the acute phase only.


Incomplete Contract

A rule-set that deliberately leaves gaps and designates a handler to fill them.


Inconsistent Shared Model

Subsystems hold mutually incompatible models of the same external state, undetected until a forcing event requires joint action.


Increasing Returns

Marginal benefit of each additional unit rises rather than falls as the cumulative state grows, compounding advantage.


Index

An auxiliary key-to-location table that makes lookup fast at the cost of maintenance.


Indexicality

Sign refers to its object through an actual existential or causal connection rather than resemblance or convention.


Informal Enforcement

Norm compliance sustained by decentralized social sanction rather than formal authority.


Informal Fallacy

A named, recurring pattern of defective argument whose error lies not in logical form but in content, context, or the relevance and acceptability of its premises — so it can be valid in form yet still fail as reasoning.


Information Asymmetry

Parties to an interaction hold unequal private knowledge.


Information Cascade

The sequential dynamic in which actors copy earlier actors' visible choices and suppress their own private signals, driving collective convergence that can be confidently wrong.


Information Hiding

Deliberately concealing internal facts behind a stable public surface to control dependencies.


Information Locality

Responsibility for a decision, guarantee, or interpretation belongs at a level that possesses the information required to discharge it; less-informed levels may assist but cannot make the result correct.


Information Scent

An agent navigates a partially-known space by reading local cues at decision points that predict the value of going further, with cue-destination correlation governing traversal efficiency.


Information Use License

Transmit information under a durable agreement that permits some downstream uses while barring others until a defined upgrade, release, exception, or expiry occurs.


Inheritance

Transmitting structure along a lineage by default, with selective override.


Inherited-Substrate Risk

A system built on a borrowed or inherited substrate carries forward latent conditions of the substrate's origin through an inheritance channel that the new system's audit boundary does not cross, so the risk concentrates exactly where attention does not.


Inhibition

An external agent actively slows, blocks, or reduces an otherwise-active transformation by occupying or counteracting the mechanism that would carry it forward.


Injectivity

A distinctness-preserving mapping in which distinct inputs never collide on one output.


Innovation Sandbox

A bounded enclosure where prohibited or untested behaviour runs without its consequences escaping.


Inoculation Theory

An adaptive system is made resistant to a future threat by pre-exposing it to a weakened form plus a successful refutation, so its defensive machinery activates and generalizes in advance.


Input Partition

One incident quantity is split among mutually exclusive output channels whose amounts or fractions exhaust the input, so changing one share necessarily changes at least one other under a closure constraint.


Input Pressure

A sustained external input rate acts as the load variable a bounded receiving system must absorb or respond to.


Inquiry-Change Learning Loop

Couple model-guided change in a real setting to measurement and durable model revision, carrying each cycle's evidence into the next action so inquiry and practice learn from the situation they jointly remake.


Inspection Paradox

When sampling proceeds by encountering items rather than enumerating them, longer items are over-represented in proportion to their length.


Institution

A durable, self-reproducing complex of rules, roles, and shared expectations.


Institutional Lag

Formal institutions change slower than underlying conditions.


Instrument Interpretive Drift

A measurement instrument's interpretive practice silently shifts over time while its stated specification stays fixed, contaminating longitudinal trends.


Integer Linear Programming (ILP)

Discrete optimization with integer variables.


Interface

A bounded, rule-governed surface across which two systems exchange information or control while hiding their internals, letting each evolve independently behind a stable contract.


Interface Mismatch

Two systems that are locally workable fail to compose because what one exposes at their required exchange boundary does not satisfy what the other can accept, including the limiting case where the needed handoff surface is absent.


Interfacial Energy

A per-unit-boundary cost that scales with seam length rather than bulk, driving systems toward configurations with less total boundary unless opposed.


Interference and Contention

Competing demands for shared bottleneck degrade throughput.


Interior Lines

A centrally-positioned actor with shorter paths to multiple fronts converts a positional property into a reaction-time advantage, reallocating a shared reservoir faster than a dispersed periphery can coordinate.


Interleaving

Mixing topics during practice to improve discrimination and retention.


Internal Intensification

A system needing more capacity densifies, deepens, or re-uses underused positions inside its existing boundary before expanding the boundary outward, a choice between two qualitatively different cost structures that compounds over the trajectory of growth.


Internalization

Adopting external norms as one's own internal standards.


Interpretation

Recover meaning from a representational substrate under a framework that makes some readings available and others not.


Intersection

The elements common to all of several collections.


Intervention

Externally fixing a variable's value, severing its normal upstream causes while retaining its downstream effects.


Intervention-Coupled Harm

A beneficial intervention produces its harm through the same causal channel that produces its benefit, so the two cannot be tuned apart.


Intervention-Induced Model Invalidation

When a model or calibrated relationship is used to choose or implement an intervention, the intervention changes the behavior or data-generating process the model described, so its pre-intervention parameters no longer transport to the regime it helped create.


Intervention Stack Accretion

A system accumulates concurrently active interventions, each justified at add-time, whose joint cost grows super-linearly and whose removal requires a distinct named operation.


Intrinsic Ceiling vs Input

An intervention is characterised by two independent and routinely conflated parameters — the intrinsic ceiling of effect it can produce, and the input required to push the response close to that ceiling — which can vary separately and which determine the right choice depending on which binds.


Invariance

Properties unchanged under transformation.


Invasive Species

A newcomer enters a system whose native controls are absent or weak against it, and outpaces them to spread and displace incumbents before the system can adapt.


Inverted Pyramid

A communication ordered so the most decision-relevant content appears first, in decreasing order of importance, degrading gracefully under truncation from the bottom.


Inverted-U Response

A response variable rises with a driver, peaks at an interior optimum, then falls — a single-peaked non-monotone relationship in which the same lever that helps below the peak reverses sign and harms above it.


Invisible Affordance

A capability, right, or action-possibility genuinely exists in a system, but the surfaces a prospective user reliably samples carry no signal of its existence, so the user's effective option-set excludes it despite its being real and available.


Irreducible Floor

A quantity of interest has a structural lower (or upper) bound that the available proximate levers cannot push past without inducing pathology elsewhere, because the floor is a consequence of the system's generating mechanism rather than a target the operator chose.


Jevons Paradox

Improving the efficiency with which a resource is used lowers the effective price of its output, expands demand, and can raise total resource consumption rather than lower it.


Joint Attention

Two or more agents share an attentional target and each knows the other attends to it.


Joint vs. Separate Evaluation

The same option is ranked differently when evaluated alongside alternatives than when evaluated in isolation against an internal reference, because each evaluation mode makes a different subset of attributes evaluable and thus carries the verdict.


Journalistic Objectivity

A claim is licensed by a procedure whose authority depends on holding the verifier structurally outside the interests at stake, so preferred-outcome leakage is made expensive.


Kairos

An action's effectiveness depends not on its own quality but on its alignment with a transient state of the receiving system — a window that opens and closes.


Keynesian Beauty Contest

The rational choice is not what you most prefer, nor what you think others prefer, but what you think others believe others will choose.


Knowledge-Action Gap

An agent holds accurate knowledge of the appropriate action, sincerely intends to take it, and systematically does not — because knowing and doing are separable load-bearing states and intervention on the knowing channel does not, by itself, change the doing channel.


Last Mile Delivery

The final segment from a consolidated trunk to heterogeneous individual endpoints costs disproportionately, and its share of total cost grows as upstream efficiency improves.


Last-Mile Failure

A distribution network's per-unit cost, latency, and failure rate spike at the final stage where its geometry fans out from few-trunks-carrying-much to many-leaves-each-carrying-little, so upstream throughput overstates endpoint coverage.


Latency

The irreducible delay between an input and the system's response.


Latent Realizable Capacity

A power, disposition, or function that exists in a bearer continuously but manifests only when its triggering conditions are met.


Latent Service Bundle

A sustaining system silently renders a multi-category bundle of benefits to diffuse, unbilled beneficiaries, and because no single category sits on a price ledger the bundle is invisible to decision-makers who consult only the invoice and so systematically under-value it.


Lateral Inhibition

Active elements suppress their neighbours, sharpening contrast.


Law of Conservation of Complexity

Every problem has an irreducible complexity floor that design can shift between parties or moments but cannot reduce below the floor.


Law of Large Numbers

As observations accumulate under a stable probabilistic generating process, their empirical average or relative frequency converges to the corresponding expectation, without imposing any balancing obligation on a particular finite sample or next trial.


Law of the Instrument

The tools an agent possesses systematically bias what it recognises as a problem, what category the problem is sorted into, and what intervention is generated — the world's joints get carved into shapes the tool can grip, and joints it cannot grip become invisible.


