Thesaurus for Writers

Antifragility

Antifragility means that things belonging to a dynamic, unstable, and contingent system benefit from this disorder over time. Fragile things, on the other hand, thrive on order and require significant effort to maintain it.

 Strength through adversity

 Robustness, Resilience, Resisting adversity

•  Nassim Taleb: Antifragile

Black Swan

Unexpected, unlikely events that have devastating effects and are unpredictable are called black swans. In the past, they have often triggered crises, wars or revolutions.

 (predictable) Catastrophes

•  Nassim Taleb: The Black Swan

Bullshit

Harry Frankfurt addressed the topic of bullshit in his famous essay. Lying is a craft that pursues specific purposes and goals. Accordingly, it must be worked out conscientiously. Bullshit does not need this. It is much more general and vague and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Someone who produces bullshit produces something half-baked. He doesn't even try to be right, cause he doesn't care whether his statement is right or wrong.

 falsehood, lie, untruth

•  Harry Frankfurt: On Bullshit
•  Rory Sutherland: Alchemy (Benign Bullshit)

Ergodicity

Dynamic systems are considered ergodic when they exhibit constant quantities over long periods but undergo fluctuations in individual time periods. In this case, they are independent of their initial conditions.

•  Nassim Taleb: Skin in the Game

Ecological Rationality

Ecological rationality describes how well a heuristic is suited to solving a problem based on the environment in which it operates.

•  Gerd Gigerenzer: Gut Feelings

Legibility

The modern state has the goal to make his citizens and his territory more legible, because legibility is necessary for exerting control. The problem is that in order to make his states subjects legible, it has to use simplified schemes, that cause injustice, social and environmental costs.

•  James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State

Mimetic Desire

Mimetic desire describes people's uncertainty about what they should desire next and the imitation process caused by that uncertainty. But at the same time they want to separate themselves from their fellow human beings because they fear too much equality. This conflict, which is nowadays fueled by social media leads to "mimetic crises" for the resolution of which the scapegoat mechanism and the market economy were invented as social innovations in the past. Nowadays, however, they no longer work so well and we need a third revolution to resolve conflicts through mimetic crises.

 imitation

•  Luke Burgis: Wanted
•  René Girard: Violence and the Sacred
•  René Girard: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
•  René Girard: The Scapegoat

Psycho-logic

The term psycho-logic was coined by Rory Sutherland and describes that in real life decisions made by humans are often counterintuitive and follow psychological principles unknown to theorists in academics.

•  Rory Sutherland: Alchemy
•  Sam Tatam: Evolutionary Ideas

Stupidity

Carlo Cipolla defines a stupid person as someone who harms others without being able to take any advantage or even harming himself in this process.

 Idiocy, Foolishness, Imbecility

 Inability

•  Carlo Cipolla: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity