prompt: here are concatenated list of concepts and definitions from several essays. there will be overlaps and redundant concepts across the different sections, as well as the same concept labeled in different names / many slight variations of the name. please FIRST convert them all into lower case, MERGE them, and then sort the list alphabetically, and turn the concepts back their original cases. remember, MERGE both the concept and the definition so I have an exhaustive and comprehensive list
- Abstraction: The process of subsuming more details into fewer categories to make connections between disparate things.
- Accuracy: How close our measurement is to the true value.
- Adaptation: The ability of businesses and other entities to adjust and find solutions in a flexible and responsive manner, rather than relying on rigid processes and policies.
- Adiabatically Isolated System: A system not in communication with its surroundings, meaning no energy, matter, or information enters or leaves.
- Algorithmic Complexity (Kolmogorov Complexity): A measure of complexity in an object in terms of the smallest program that could describe it. It is related to how much compression is possible, with more complex objects being less compressible.
- Analogy: Sensing some shared structure between superficially disparate things.
- Artificial Deadline: A man-made timeline for completing a project, which may not align with the natural development of the work.
- Authority: The perception that makes it hard for things to die, retarding the ability of systems to leverage variation.
- Authority of Simplicity: The problem that details look beautiful, smart, and authoritative, making them hard to challenge.
- Bad Constraints: Constraints that go deeper than goals and try to instruct on how to take specific actions, interfering with the need to explore.
- Cardinality (Size): The number of elements in a set, used here to describe the compressibility of ingredient sets.
- Category Membership: If something breaks then it is no longer a member of its original category (a broken table is no longer a table). As long as the table provides a flat surface to work on it belongs in the table category.
- Categorical Invariance: The degree to which the inner description of an object remains in its category under perturbation.
- Cohesion: The degree to which elements in a set share common characteristics, which affects their compressibility.
- Complex Systems: Systems where outputs are achieved through the interaction of many parts in a multiplicative fashion, rather than a simple sum of inputs. Complex systems call upon all pieces of a system to produce observed behaviors.
- Complexity Threshold: A point where technology becomes undeniably beautiful and draws humans in beyond its utility.
- Components: Individual elements (i.e., machines) that share information with partners to maximize mutual information in a system.
- Connective Tissue: The parts of a story or creation that never change, even if other elements are altered.
- Context: The accompanying words or situation that provide the meaning of a word or symbol.
- Creativity: The process of transforming ideas into something tangible, involving exploration and the creation of something new that has never been experienced before.
- Deadlines: Time constraints that demarcate efforts against other responsibilities, giving coworkers notice of contribution delivery and allowing consumers to gauge the next release. They help visualize life on a timeline, giving a sense of control and progress, and make it easier to have goals and orient work around bite-sized pieces.
- Deep Knowledge: Detailed knowledge about something, considered superior since it involves understanding the specific components of a situation.
- Deep Understanding: Traditionally associated with detailed knowledge, but now redefined as disconnected thinking that lacks context.
- Definition: Uses words to describe the label we look at.
- Detail-Oriented Thinking: Concerned with understanding the specific details of a given situation.
- Disconnected Thinking: Thinking that lacks context, typically associated with detailed knowledge.
- Directional Learning: The concept that learning should come from operating at the highest level of abstraction and entering the environment accordingly.
- Degradation in Mapping: The notion of partiality to the connection between a solution and its problem. A low-quality object should be expected to have a weaker mapping between itself and the problem it solves.
- Description Set: The internal description of an object represented by a set of lower-level constituents.
- Emotionless Intelligence: A concept rejected as genuine intelligence must have emotions to navigate complex environments.
- Entropy: Measures the extent to which the probability of the system is spread out over different possible microstates, for a set of macroscopic variables. The more microstates available, the greater the entropy.
- Epistemic Uncertainty: The inherent uncertainty in knowledge and the process of discovery.
- Extension: The usual way of thinking about technology is as an extension of life, meaning it extends our physical and intellectual abilities.
- Feedback Loop: A process where we create technology, which changes the environment, which changes our external stressors, which we must adapt to by creating new technologies.
- Freedom: The ability to venture into the unknown and explore possibilities without being overly constrained, which is essential for creativity.
- Function: A function assigns elements from a set X to a set Y such that each element of X exactly maps to one element of Y.
- Functor: A structure-preserving map between categories in category theory.
- General Rules of Thumb: Heuristics provided by nature to navigate our complex world, as opposed to details.
- Generative: The quality of structure that triggers creativity by compelling individuals to fill the gaps between their current and future states.
- God: Used metaphorically to describe technology as the ultimate end state, interconnected and driven to maximize information content.