Layered Accumulation

Sequential time-ordered deposition in which each new layer rests atop the prior ones, so the position of a layer encodes when it formed and the stack becomes a readable record of history.


Lazy Evaluation

Defer work until its result is actually demanded.


Lead-and-Support Hierarchy

When multiple simultaneous channels carry related content, one channel takes the lead while the others provide coordinated, structurally subordinate support that actively defers to it in prominence, timing, and register, producing a figure-ground hierarchy across the channels.


Learning

Durable, experience-driven update of an agent's internal state that carries forward to alter later behavior or prediction.


Learning Curve Effects

Unit cost falls predictably with cumulative production experience.


Learning-Substrate Contamination

An adversary writes future behavior indirectly by selectively contaminating the experience or evidence from which an agent durably updates, so the agent later and faithfully enacts a distortion installed before the decision.


Legacy Integration

Maintains knowledge and identity across organizational discontinuities.


Legibility

A distant actor makes heterogeneous local reality governable by projecting it into standardized, simplified representations, gaining comparison and control while discarding context the scheme cannot see.


Legitimacy-Yielding Inquiry Insulated from Decision

An organisation runs an inquiry, consultation, or review whose nominal purpose is to inform a decision but whose findings are structurally insulated from changing it, so the activity persists because it confers legitimacy rather than because it informs.


License as Coordination

A standing license replaces repeated bilateral permission bargaining with published terms covering a class of actors and uses, so each participant can coordinate by checking the rule rather than renegotiating access.


Liebig's Law of the Minimum

A system's output is governed by whichever of its non-substitutable required inputs is in shortest relative supply, not by the total or average.


Lindy Effect

For entities that do not age, the longer they have already survived, the longer their expected remaining survival becomes.


Linear Combination

Scale each of several objects by a weight and add them together.


Linear Independence

No member of a collection is reproducible as a weighted sum of the others.


Linear Programming (LP)

Optimize linear objective with constraints.


Linearization-Meaning Mismatch

Multi-dimensional content forced through a serial channel is ordered by a principle that does not match the one the consumer reasons by.


Livelock

Coupled agents stay active and responsive yet make no progress, their every move triggering a compensating move that locks the joint state in a futile cycle.


Load Balancing

Distributing work across resources so none is overloaded.


Loading Dose

Delivering an initial input larger than the steady-state input to bring a stock rapidly into its working range, then dropping back to a maintenance rate.


Local Optimum

A point best within its neighborhood but not across the whole landscape.


Local Sequence Legality

The acceptability of an arrangement of units drawn from a finite inventory is decided by local constraints over short windows of context, prior to and independent of higher-level interpretation, so global legality is the composition of local verdicts.


Local-to-Global Aggregation

Locally checkable properties promote to a global verdict under an explicit aggregation discipline.


Locality Of Reference

Accesses cluster in time and space, making prediction and caching effective.


Located-In Relation

One entity is situated within the region of another at a time, without that entity being a part of, or strictly contained by, the location.


Lock-In

Forward-looking cost of switching exceeds the forward-looking cost of staying, even when a superior alternative exists.


Logarithmic Perception and Encoding

Systems operating over wide dynamic range encode magnitude as its logarithm, so equal internal steps mean equal ratios.


Logging

Record events as they occur, append-only, for inspection after the fact.


Logistic Growth

The self-limiting sigmoid trajectory that arises whenever growth feeds itself but is multiplicatively braked as it approaches a finite ceiling.


Logistics Overreach

An operating front advances faster than the trailing supply line that sustains it, and because the lengthening line itself consumes delivery, beyond a crossover point further advance strands what has already advanced rather than extending reach.


Loss And Damage

The residual harm that passes through after every layer of defense, treated as its own accounting unit and assigned a bearer and a policy.


Mach's Principle

The thesis that a body's inertia is not intrinsic but arises from its relation to the total distribution of matter in the universe, making local inertial structure a consequence of global contents.


Maintenance

Sustained preventive work that keeps a system's intended function intact against inevitable degradation, acting ahead of failure rather than repairing after it.


Maintenance Rehearsal

Holding a decay-prone state above its disappearance threshold by repeated low-cost refresh actions that re-assert it without enriching or moving it.


Majority-Dominated Aggregate Objective

An aggregate objective whose mass lies with the majority systematically underweights an operationally important minority.


Managed Retreat

Withdrawing deliberately and in advance to a defensible boundary when the cost of holding a position rises past its value, before forced displacement closes the option.


Maneuver

Deliberately changing one's position in a state space whose positions differ in advantage, so the new position confers advantage without a direct contest of resources.


Manifold

A space that is locally flat but globally curved or topologically non-trivial.


Manufactured Dependency for Role Capture

An agent covertly sustains a problem to keep occupying the valued role attached to solving it.


Markov Blanket

The minimal set of variables that, once observed, render a target conditionally independent of everything else — the system's statistical interface with its environment.


Markov Decision Processes (MDPs)

Sequential decision-making under uncertainty.


Markov Process

Future state depends only on the present, not the full history.


Mass

Concentrating finite resource on a single decisive point against a nonlinear response curve, rather than spreading the same resource thinly across all points.


Maturity Mismatch

A system holds two-sided commitments whose durations differ — a short side that must be repeatedly refreshed against a long side that cannot accelerate — so it fails when refreshing stops, not because it lacks resources but because they are locked in durations longer than the moment requires.


Measure

An additive rule that assigns non-negative size to subsets of a space.


Measurement

Mapping a target's attribute onto a scale via an instrument and procedure, yielding a value-plus-uncertainty tied to a unit and frame.


Measurement and Disturbance

Obtaining information while minimizing measurement perturbation.


Measurement Uncertainty and Observational Noise

Measurement noise arises from instrument and observation limits.


Mediator Availability Constraint

Expert guidance scarcity limits one-to-one learning support.


Memoing

Producing a parallel, contemporaneous, durable record of the in-flight reasoning that generates an artifact, so the trajectory survives alongside the artifact.


Memory Consolidation

Converting a newly encoded trace from a fragile, overwritable form into a durable, interference-resistant one through a slow post-encoding stabilization process.


Memory Palace (Method of Loci)

Spatial mnemonic encoding via familiar locations.


Mere Exposure Effect

Repeated exposure to a stimulus raises liking for it along a saturating curve, even without conscious recognition of the prior encounters.


Message Passing

Autonomous holders of private state interact only through discrete addressed messages over intermediating channels.


Metaplasticity

A system's capacity to change is itself modulated by prior activity, so a slow second-order process governs how readily the fast first-order adaptive process can operate.


Metastability

A system persists in a locally stable configuration that is not the global optimum, held there by a barrier that routine disturbances cannot clear.


Metonymy

Referring to a thing via a contiguous element attached to it — part, locale, instrument, institution, address — with the substitution valid only while the contiguity holds.


Metric

A distance function on pairs obeying non-negativity, symmetry, and the triangle inequality.


Micro Macro Linkage

A two-way bridge by which micro units produce macro regularities and macro conditions reshape the micro situation.


Microstructure

Macro-level behavior is governed by an intermediate, meso-scale arrangement of parts, not by composition or gross form alone.


Minimal Modification Principle

Preserve true facts when constructing alternative scenarios.


Minimal Pairs

Hold everything constant except one feature, observe whether the output changes, and attribute the difference to that feature.


Minimax Strategy

Choose the action whose worst possible outcome is the best worst possible outcome — minimize the maximum loss an adversarial environment can inflict.


Minimum-Necessary Disclosure

A producer delivers only the subset of its record a consumer's role requires, stripping the surplus at the source.


Minority Signal Preservation

A system deliberately retains dominated, out-voted signals in addressable form to preserve optionality against future regime shifts.


Missing Data Mechanisms (MCAR, MAR, MNAR)


Mission Command

Centralize intent and decentralize execution, holding the slowly-evolving why at the top while delegating the rapidly-evolving how to the edge where information is freshest.


Mixed Layer

An actively-stirred, locally-homogeneous surface zone that buffers a stratified interior, joined to it by a sharp discontinuity.


Mixed Strategy

Randomize over actions so an adversary cannot predict the next choice.


Mixing

Redistribute distinguishable constituents among local regions so composition becomes less dependent on original position, while preserving the total amount being rearranged.


Mobilization

Latent capacity is activated, channeled into directed action, and then sustained or returned to rest.


Modal Reasoning

Reasoning about necessity, possibility, and contingency.


Model Assumption Failure

A conclusion, forecast, or plan loses warrant when a load-bearing condition its model treated as true is false or ceases to hold, even if the reasoning inside the model remains correct.


Modifiable Areal Unit Problem

Statistics computed on aggregated data change, sometimes reversing sign, when the boundaries used to aggregate are redrawn — the partition is a non-neutral analytical input.


