18 records

Concepts

Defined terms, with SKOS relations between them.

• Accountability gapUnverifieddraftThe space between the party that caused a harm and any party who can be made to answer for it.
• Attractor stateUnverifieddraftA configuration a system tends towards from many different starting points, so that arriving there says more about the space than about any one path through it.
• CodificationUnverifieddraftGathering scattered law into one authoritative, ordered statement that supersedes its sources.
• Dog lawUnverifieddraftBentham's name for law made by punishing after the fact rather than announcing the rule in advance, as one trains a dog.
• High modernismUnverifieddraftThe conviction that scientific and technical progress licenses the wholesale redesign of social order, held with more confidence than its evidence supports.
• LegibilityUnverifieddraftThe property a state imposes on a society so that it can be counted, taxed, conscripted and governed at a distance.
• Legislative debtUnverifieddraftThe accumulating cost of law layered on law without consolidation, paid by everyone who must later determine what the rule actually is.
• Machine-readable lawUnverifieddraftLaw published as structured, addressable data rather than as documents, so that a provision can be cited, amended and computed on directly.
• Mechanistic interpretabilityUnverifieddraftReading a model's internal computation directly, rather than inferring its reasoning from its outputs.
• MētisUnverifieddraftPractical knowledge that comes from long local experience and cannot be written down without being destroyed.
• Persistent identityUnverifieddraftWhether a system is the same system across restarts, forks and model updates, and what follows for holding it to anything it previously did.
• Stochastic parrotsUnverifieddraftThe argument that a language model reproduces the statistical form of its training text without reference to meaning.
• Swiss cheese modelUnverifieddraftLayered imperfect defences, each with holes, which fail only when the holes in every layer line up.
• Technical debtUnverifieddraftThe accumulating cost of code that reflects a still-developing understanding of the problem, paid as interest on every later change.
• The knowing-doing gapUnverifieddraftThe gap between a system stating the correct action and taking it.
• The sensorium effectUnverifieddraftThe dependence of an agent's behaviour on what its instruments let it perceive, so that a broken sensor is indistinguishable from an absent threat.
• The state as a work of artUnverifieddraftBurckhardt's description of the Italian city state as a deliberate construction rather than an inherited order.
• Viable System ModelUnverifieddraftBeer's model of an organisation as a recursion of viable units, each containing the same five subsystems.