- Good Constraints: Constraints that anchor efforts using high-level goals, signaling when one is on the right track, and ensuring that creativity converges to something commensurate with how nature works.
- Heuristic: A quick method or approach to problem-solving that is not necessarily perfect but is practical and efficient.
- High-Level Thinking: Concerned with abstract ideas and general knowledge.
- High-Level Thinking: A mode of thinking that focuses on behavior and invariance rather than static ingredients devoid of meaning. It understands interactions implicitly rather than details mindlessly and allows details to die, operating via variation and iteration. It is not susceptible to the authority of simplicity and does not anchor truth on specific sets of assumed inputs. It allows swarms of details to make conceptual connections and brings people into environments where real problems exist.
- High Quality Object: One that is more likely to maintain its category membership over time.
- Humanity and Technology: Intertwined entities with no real distinction, both evolving through information and processing.
- Information: The currency of everything, viewed in terms of information and processing, applicable to both people and microchips.
- Influencers: In social networks, these are individuals who become popular hubs of network activity. Their informational output depends on the flow of information from the rest of the network.
- Invariant: The most unchanging aspects of anything we create, which must be true.
- Invariant Structure: The essential and unchanging parts of a project that ensure it works.
- Invariance: The concept that meaning comes from what doesn't move when everything else does.
- Intuition: The ability to comprehend something immediately, without the need for explicit definitions or analyses.
- Isomorphism: A structure-preserving mapping between two structures that can be reversed by an inverse mapping.
- Kolmogorov Complexity: The length of the shortest program that outputs a string; the smallest description one can make of the string.
- Locality: The notion of identifying specific regions responsible for something observed more generally. It involves connecting the appearance of something to the behaviors we observe.
- Machine Learning: Uses large amounts of data to discover statistical correlations, which fuel either implicit or explicit decision making.
- Meaning: What the label actually is in a given situation.
- Meta Understanding: Accepts that the only knowledge truly available are the high-level processes systems undergo.
- Multiple Realizability: If something is multiply realizable, it means there are multiple ways to achieve it.
- Multiple Realizability: The concept that complex things don't show us how they come to be; that information is forever lost to the mechanism.
- Mutual Information: A concept referring to the shared information between different components within a system, contributing to its complexity and adaptability.
- Narrative: A story that lays out a causal explanation for the things we experience.
- Nature Chooses our Deadlines: The idea that deadlines are both needed and unnatural, meaning things are required by a certain date, but there is something wholly unnatural about the deadlines we create. It suggests that the right solution will emerge when the necessary pieces and interactions come together naturally.
- Nature’s Deadlines: Defined as the points in time when enough of the right pieces and their interactions come together to solve a hard problem, resulting in a solution with the requisite level of complexity.
- Nature’s Deadline: The natural timing for the completion of a project, as opposed to artificial deadlines.
- Neuroscience: The science that tries to understand the nervous system, including the brain, spinal cord, and an intricate network of nerves. It aims to explain human behaviors in terms of how the brain is structured and evolved, and it is touted as our window into the biological basis of learning and memory.
- Neuroscience Paradigm: The current scientific approach in neuroscience that focuses on reverse engineering phenomena to identify specific components with specific roles. The text argues that this paradigm is outdated and not suitable for understanding complex systems like the brain.
- Not So Natural: The concept that deadlines are a product of modern life and not a natural phenomenon. Our ancestors likely had a different perception of time, unencumbered by the preoccupation of how long something takes to complete.
- Occam's Razor: The principle that the simplest theory that survives refutation should be followed, emphasizing simplicity and testability.
- Occam's Razor: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity," often inaccurately restated as "the simplest explanation is usually the best one."
- Optimization Theory: A conceptual framework where problem-solving is visualized as a ball rolling on a surface of hills and valleys, representing the amount of error or energy in the current solution. The lower the ball sits, the better the solution.
- Overshooting: The scenario where more pieces than necessary are added, forcing the creation into a more random, less structured state, often due to second-guessing or having too many contributors.
- Partial Function: A function that is only defined for part of a category’s domain.
- Partial Function: A concept referenced from ncatlab.org.
- Partial Invariants: Symmetries that exist when a group of elements undergoes a transformation along one or more dimensions.
- Pattern: A set of unmoving parts that stay still amidst the immense complexity and swirling of everyday life, and of phenomena in the natural world.
- Pattern: A set of concepts or principles that have withstood the test of time, noticed by historians, writers, philosophers, engineers, and scientists.
- Pattern Recognition: Grouping and categorizing based on what we observe, allowing us to communicate situations to others.
- Path: The journey or process that produces patterns, characterized by massive epistemic uncertainty and multiple realizability.