Identity-Preserving Modification

An entity undergoes an event that changes some of its properties while an identity-condition licenses calling the after-state a continuation of the same entity rather than its replacement.


Monitoring

Continuously observing a system's state to detect deviation from expected behavior and trigger a response, separating genuine signal from routine noise.


Monoid

Equip a set with one closed associative binary operation and a two-sided identity, creating the exact algebraic tier whose neutral element makes empty products and folds well-defined while still withholding inverses.


Monopoly

A single locus controls access to something for which there are no close substitutes.


Motif

A small recognisable unit that recurs with variation across a corpus, accumulating significance by recurrence and binding the whole into a coherent structure.


Motivated Reasoning

Let a non-epistemic goal or preferred conclusion steer which evidence is sought, admitted, interpreted, weighted, or used to update belief, producing a directional departure from the verdict the same record would otherwise support.


Multi Path Convergence

Multiple distinct trajectories from different starts arrive at the same end-state, with the destination doing the work.


Multiple Comparisons Correction

Adjust the thresholds or p-values of a defined family of simultaneous tests so a chosen family-level error criterion remains bounded despite multiplicity.


Multiplexing

Sharing one channel among many signals by dividing time, frequency, or code.


Multiplicative Random Growth

Independent proportional shocks compound a positive state multiplicatively, so its logarithm follows an additive random walk and, under finite-variance increments, its cross-sectional distribution tends toward log-normal.


Mutual Exclusion

Guarantee that at most one party occupies a designated state or resource at a time.


Appellation

A stable opaque token is bound by an authoritative act to an entity and thereafter used to refer to it across contexts, decoupling reference from description.


Naming Convention

Names or identifiers are minted not freely but by explicit generative rules a community commits to, buying predictability, parseability, and collision-avoidance.


Narrative

Organizing events into a sequenced, meaning-bearing account.


Narrative Persuasion

Shift attitude or belief through story-mediated transportation that bypasses counter-argument by delivering the payload as experience rather than claim.


Nash Equilibrium

A strategy profile in which no agent can improve its payoff by unilaterally changing strategy, given the others' choices — the fixed point of the joint best-response correspondence.


Native-Category Flattening

A source system's own partition of the world is silently collapsed when an external observer recodes it into a foreign taxonomy without first preserving the source partition, destroying distinctions the downstream analysis would have needed and that recoded labels cannot recover.


Natural Selection

A population of varying, heritable variants is filtered by a selection pressure so that the better-performing variants differentially reproduce or persist, shifting the population's composition over rounds — variation, selection, and retention as a substrate-neutral engine.


Navigation

A positioned agent moves through a structured space toward a goal using an incomplete map, staying oriented at each step.


Near-Miss Normalization

A system reads the absence of harm in a narrowly-averted event as evidence of robustness rather than as a signal of lost margin, so it resets the margin to the smaller value and drifts its operating envelope toward the failure boundary while still counting itself safe.


Need–Solution Alignment

A proposed intervention fits a need when its supplied capability satisfies that need's binding conditions better than the current alternative for a particular beneficiary and context.


Negative Case Analysis

Deliberately hunt the cases that would overturn your account, then revise or scope it.


Neighborhood

The local-context window of elements close to a focal point under a proximity structure.


Network Broker Role

A network position combining upstream access, downstream tie capacity, and interpretive authority that makes its holder a productive required intermediary.


Network Traversal

Starting from one or more seeds, repeatedly follow eligible edges to visit or expose nodes, so reach and discovery order are determined by topology, frontier policy, and stopping rule.


Neuromodulation

A separate, diffuse control channel sets the gain or operating mode by which a system processes content, without itself carrying content.


Niche Construction

An agent modifies its environment, and the modified environment changes the selection pressures acting back on the modifier — the environment is endogenous.


Nirvana Fallacy

Rejecting a real, available option because it falls short of an idealized counterfactual, when the operative comparison should be against the best feasible alternative.


No Free Lunch Theorem

Averaged over all problem instances, no search, optimization, or learning procedure outperforms any other; a method's value is the match between its inductive bias and the problems it faces.


No True Scotsman

When a counterexample to a universal claim appears, membership in the subject category is redefined to exclude it, preserving the claim by emptying it of content.


Nominal vs. Actual Control

Every control exists as a documented nominal form and an enacted actual form, and the assurance apparatus usually samples only the former.


Non-Locality

Distant elements influence or correlate with each other without a chain of contiguous intervening contact — coupling that jumps the substrate rather than propagating through neighbors.


Non-Stationary Objective

The target moves at a rate comparable to or faster than the system can converge on it, so tracking error replaces steady-state error.


Non-Zero-Sum Game

A strategic interaction whose joint payoff is not fixed: cooperative play can create value and destructive play can destroy it, so the size of the pie is endogenous to the strategy profile.


Normalization of Deviance

An operating standard drifts outward because small departures, each repeatedly observed without immediate catastrophe, are reclassified as normal.


Nucleation

A metastable system cannot transition globally because a new phase's surface cost exceeds its volume benefit at small size; transition begins only when a seed crosses the critical-nucleus threshold and then grows.


Object Permanence

A system maintains persistent internal state for entities it cannot currently observe, modeling them as continuing to exist and re-binding them on re-emergence.


Objective Creep

An actor's effective goal boundary expands beyond what its original plan was sized for, as locally-reasonable sub-objectives are added under engagement through low-friction addition and high-friction subtraction, diluting the original objective.


Observable Surface Becomes Contract

Every observable behaviour, exposed to enough observers over enough time, becomes a binding dependency regardless of the nominal contract.


Observational Learning (Social Learning)


Offensive Action

Commit to unilateral first movement that forces opponents into a reactive posture, letting the initiator set the tempo, location, and terms of engagement and so control the agenda.


Omission Bias

When acting and not acting carry similar expected outcomes, decision-makers systematically prefer inaction, judging a harm caused by acting as worse than an equal-or-greater harm caused by failing to act, because commission feels more causally and morally attributable than omission.


Open-Closed Principle

Harden a stable kernel against modification and route all change through an open extension surface.


Open-Goal Persistence

Once an agent adopts a goal with a recognized completion criterion, keep its representation and return priority active across interruption until completion, abandonment, or a credible external surrogate supplies the release signal.


Open Publication for Interoperability

Publishing artifacts in an addressable, license-clear, machine-readable, openly accessible, versioned form so other communities can build on them without per-use negotiation.


Operational Overextension

A system advances a frontier of activity faster than the supporting backbone that sustains it can keep up, so the leading edge becomes brittle and fails on its next shock — the failure lying in the frontier-to-backbone ratio, not the frontier itself.


Operational Period

A bounded interval in which a plan is committed, executed, and reassessed at its boundary.


Operational Reach

Effective action extends only as far as the support tail can sustain it.


Operationalization

A specification of what is wanted is mechanically lowered into an executable how, under a correctness contract relating the two.


Opportunity Asymmetry

Agents possess unequal access to actions and favorable outcomes.


Optimal Stopping Rule

A rule maps a sequence of observations to a halt decision, trading the cost of stopping too early against stopping too late.


Optimization Landscape

The topology of a value function over a configuration space, whose shape predicts which search strategies will succeed or get stuck.


Optionality

The asymmetric value of having a choice—bounded downside, unbounded upside—without obligation to act.


Orchestration

A directing control locus selects, assigns, orders, and adapts heterogeneous components as one execution, managing their interfaces and timing so their joint behavior realizes an outcome none is responsible for producing alone.


Order

Defines ranking or sequencing relationships.


Other-Regarding Preferences

An agent's evaluation of outcomes depends not only on its own payoff but on the payoffs of other agents.


Out Of Distribution Detection

Couple a scope detector to a decision system so out-of-competence cases are deferred, not answered.


Outcome-Defined Adequacy

Adequacy is specified by whether a defined outcome is produced in context, leaving the form open to any realization that achieves it.


Outlier Leverage

A small number of extreme observations carry disproportionate weight in an aggregate result, so the result is more a property of those few points than of the bulk of the data — a consequence of the aggregation rule's non-resistance to extremes, not of any sampling defect.


Overshoot and Collapse

An enabling input that is beneficial at low levels crosses an assimilation ceiling and inverts into a self-amplifying degrading load, depleting a secondary resource and locking in a hysteretic worse regime that does not reverse when the input is removed.


Overton Window

A mobile range of positions that are currently sayable without social cost, with boundaries shifted by repeated exposure rather than argument.


Paradigmatic vs. Syntagmatic Relations

Any structured system can be decomposed along two orthogonal axes, the vertical set of substitutable alternatives that could fill a slot and the horizontal chain in which selected items are combined.


Paradox of Unanimity

Agreement beyond what independent observation could produce becomes evidence against the conclusion, signaling a broken-independence failure mode.


Parallel Independent Inspection

Defect coverage of a fixed artifact rises with the number and diversity of independent inspectors working in overlapping parallel.


Parkinson's Law

An elastic activity expands to fill its allocated resource container up to the binding constraint when no counter-pressure calls a stop short of the wall.


Parrondo's Paradox

Two individually losing strategies, coupled through a shared state with opposite-signed regional effects, can combine into a winning one.


Parsing

Recover hidden hierarchical structure from a flat sequence using a grammar.


Partition

A division of a set into non-overlapping, collectively exhaustive blocks.


Partition Dependence of Aggregates

Any statistic computed on partition-aggregated data is a function of the partition itself, not solely of the underlying data.


Past-State Contamination

Later information enters a reconstruction, estimate, or evaluation presented as valid for an earlier time, erasing the boundary between what was knowable then and what became available only afterward.


Path

An ordered, traversable sequence of edges connecting one node to another through a relational structure.


Path Dependence

Outcomes are shaped by the specific historical sequence of past choices, which lock in consequences and foreclose alternatives that persist despite present incentives to change.


Pattern Completion (Filling the Incomplete)


Pedagogy

Deliberate other-directed structuring of a learner's encounter with content to cause durable change in their capability.


Peltzman Effect

When a safeguard lowers the cost of failure, an agent reallocates the freed risk-budget into riskier behavior, partly offsetting the intended gain.


Perception Action Loop

Perception and action are constitutively coupled: action moves the sensing apparatus, that movement changes what is sensed, and what is sensed becomes the basis for the next action, in one closed loop with no clean sense-think-act stages.


Perceptual Expertise

Repeated category-specific exposure reallocates representational resolution toward the distinctions that vary within the trained category, so experts individuate its members finely while sparsely sampled categories remain coarsely coded.


Percolation

Local, often random short-range connections accumulated across a population suddenly produce system-spanning connectivity once their density crosses a critical threshold.


Percolation Threshold

On a network substrate, a system-spanning connected cluster appears suddenly at a sharp critical density of links, transforming isolated pieces into one reachable whole.


Performativity

Utterances and acts that constitute the very reality they name.


Permeability

A bounded medium selectively passes some carrier through connected pathways.


Permission-Gated Hold

An otherwise ready flow remains blocked until an external authority emits a required authorization, making completion depend on administrative release rather than on the flow's own movement or production capacity.


Persistent Identifier

A designed token committed to keep resolving to its entity across changes in the entity's location, representation, custodian, or version, via a separately maintained resolver.


Persona

A synthesized, named, concrete archetype that stands in for an unwieldy population during reasoning under uncertainty, trading coverage for cognitive traction.


Perturbation Theory

A technique for handling an intractable problem by splitting it into an exactly solvable baseline plus a small correction, then expanding the quantities of interest as a power series in that small parameter.


Phase Separation

A previously mixed system spontaneously demixes into distinct, spatially segregated regions once like-with-like interactions outweigh mixing above a threshold.


Pilot To Scale Transition

An effect proven in a curated niche need not survive the heterogeneous distribution of scale.


Pivotality

An element whose participation is necessary for a collective outcome owns the marginal contribution and acquires leverage beyond its nominal share.


PK/PD Modeling (Pharmacokinetics / Pharmacodynamics)


Planning Fallacy

Forecasters of a novel task default to inside-view simulation over the outside-view reference class, systematically underestimating time, cost, and risk.


Pluralistic Ignorance

A shared false second-order belief in which most members of a group privately reject a position yet, misreading each other's public conformity as private conviction, each believes themselves a rare exception — so the rejected position survives as an apparent consensus no one actually holds.


Poisson Process

The structural skeleton of memoryless, independent arrivals at a constant average rate, serving as both null model and diagnostic coordinate system.


Polyphony

Several independent lines coexist on a shared substrate, each retaining its own legible identity, while their interaction generates a coherent whole that none produces alone.


Population Coding

Information about a quantity is carried by the joint pattern across many individually noisy elements and read out by a decoder, yielding precision and robustness no single element provides.


Porosity

A bulk holds a distributed fraction of internal void space whose total, connectivity, and distribution jointly set storage capacity, transmissibility, and mechanical strength.


Portable Context Bundle

A behaviour-unit carries the context it was defined in, resolving against its definition-time environment rather than the ambient one at use.


Positional Advantage

Occupying a location in a value-graded space such that the position itself confers advantage — leverage, reach, defensibility, reaction-time — independent of the resources or force held at that location.


Postponement

Delay the point at which a system commits to a final configuration until more information about which configuration is wanted arrives, trading earliness for accuracy.


Site

A persistent, addressable position whose identity is given by its capacity to host or contain entities, surviving the turnover of whatever occupies it.


Pragmatics

What a signal means in context is the joint product of its literal content and patterned contextual machinery, not just what the signal literally encodes.


Precision Weighting

Signals about the same latent quantity receive influence in proportion to estimated precision, so more reliable evidence contributes more while context may revise the weights.


Precomputation and Materialization

Perform expensive or combinatorial work before demand and store its result as a directly usable artifact, trading build and update cost plus possible staleness for cheap, predictable use-time access.


Predicate

A testable yes-or-no property of an object, returning a truth value.


Prediction Error

The signed discrepancy between a model-generated prediction and its realized observation becomes an operational signal for updating, routing through, or diagnosing the predictor.


Predictive Coding

A system predicts its input and propagates only the prediction error.


Preference

Agent's ordering over a choice set on some evaluative dimension.


Preference Falsification

Under asymmetric cost on expression, agents voice a cheaper preference than the one they privately hold, so the visible distribution diverges from the held one.


Preference Heterogeneity and Conflict

Incompatible agent preferences create impasses and partial dissatisfaction.


Preimage

The set of all inputs that map to a given output under some mapping.


Premature Optimization

Committing local refinement effort before global structure is known pays both search-cost and rigidity-cost without the information to spend either well.


Preparation

Holding a system in a primed state nearer its activation threshold, paying a standing cost for a faster or larger response on trigger.


Preparatory Field Conditioning

Change the environment or target-state before a later focal action so that action encounters a deliberately conditioned field, with upstream value mediated through an explicit state target, causal model, lead-time, and reversion window.


Presentational–Semantic Mismatch

A presentation carries distinctions that the underlying machine-consumable representation does not encode, so a consumer restricted to the semantic model receives a silently impoverished or different structure even though the rendered artifact looks complete.


Presupposition Smuggling

A communicative move binds a surface action to an embedded premise so that engaging the surface ratifies the premise without argument.


Price of Anarchy

The worst-case ratio between the aggregate cost of selfish equilibrium play and the cost under centralized optimal coordination.


Priming

Prior exposure to a stimulus transiently activates related representations in memory, biasing or speeding subsequent processing, often without awareness.


Principle of Least Privilege

Granting each component only the minimum authority its function requires bounds the blast radius of its compromise or error.


Prioritization

Ordering competing claims on finite resources by a value or urgency metric to produce a ranked sequence of action under constraint, making explicit what gets done first and what does not get done at all.


Private-Public Preference Divergence

A systematic gap between the distribution of privately-held preferences (or beliefs) in a group and the distribution publicly expressed or inferred, sustained because each member reads others' conformity as conviction and conforms in turn.


Problem Framing

Construct the boundary and representation of a problem before solving it, making explicit which actors, variables, causal relations, constraints, success criteria, and action horizon are inside the question and which are excluded.


Problem Representation

The chosen encoding of a problem fixes which operations and intermediate states are available, and therefore which solutions can be found at all, before any solving begins.


Procedure-Work Mismatch

A system's prescribed model of how work happens diverges systematically from how work is actually done, with the gap often load-bearing for performance, so the question is how the gap is managed rather than whether it can be eliminated.


Processing Fluency

Cognitive ease with stimulus influences judgment independent of content.


Production Signature

A production process involuntarily imprints stable regularities on its output, letting an analyst attribute the output to its source.


Progressive Disclosure

Reveal information or options in stages calibrated to the receiver's current need-to-know, each stage sufficient to act on, with deeper layers reachable on demand behind a visible affordance.


Projection

Map a richer object onto a lower-dimensional target along a chosen direction, discarding the rest.


Proof By Contradiction

Establish a claim by assuming its negation and deriving an impossibility.


Propagation

The systematic spreading of a signal, effect, or state from a source through a medium or network, where the medium's structure governs how fast it moves, how it attenuates, and which paths it follows.


Property Rights

An enforceable bundle of exclusive entitlements over a resource.


Prospective Memory

An intended future action is encoded paired with a triggering cue, persists latently without rehearsal, and is retrieved and executed when a parallel cue-detection process fires.