- Pneumatized: Bird bones that allow the bird to take in oxygen while both inhaling and exhaling.
- Power Law Relationships: A behavior in complex networks where a quantity varies as a power of another. It includes properties like scale invariance, where some feature of the object does not change despite altering the scale of observation.
- Precision: Stripping away the externalities of the messy world and instead anchoring our ideas on some set of irrefutable facts.
- Precision (in Measurement): How refined our measurement is.
- Project-Based Learning: An educational approach that focuses on learning through engaging in projects, which may serve as a proxy for focusing on high-level processes and signals.
- Quality: Generally means an object that will go a long time without breaking. This definition works even for things like writing, entertainment, and people, as long as we’re thinking in informational terms.
- Quality: Defined as something that maps to its purpose with good efficacy, rather than just being homemade.
- Redundancy: Nails and glue represent a kind of redundancy as they can be expected to act as partial invariants under perturbation.
- Reductionism: The idea that we can understand something by inspecting its makeup; looking into the individual components to know the thing itself.
- Restriction Category: Another concept referenced from ncatlab.org.
- Rigor: Being thorough; to exhaust how we choose to argue about how things work. Rigor admits the fewest assumptions and lays down only what we believe to be absolutely true.
- Root Causes: The underlying reasons behind observed phenomena. In complex systems, the concept of root causes is challenged because outputs are achieved in aggregate, not through specific individual functions.
- Scale Invariance: A property of power law relationships where some feature of an object remains unchanged despite changes in the scale of observation.
- Schrodinger Paradox: The paradox where life appears to create order and structure, contrary to the 2nd law of thermodynamics which states that entropy must increase.
- Scurvy: A disease prevented by consuming certain fruits, not by studying the fruits to determine they contained something healthy.
- Simultaneous Invention: The concept that an invention or theory is guaranteed to occur within a certain time frame due to the interconnectedness and contributions of human society.
- Signals: High-level guides that indicate when we are on the right track, rather than strict instructions or recipes for achieving outcomes.
- Soft Computing: AI technologies that produce outputs through iteration and convergence, not deterministic, hardcoded rules.
- Solutions as Peaks in Complexity: The notion that solutions to problems can be thought of as resolutions to optimization problems, where the goal is to find the lowest possible point on the error surface, satisfying some reasonable number of constraints.
- Structure: The arrangement of relations between the parts of what is built, necessary to package innovation into non-randomness that draws people in.
- Structure and Staggering: The concept that while we cannot shift the peak of nature’s deadlines, we can enter the peak sooner by focusing on the most abstract aspects of the challenge and introducing details only when absolutely needed.
- Structural Complexity: A measure of complexity that aligns with how we perceive complex patterns, taking into account the presence of hierarchies and the nesting of patterns. It is calculated using renormalization group transformations to produce a multiscale structural complexity profile.
- Structural Complexity (Ψ): An expression that captures the descriptive complexity of a category’s description set in terms of Kolmogorov complexity.
- Structural-Algorithmic Complexity (SAC): A conceptual definition combining algorithmic complexity (program size) with structural complexity, suggesting that a system's peak in structural complexity occurs where its program (physical arrangement that computes the output) is most complex.
- Staggering: Working on multiple projects in parallel, allowing the most developed one to be released next.
- Surprisal: The level of initial bewilderment that a creative work brings to those who consume it, which assigns meaning to the work.
- Survivability: The idea that continuity is not truth, but survivability is.
- System 1: A type of thinking that is quick and intuitive, as referenced from the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
- Technium: A concept by Kevin Kelly referring to the whole collection of today’s technology as a kind of “living” blob that strongly resembles life.
- Targets: In neuroscience, these are specific areas of the brain identified through causal explanations that are used for future intervention. Correct targets can lead to effective treatments, while incorrect targets can waste resources or cause harm.
- Tools: Apparatuses that enable movement through the environment, not fixed ideas about how things work.
- Trial-and-Error: An approach in engineering and other fields that involves experimenting and learning from failures rather than strictly adhering to best practices and rigid rules.
- Undershooting: The scenario where a solution hasn’t taken on the needed level of structural complexity, leading to poor decisions and a failure to deliver the necessary outputs.
- Universality: Occurs when the properties of a system are independent of the details of the system, leading to many different physical systems exhibiting the same behavior.
- Uncanny Valley: A concept where computer simulations approximate reality closely, making it hard to distinguish between real and artificial.
- Unmanaged Complexity: The plague of the software industry, brought about by ad-hoc development without fundamental understanding.
- Wetness: There is no way to trace the path from individual water molecules to wetness. Wetness is multiply realizable.
time taken: 0:00:44.980614