Prototype Theory

Categories are organized around their best examples rather than by necessary-and-sufficient definitions, modeling kinds as centers with gradients rather than boxes with edges.


Provenance

A documented, traceable record of an entity's origin and successive custody transfers that establishes authenticity and assigns accountability by linking present state back to first known state.


Provenance Laundering

Provenance laundering routes an item through successive intermediaries so its disfavored or unverifiable origin becomes harder to recover while inherited channel authority is mistaken for independent authentication.


Proximity Capture

An observer with a duty of independent judgement gradually absorbs the target's frame through sustained proximity, eroding the independence the role requires.


Proxy-Target Divergence

An apparatus calibrated against a proxy keeps operating on it after the proxy-target relationship has silently decoupled.


Proxy–Target Fidelity

How faithfully an observable proxy tracks the unobservable target it stands in for — the degree to which acting on, optimizing, or inferring from the proxy is acting on the target itself.


Pruning

A system over-generates components, then removes the under-used subset on a use- or fitness-signal, leaving a leaner, more specialized configuration that could not have been built directly.


Public vs. Private Contexts

Audience presence alters motivation and behavior through reputation.


Publish Subscribe

Producers emit to a topic and consumers subscribe to the topic, routed by an anonymous broker.


Pull Flow

An activity is triggered by a downstream demand signal rather than scheduled by an upstream producer, shifting uncertainty absorption from inventory to latency.


Punctuated Equilibrium

Change runs bimodal in tempo: long intervals of near-stasis that load latent constraint, interrupted by short bursts of correlated structural reorganization.


Purity and Pollution

Classifying things as clean or contaminating, with contagion and ritual cleansing.


Quality Control

Checking output against a specification before release and rejecting or reworking non-conforming items, binding process variation to defined tolerances through a measure-compare-act feedback gate.


Quantifier

Specifies the scope of a claim over a domain — all, some, none, most, or exactly N.


Quenching

A transient configuration is frozen in place by dropping the system's mobility to near-zero on a timescale faster than its relaxation, capturing whatever state was present at that instant.


Queueing

Organizes tasks into a waiting line based on arrival and service rates.


Race Condition

The outcome of a system depends on the uncontrolled relative timing of concurrent actions on shared state, so the order effects land — not the actions — determines the result.


Race to the Bottom

Competitors gain relative advantage by lowering the same price, standard, contribution, or burden, so every above-floor position invites undercutting and mutually rational responses drive the shared dimension downward, often destroying joint value.


Random Walk

A trajectory built as the running sum of independent random increments, whose displacement grows like the square root of the number of steps.


Rank-Dependent Value

An outcome's value depends on its holder's rank within a comparison distribution rather than only on its absolute level, so equal shifts that preserve rank leave the positional component unchanged.


Rashomon Effect

Multiple internally coherent but mutually inconsistent accounts of one event, underdetermined by the testimony set with no internal adjudication procedure.


Ratchet Effect

Direction-asymmetric coupling plus a locking element produces accumulating one-way displacement under bidirectional forcing.


Rate Coding

A continuous magnitude is represented by the frequency of identical discrete events, decoded by integration over a window that trades latency against precision.


Rate Limiting

Cap the temporal rate at which an identifiable actor consumes a resource.


Ratio

Compare one quantity with a nonzero reference quantity by division, so the quotient states how much numerator obtains per unit of denominator and stays interpretable only while both quantities, their units, and their scope are named.


Reaction-Channel Back-Action

Peripheral harm from an action is metabolized by a downstream system and returned to the original actor as operational cost, after a delay.


Reaction Intermediate

A multi-step transformation passes through a named transient state, absent at both endpoints, whose formation and consumption rates govern throughput and form a distinct intervention surface.


Readiness Window

A receptive substrate enters a bounded opening-interior-closing interval during which a class of interventions can take hold.


Reality Monitoring

A system holding items from multiple source classes must, at use-time, attribute each item to its source — most basically internally-generated versus externally-perceived — with characteristic errors when the cues mislead.


Realized vs Possible Outcomes

The comparison between what a process actually produces and what it could in principle produce, with the gap as the primary object of analysis.


Receptive Field

A processing unit responds only to inputs falling inside a bounded region of an input space, so a large system covers its input by tiling many such local jurisdictions.


Recognition Justice

Judge whether people, identities, experiences, and categories of harm are represented as intelligible and worthy of equal standing before an allocation or procedure is evaluated.


Reconsolidation

A stored item returns to a malleable state when retrieved and must be re-stored, so every retrieval is a read-modify-write and a potential edit of the original.


Record-Reality Divergence

An authoritative record of an external state drifts from the reality it describes while remaining the basis for downstream decisions.


Record Reconciliation

Matching records across two naming systems and declaring, for each pair, a typed sameness verdict with explicit conditions of preservation and loss.


Recovery

The post-disruption trajectory by which a damaged or displaced system moves back toward a working state, through discernible phases, to an endpoint that may be the original state or a transformed one.


Recruitment Variability

A stock replenished by discrete cohorts whose size is set by environmental conditions at an early sensitive window — not by current stock — develops persistent, age-structured echoes from which cohorts were lucky.


Recurrence

The property by which a state, event, or value reappears across time or iterations because the present state depends on prior states, distinct from mere repetition by its measurable lag structure.


Recursion

Breaks processes into self-similar steps.


Recursive Attenuating Amplification

A one-shot input recirculating through a leaky operator with sub-unit retention produces a bounded total response of input/(1−k).


Red Teaming In Strategy

Build an independent, role-protected adversary whose job is to attack the plan before reality does.


Reductionism

Explaining a whole entirely in terms of its constituent parts.


Refactoring

Change internal structure while preserving observable behavior.


Reference Cadence Exceeds Tracking Bandwidth

When the signal a closed loop must track changes faster than the loop's bandwidth, persistent error follows that no amount of executor effort can close.


Reference-Point Dependence

Evaluate an outcome by its signed change from a movable reference state rather than by its absolute level, so relocating the reference can reverse whether the same outcome is experienced as a gain, loss, improvement, or deterioration.


Reference Standard Decay

A measuring apparatus keeps scoring against a reference standard that has silently drifted, so its numbers stay stable while their meaning shifts.


Refinement

Iteratively improving a candidate solution toward adequacy through repeated cycles of evaluation and adjustment that narrow the gap to a target, rather than deriving the answer in one shot.


Refractory Period

Immediately after an action, a unit enters an intrinsic, self-imposed window during which it cannot repeat that action, capping its rate and preventing runaway re-triggering without external governance.


Reframing

Hold an underlying situation, artifact, or event fixed while replacing the interpretive frame applied to it, so unchanged material acquires different meaning, salience, evaluation, or action implications.


Regime Change

A discontinuous flip of a system from one stable operating regime to a qualitatively different one, where the same inputs produce fundamentally different responses on either side of a feedback-driven threshold.


Regime Transition Plateau

Progress stalls when the strategy that produced the current gains exhausts its inputs before the qualitatively different capabilities required for the next regime have been built.


Registry-Mediated Discovery

Agents find each other through a shared registry rather than by direct reference: a named indirection mapping stable identifiers to current locations, so coupling survives turnover.


Regret

Disvalue from comparing an outcome against a better forgone alternative.


Regularization

Add a tunable soft penalty on the complexity of a candidate solution to a fitting procedure, trading data-fit against complexity by an explicit weight chosen for out-of-sample performance.


Regulatory Capture

Regulated agents gain influence over institution redirecting it.


Rehearsal

A system keeps a high-stakes capability warm by repeatedly re-running the whole action under near-live conditions, with feedback between iterations.


Reification

An abstraction designed to summarise a substrate is treated as the substrate itself, with the audit trail back to the original allowed to atrophy.


Reinforcement

An action's consequence selectively changes the probability of that action recurring under similar conditions.


Relationship Specific Investment

Resources spent to build an asset whose value is highest inside one specific relationship and drops sharply outside it, creating asymmetric hold-up exposure.


Release From Controlling Context

An actor's intrinsic dynamics, calibrated by a home context's constraints, run unconstrained when moved to a recipient context lacking them.


Relevance Substitution

A psychologically active but epistemically irrelevant signal is supplied in place of a relevant one, and the recipient updates on it blind to the substitution.


Remapping

A single substrate holds multiple disjoint, context-keyed representations and switches discretely between them on a context cue, preserving inactive ones for later re-entry.


Remediation

A new medium establishes itself by refashioning an older one—first quoting its forms to legitimize itself, then progressively shedding what the new substrate need not preserve and exploiting affordances the old could not support.


Renewal Process

After each event a clock resets; an interarrival-time distribution then makes conditional event risk depend on the age elapsed since that reset.


Rent Seeking

Expending real resources to capture a larger share of existing value by working the rules that govern allocation, rather than to produce new value.


Replay

After live experience, a system reactivates captured sequence-traces in a decoupled offline window, and that rerun — not the original experience alone — writes durable structure into memory or skill.


Reporting-Pyramid Undercount

A true event population passes through ordered, non-random reporting filters whose layerwise capture rates multiply, so the recorded count is a biased fraction and changes in any filter can masquerade as changes in incidence.


Representational Modality

Choice of medium fundamentally shapes what can be expressed.


Representational Structure Mismatch

A representation preserves its target's elements but misstates one or more task-relevant relations among them, so content can appear complete while its shape licenses the wrong traversal, inference, or action.


Reputation

An aggregated signal of past behaviour that shapes how others treat an agent.


Researcher Degrees of Freedom

The unpinned analytic choices between a question and a reported result, where a silently explored decision tree collapses into a single declared comparison, inflating false confidence without any individual choice being made in bad faith.


Reserve

Deliberately maintained surplus held beyond expected need so the system can absorb variation, uncertainty, or shock without failing.


Residual Analysis

Subtract the best explanation and study the leftover as the next site of structure, not as noise.


Resolution Matching

Match the resolving granularity of an instrument, effector, representation, or control surface to the smallest distinction the task must preserve; a coarser resolver collapses consequential differences, while unnecessary fineness spends capacity without improving the decision.


Response-vs-Propagation Race

Containment wins or loses by timescale comparison.


Responsibility Attribution

Assigning credit or blame for an outcome to a particular agent.


Responsibility Diffusion

Spreading responsibility reduces individual accountability perception.


Retention Under Removal Uncertainty

A durable system accumulates obsolete-but-not-removable elements because each removal decision faces an asymmetric cost that loses individually and wins only in the integral.


Retired Term

A label withdrawn from new use but kept resolvable for existing references, with its retired status and successor publicly marked.


Return Path

Every forward-flow pipeline serving goal-directed users requires a separately-designed backward channel whose optimisation criteria invert the forward channel's.


Revealed Preference

Infer latent value from observed choices rather than stated reports.


Reversibility and Irreversibility

Actions or transitions may or may not be undone or reverted.


Reversibility Horizon

Temporal threshold where reversal cost exceeds forward commitment.


Revocation Closure

An issuer retains a bounded-time path to invalidate every active manifestation and downstream derivative of a grant, so withdrawal reaches the grant's actual effect set rather than only the issuer's registry.


Reward Prediction Error

The signed difference between received and expected reward or value becomes a teaching signal for updating value estimates, policies, and reward-linked behavior.


Rhetorical Velocity

Compose an artefact in anticipation of how others will cut, remix, and forward its fragments.


Rhythm

Patterned recurrence of elements across time or space.


Risk

Exposure to a known distribution of possible outcomes.


Risk Migration

An intervention that blocks a hazard at one site without absorbing the generative pressure behind it does not eliminate the hazard but relocates it across a permeable boundary to a less-monitored region, often where controls are weaker and measurement does not follow.


Risk Pooling

Aggregating many independent or weakly correlated exposures so that the variance of the pooled outcome shrinks below the sum of individual variances, letting participants share a more predictable collective risk.


Risk Transfer

Shifting an adverse-outcome distribution from one party to another for a price, so the loss lands on whoever can bear it best.


Rock Cycle

The same persisting substance moves among a small set of distinct phase-states via named transformations, its identity preserved through phase change while its properties change qualitatively in each phase.


Rock-Paper-Scissors (Intransitive Cyclic Dominance)

A beats-relation that closes into a cycle rather than a ranking, so no option dominates and the system is governed by rotation and coexistence.


Role

A bundle of expected behaviours attached to a social position.


Role Fluidity

Role fluidity allows the same occupant to move among positions that a rigid system assigns to separate actors, so producer/consumer, leader/follower, or requester/provider functions can alternate without changing occupant identity.


Rule of Law

No element of a system is exempt from its governing rules, including the element that generates or enforces them.


Rule of Least Power (Minimum Sufficient Capability)

Choose the least expressive mechanism that still solves the problem, because unused capability is structural debt that weakens analyzability and safety.


Rules Of Engagement

Pre-committed conditional permissions that let an operator act autonomously inside a bounded space.


Sacred

Things set apart as inviolable and demanding reverence.


Sacrifice Periphery To Defend Core

An agent under contest deliberately yields ground at the periphery to redirect resources to defending the load-bearing core.


Saddle Point

An equilibrium stable in some directions and unstable in others.


Salience

A bottom-up, relational score by which items stand out from their surround before deliberate attention is allocated.


Salience-as-Significance

A what-got-shown signal misread as a what-matters claim.


Sanctuary Effect

An adversary persists indefinitely because it regenerates inside a low-contestation zone the controller cannot reach, so suppression-only effort yields a positive steady state rather than elimination.


Sandboxing

Exercise an untrusted candidate inside a bounded, observable enclosure.


Scaling and Scale Dependence

Patterns and constraints change qualitatively across different scales.


Scapegoating

Channeling collective blame onto a substitute target.


Scarcity

A finite resource is insufficient to satisfy all competing wants.


Schema-Bounded Blind Spot

A finite elicitation schema can be exhaustive only inside the categories it contains, so diligent use systematically misses cases outside its coverage boundary and can turn procedural rigor into false completeness.


Scope Creep

A perimeter ratchets outward through small additions each judged against a drifting current baseline rather than the original charter, with no owner of the trajectory.


Script

A stored representation of a familiar situation as a temporally and causally ordered sequence of events with role-slots, props, and conditions, against which encounters are interpreted and deviations detected as breaches.


Second-Order Cybernetics (Second-Order Observation)


Second-System Effect

When load-bearing constraints are lifted but capability is retained, a stockpile of postponed ambitions floods the successor, producing overengineering.


Segmentation and Boundary Drawing

Partitioning continuous domain via boundaries concentrates meaning.


Selection

From an available population, a criterion, pressure, or rule gives some alternatives greater retention, passage, or weight than others, producing a survivor set or shifted composition.


Selection on Noisy Estimates

When noisy estimates help determine which candidates, results, or options are selected, conditioning on selection shifts the selected estimates toward the favored tail and makes them systematically overstate their latent values.


Selection-Visibility Gate

A selector can differentially retain only variants whose consequences are expressed and accessible when selection acts, so an upstream visibility gate biases the surviving record away from the generated variant distribution.


Selection Vs Transmission Decomposition

A change in a population's weighted mean splits exactly into a selection term (differential weighting of units) and a transmission term (units changing within themselves).


Selective Information Severance

Deliberately cutting an information channel on a need-to-know basis, so a party cannot act on, be biased by, or leak information it never receives.


Selective Propagation

A heterogeneous population moves through one carrier or medium while a component property controls continued passage or dropout, so the population that reaches farther is systematically composition-shifted even when the survivors move at the same speed.


Selectivity Window

A process discriminates among targets only inside a bounded operating range of a control parameter, and loses or reverses that discrimination outside it.


Self Checking

A system detects errors in its own output by computing the answer through partially-independent paths and comparing.


Self Control

Overriding immediate impulses in service of longer-term goals.


Self-Defeating Prediction

Belief in a forecast moves conditions against it.


Self Engagement Under Misclassification

A defensive apparatus inflicts its full harm on self when its classifier misfires, because the protection machinery and the harm machinery are the same machinery gated only by the classifier.


Self-Handicapping

Pre-emptively creating obstacles before an evaluation so any failure can be blamed on the obstacle rather than on one's ability, protecting a fragile self-assessment from disconfirming evidence.


Self-Organized Criticality

Localized chaos and fluctuation at fine scales actively sustains and enables emergent coherence and order at coarse scales through recursive multi-scale feedback, rather than degrading it.


Semigroup

The minimal algebraic species — a set with one closed, associative binary operation and nothing more — whose lone axiom certifies that any finite product is parenthesization-independent, so a sequential reduction can be split, reassociated, and run in parallel without changing the answer.


Sensitivity Analysis (in Operations Research)


Sequencing

Deliberately ordering steps under precedence constraints so that the arrangement itself, not just the set of tasks, determines the outcome.


Sequestration

Deliberately removes a resource, hazard, or information from active circulation and keeps it behind a maintained boundary for persistent isolation.


Serial Local Optimization Failure

Stages arranged in series each optimize a local objective while treating their effects on other stages as outside that objective, so individually rational choices compound into an outcome worse than joint optimization.


Serialization

Convert structured content into a flat, transportable form that reconstructs.


Setup–Resolution Pair

An initiating element opens a typed demand that a causally paired answering element discharges, so the two ordered roles form one completed higher-order unit.


Severed Accountability Via Unearned Revenue

When an agent's revenue arrives through a channel that bypasses the principals it would otherwise answer to, the accountability link is severed and predictable goal-drift follows.


Shadow Of The Future

Expectations of continued interaction plus observability of past behaviour convert one-shot dilemmas into self-sustaining cooperation without contracts or altruism.


Sharding

Partition a load across owners by a stable key-to-shard function.


Shared-Interface Constraint Conflict

Shared-interface constraint conflict forces one undifferentiated output through a common interface to receivers whose binding acceptance rules cannot all be satisfied, so success for one receiver entails failure for another until the interface or receiver set is partitioned.


Shared Mental Model

A jointly maintained external artefact anchoring distributed reasoning.


Shirky Principle

An entity created to solve a problem develops a survival interest in the problem's persistence when its resources are coupled to the problem's measured presence.


Shortcut Learning

An adapting system replaces the structure it was meant to learn with a cheaper incidental feature that correlates with success on its training distribution, and collapses sharply once that correlation breaks.


Side Channel Attack

A system's legitimate outputs reveal information its access policy meant to protect, via observable consequences the policy never enumerated.


Side Effect

An action's change to shared state beyond its declared interface.


Signal Decay and Fadeout

Signals, influence, or effects systematically weaken over time or space.


Signal Detection Theory

Every decision under noise factorizes into a sensitivity that fixes the achievable error trade-off and a freely-chosen criterion that distributes errors along it.


Signal Devaluation

A signal erodes in informativeness as issuance expands and readers adapt.


Signal Extraction

Quantitatively recovering a target component from an entangled observation using a signal model, a noise model, and a discriminator.


Signal Inflation

A sender over-fires a channel and depletes a finite, slow-regenerating receiver-side credibility budget, so the next true message lands on an audience that has rationally stopped responding.


Signature-Borne Provenance

A conservative property carries origin through transport, read back without a custody chain.


Signifier

A perceptible cue placed on or near an action possibility so the possibility is recognized in time to be used—what makes an affordance perceivable, not what makes it possible.


Silence as Signal

Cost-asymmetric record production makes absence misread as the negative state.


Silent Representation Overflow

A bounded field silently rolls past its capacity and a blind consumer trusts it.


Similarity Measure

Map an ordered pair, under a declared representation and relevance rule, to a comparable degree of likeness; the score may be nonmetric or asymmetric, and changing the frame can reverse what counts as near.


Simpson–Yule Effect

An association measured in pooled data can reverse, vanish, or appear once the data are partitioned by a confounder unevenly distributed across the compared groups.


Simpson's Paradox

A relationship can run one direction inside every subgroup and the opposite direction in the aggregate, because a confounder's distribution differs across subgroups and is silently mixed away on pooling.


Simulated Annealing

Probabilistic search escaping local optima.


Single Point of Failure

A component on the critical path of every essential function, with no parallel route, that caps the whole system's reliability at its own.


Situation Awareness

Acting on a system that keeps moving requires three distinct cognitive products — perceiving current elements, comprehending their meaning, and projecting their near-future trajectory.


Social Choice

Aggregate many agents' preferences into one collective outcome under a stated rule.


Social Dilemma

Individually rational defection yields a collectively worse outcome (canonical form: the Prisoner's Dilemma).


Social Loafing

The decline in per-person effort as group size grows when individual contributions are pooled into one output and cannot be separately measured or credited.


Social Norms

Shared expectations about how members of a reference group should behave, maintained through internalization and anticipated decentralized approval, correction, or sanction.


Solidarity

Shared commitment and mutual support within a group.


Source-Sink Dynamics

A system persists across coupled sites with asymmetric net balance: net-producing sources export a surplus that sustains net-consuming sinks which would decline in isolation.


Source-Sink Role

Classify a bounded component as a source or sink by the sign of its net transfer to a reference pool over a specified window, with the role changing when the boundary, window, or tracked quantity changes.


Span

The complete set reachable by combining primitives under admissible operations.


Sparse Coding

A system represents each input by activating a small content-specific subset of a much larger pool of units, gaining combinatorial capacity from the choice of which few are active.


Spatial Indexing

Organizing items by position in a space so retrieval, neighborhood, and range queries become geometric and output-sensitive.


Specialization

Agents concentrate on a narrow range of tasks for efficiency.


Speculative Bubble

Self-reinforcing price rise detached from fundamental value.


Speech Act Theory (Illocution, Perlocution)


Spinodal Decomposition

A uniform state spontaneously separates into distinct phases because it is itself unstable, so ambient fluctuations are amplified rather than damped, producing a characteristic-wavelength pattern without any barrier or nucleus.


Spiral Of Silence In Publics

A self-reinforcing loop in which people infer the climate of opinion from visible expression and those who believe themselves in the minority suppress their own, steepening the apparent consensus away from the underlying private distribution.


Sponsor Vacuum

A designated decision-resolving role is occupied but disengaged, and its nominal occupancy suppresses the formation of substitute decision channels, so the system loses both the function and its replacement.


Stability

A system's tendency to return toward an operating point after perturbation.


Stability-Induced Fragility

Prolonged calm endogenously erodes the response capacity that stressors keep exercised.


Stack

A strictly nested discipline where what was opened last must close first.


Stage Gate Process

Partition a long commitment into evidence-gated stages with escalating commitment and a funnel of kills.


Standardization

The act or process by which independent parties converge on a single shared specification, format, or interface — agreement on a common norm rather than the benefits that follow from it.


Starvation

A participant who is eligible and in the queue is perpetually denied service, not by exclusion but because a locally rational priority rule always picks someone else.


Stasis

Locate the kind of question at issue in a dispute—did it happen, what is it, was it justified, whose call is it—before contesting the substance, since disputants who seem to disagree about the answer are often disagreeing about the question.


State and State Transition

Captures system condition and evolution.


Stated Preference

Infer an agent's valuation from a solicited report rather than an enacted choice, gaining access to hypothetical or unchosen alternatives at the cost of a cheap, channel-shaped signal.


Stated–Revealed Preference Gap

A reported preference and behavior under a real choice opportunity systematically diverge, so the mismatch must be analyzed as two differently distorted access channels rather than automatically treating either as the agent's true valuation.


Statistical Independence

Learning one variable gives no information about another; the joint distribution factors.


Statistical Inference

Reasoning from a finite, noisy sample back to the underlying population or process while explicitly quantifying the uncertainty that sampling introduces.


Stereotyping

Generalized category beliefs compress individual variation into archetypes.


Stochastic Process

A quantity indexed (usually by time) whose evolution is governed by randomness — an indexed family of random variables sharing one probability law.


Stochasticity vs. Determinism

System behavior fully determined by prior state or fundamentally random.


Stock Disabled Control

A flow lever stops working when a shock pushes the system's stock variable outside the range where flow-margin nudges propagate; pulling harder fails until the stock is repaired.


Stovepipe System

Capabilities built as parallel vertical stacks that each re-implement shared concerns, with no horizontal layer between them, are locally efficient but globally incoherent and pay a super-linear integration tax.


Strategic Complementarity

One actor's action raises the marginal benefit of others taking the same action.


Strategic Substitute

One actor's action lowers the marginal benefit of others taking the same action.


Streetlight Effect

Search effort concentrates where evidence is easiest to observe rather than where the sought answer is most likely to lie, systematically substituting accessibility for relevance.


Streisand Effect

A visible attempt to suppress information becomes a high-salience signal that amplifies it, when the suppression act is itself observable to the audience.


Stressor Induced Adaptation

Bounded stress that costs short-term performance to build durable long-term capacity (hormesis, progressive overload, desirable difficulties).


Structural Filtering

A content-producing system passes its output through several parallel institutional filters, so the surviving output is the filter set's intersection — predictable even when producers are sincere and unaware.


Substitutability

One component replaces another without functional degradation.


Substrate-Cued Behavior Recruitment

Modifying a substrate so that perceiving it elicits a target behavior without explicit instruction.


Substrate-Induced Boundary Dissolution

Substrate-induced boundary dissolution occurs when a shared carrier makes formerly separate kinds mutually expressible, removing the operational basis of their partition and propagating reorganization into layers built on that partition.


Summary Substance Divergence

An artefact's short summary surface and long substance surface, authored under different incentives and consumed by different audiences, drift apart into two truth-conditions.


Sunk Cost and Irreversible Commitment

Expended resources create psychological barriers to reversal.


Supernormal Stimulus

A response circuit calibrated only over a natural cue range, with no built-in ceiling, is hijacked by an engineered referent that exceeds that range and triggers disproportionate response.


Supersaturation

An intensive variable is driven past its equilibrium-permitted level and held there by kinetic isolation, storing release potential whose eventual discharge is sized by the accumulated gap, not by the trigger.


Supersession

A successor explicitly displaces a predecessor in a role, which the predecessor no longer fills going forward even while it persists for historical reference.


Surjectivity

A coverage-guaranteeing mapping in which every element of the target is hit by some input, leaving no gap in the codomain.


Suspension

A prepared element persists into a changed context, becomes dissonant, then resolves by a small move.


Swiss Cheese Model (Layered Defense with Aligning Holes)

Catastrophe occurs only when a hazard finds a trajectory through a hole in every serial defensive layer at once, so the key variable is the correlation of holes across layers.


Switching Cost

Moving between stateful modes incurs a per-transition overhead — unload, load, cold-start, residual interference — that is structurally distinct from steady-state cost and dominates under frequent switching.


Symbolic Representation

Sign-meaning link sustained by collective convention rather than resemblance or causal connection.


Symmetric Response to Asymmetric State

Equal treatment of an unequal state distorts toward the weaker side.


Synchronization

The emergence of stable shared timing or phase among independent oscillating processes through local coupling, without any central conductor.


System Archetypes

Recurring configurations of reinforcing and balancing feedback loops that generate the same characteristic system behavior across different domains, enabling structural diagnosis instead of symptom-chasing.


Systemic Risk

Risk that local failures propagate into system-wide collapse.


Systems Thinking

Analyzing a whole through the relationships and feedback among its parts.


Technical Debt

A present expedient choice imposes a future cost that compounds with system growth until it is paid down, with a principal, an interest payment, and a pay-down.


Teleconnection

Distant relationships via shared dynamics.


Template Instantiation

Reuse an invariant frame of typed slots by binding variable payloads into it, producing comparable instances while exposing slot-fit failures and frame drift.


Tempo Mismatch

A system's pace of action is out of phase with the timescale of the environment it must respond to, so correct decisions degrade outcomes by arriving against a world that has already moved on (or one not yet ready to absorb them).


Temporal Decay and Degradation

System properties or capabilities systematically diminish over time.


Temporal Dynamics

System outcomes depend fundamentally on timing, sequencing, duration.


Temporal Inconsistency and Preference Reversals

Preference orderings reverse as decision horizon approaches.


Temporal Synchronization and Phase Alignment

Phase alignment or misalignment determines efficiency and coherence.


Tension And Release

Deliberately build instability away from an expected baseline, sustain it long enough for anticipation to accrue, then resolve it in a way the prior tension makes valuable—a single coupled cycle whose payoff is earned by the build.


Termination Condition

An explicit, checkable predicate that decides whether an iterative or recursive process stops or continues.


Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

Drawing the hypothesis boundary around an observed cluster and then crediting it as if it had been specified in advance.


Texture

The fine-grained surface variation beneath an object's gross form that carries perceptual, material, and emotional information rather than mere decoration.


Theme And Variation

A recognizable invariant is repeatedly re-instantiated under systematic transformation along named dimensions, with a retention condition that keeps each result referable back to the original—diversity generated from a held kernel rather than sampled independently.


Theoretical Sampling

Select the next case by what it would teach the emerging model rather than by what it represents about a population, interleaving selection with analysis and stopping when new cases add only confirmation.


Theory Of Mind

An agent maintains a separate, updateable model of another agent's hidden states and routes behaviour through that model rather than through ground truth.


Thick Description

Record a phenomenon together with the surrounding context that makes its meaning recoverable, not just the bare surface event.


Threshold Bounded Vicious Cycle

A system has a low regime that consumes any small input as maintenance and a high self-sustaining regime, separated by a threshold an intervention must clear in both magnitude and duration.


Threshold-Triggered Rule Activation

A continuous observable crossing a threshold flips a dormant rule to active.


Thundering Herd

Many independent waiters are released by a single shared signal and collide at once on a finite resource, so the failure lives in the correlated timing of their release rather than in the population size or the resource capacity.


Time

The dimension that orders events from earlier to later with measurable duration and an irreversible direction, providing the foundation for change, rate, and causality.


Time-Of-Check To Time-Of-Use Flaw

A precondition verified at one instant authorizes an action taken at a later instant, and the relevant state changes in the gap between them, so the defect lives in the temporal binding between check and use rather than in either operation.


Tolerance Paradox

A system defined by an open principle must refuse that principle to elements that would destroy it, or be destroyed by its own openness.


Topographic Forcing

A fixed boundary's relief reorganizes a passing flow, converting background transport into localized deflection, vertical motion, wakes, mixing, or flux concentration.


Topographic Map

A source space is laid out on a substrate by a neighbourhood-preserving map with non-uniform magnification, so positions encode relationships and damage to a substrate region predicts a localised source deficit.


Topology

Studies properties preserved under deformation.


Traceability

The infrastructure of bidirectional links that lets any element be followed backward to its origin and forward to its uses, turning opaque processes into auditable, queryable histories.


Training Serving Skew

A system prepared in one environment silently underperforms in a systematically different one.


Transferability Overclaim

A result established under specific scope conditions is exported beyond them with those conditions stripped, so the claim arrives at its new site shorn of the limits that made it true.


Transformation

A rule-governed mapping that restructures an input into a different output, holding certain invariants fixed while altering others.


Transient Response

The time-course by which a system approaches (or departs from) a state after a disturbance — the trajectory between disturbed and settled, with a named anatomy (settling time, relaxation time, overshoot, damping) that is distinct from the resting state it approaches.


Translation and Conceptual Bridging

Convert concepts or meanings between incommensurable frameworks.


Triangulation

Cross-verifying a claim by combining multiple independent sources or methods so their convergence raises confidence and their divergence exposes hidden bias or context.


Trilemma

Three desirable properties that cannot be jointly guaranteed, forcing a pick-any-two choice with a distinct dissolve-or-scope intervention catalogue.


Trust

Willingly accepting vulnerability to another party's future behavior under incomplete monitoring, based on positive expectations about their competence and intentions.


Trusted Intermediary Compromise

Trust transitivity is exploited to push a hostile payload past the consumer's perimeter.


Turn Taking

Contenders share a one-at-a-time channel by an allocation rule that selects who goes next.


Turnover

Continuous replacement of components while the system's structure persists.


Two Sided Market

A platform mediates two distinct user groups whose participation creates value for each other, so each side's marginal value rises with the other side's size and the two demand schedules must be balanced together.


Two-Sided Matching

Forming stable pairings between two sides of a market under each side's preferences.


Two-Store Architecture

A fast interference-prone store and a slow integrated store coupled by a periodic transfer mechanism, paying for both speed and integration by maintaining two oppositely-optimised substrates.


Type–Token Distinction

Separate a repeatable type from its numerically distinct tokens so shared properties attach once to the type while occurrence-specific identity, state, and history attach to each token.


Ultra-Stability (Ashby's Concept)

Multi-level feedback preserves viability.


Uncertainty-Driven Verification Premium

Under uncertainty, agents pay to retreat from unverified options toward verified ones.


Underspecification

A selection process treats evidence as if it picked out a single answer when many distinct answers fit it equally well, so a hidden closure silently chooses one representative and the behavior that distinguishes them is left uncontrolled.


Unearned Windfall Mechanism Atrophy

An easy, abundant inflow of value uncoupled from performance atrophies the very mechanisms that performance would have built, leaving the system brittle in proportion to its windfall.


Unevenness Waste

Variance in arrivals or service through finite shared capacity imposes its own cost — additive to the cost of the mean and rising nonlinearly near the capacity ceiling — so capacity sized to mean demand is not capacity adequate to demand.


Unfalsifiability

No admissible observation can force rejection of a claim because it either forbids no possible outcome or can revise its refutation conditions after adverse evidence, leaving every result compatible with survival.


Union

The elements belonging to at least one of several collections — everything that is in any of them.


Unity Test

The rule that decides, in a given system, when a collection of parts counts as one whole rather than many.


Unity & Variety

Balance between consistency and diversity.


Universality

Systems with different microscopic detail obey identical macroscopic laws because only a low-dimensional signature survives coarse-graining.


Unowned Known Risk

A hazard that is common knowledge yet reliably un-acted-upon because prevention costs are diffusely owned, horizons mismatch, precursors are normalised, and the outcome is later recast as a surprise.


Unreliable Narrator

A source whose report is systematically distorted relative to the reality it describes, so the receiver must model the distortion rather than read the account as transparent.


Untrusted Input Execution

Attacker-influenced input crosses a data-to-control (or authority) boundary and a correctly-operating intermediary executes it with the intermediary's own authority, so the attacker borrows the defender's privilege without ever violating the intermediary's rules.


Unverified Precondition

An action presumes a referent exists at the moment of use without checking.


Vaccine Escape

A durable barrier imposed on an adaptive population acts as a selection filter, shifting the population toward variants it cannot engage, so effective coverage falls even though the barrier still works exactly as designed.