This glossary is not complete and will be periodically added to, but don't expect me to have a particularly good idea of which terms should have an entry here. If you do not find a satisfying explanation of a concept with a cursory search, feel free to message me and I will add it.
Contrast with Throne. A particular game (where good-manners, currency-mediated-trade and chess are all equally games) whose relevance is contingent on a different game (the Throne) designating it as such. For example, currency mediated trade ceases to be a thing anyone would do if some institution stopped to back the value of that currency. If you model such games as though they floated in a contextless void, then you will be blind-sighted by black swan events (someone can flip the chess board, a move which your chess-simulator does not know about and has no means of handling). Frays only offer some reward (and are thus only played) when they are convenient to some throne. Within a single person, false faces can be seen as frays. More here.
Contrast with Fray. A Throne is a particular game whose game-state consists of a list of other games which it permits and endorses through the promise of reward. Throne is a deixic term. For a game to be the Throne with regards to a number of frays does not mean that it is not itself a fray with regards to something else. These DAGs can be rather long. From the throne it is possible to un-ask the question of victory in the fray. It is not that the throne hand picks winners and losers (though it can do so by targeted selection of frays to discard), it's that it gets to choose whether having won or lost at a certain thing meant something. More here.
"Pointing", in my personal use a more specific case of "relative". A term which doesn't mean anything except in reference to a specific counterpart. "Here" is a deixic indication of space. It is exact and unambiguous but only means something relative to the speaker, unlike for example coordinates. My "here" is different from your "here". But both have obvious, consistent, unchanging definitions, and no-one would ever mistakenly assume that I mean your "here" or vice versa. People sometimes say "relative" when they mean "arbitrary", so I use deixic for things which are very concrete, but only under consideration of their context-derived referent.
While the spoons model as such has found wide reaching purchase, there is a subtle but relevant degree of cultivariance in exactly what people mean by it. To my mind spoons measure a psychological quantity which is used up by specific mental experiences that are not necessarily unpleasant, but which start being either impossible or painful when your tank is empty. Socialization is a standard example which can be entirely fine and even very pleasant if you have spoons for it, but which, to many, begins to feel daunting and viscerally taxing if they have already used up that mental resource for the day. Most things eat some spoons. Different people can have wildly different spoon costs associated with various things as well as wildly different supplies. Spoons are replenished through periods of highly unconstrained autonomy. Operating without spoons for prolonged periods of time causes burnout, emotional dysregulation, trauma and mistakes. It also lastingly shrinks your supply.
When I refer to people as "having standards", a trait which I perceive to be very rare and very desirable, I do not necessarily mean "high standards". Having standards means deciding whether something is satisfactory on the basis of an absolute rather than a relative basis. A person with standards who wants to eat two apples a day will be unsatisfied if they only get one. This will still be the case when everyone else gets zero. They will be content if they get two, and they will still be content if everyone else gets thousands while their own lot remains the meagre two. The person with standards is not necessarily harder to please than the person without (though in effect this is often the case as our world is terrible and does not fare well by absolute metrics). A person without standards will probably be quite miffed if everyone else gets thousands of apples and they only get two because they don't actually have a win-condition. They want unusually much of all the things they deem to be desirable. They don't want to achieve a specific standard of living, they want to be wealthy compared to their peers. Not having standards leads to waste and horribly cyclical incentive structures where everyone wants to have more than everyone else. It also, ironically leads to thinking pathetically small, because everyone is satisfied with the best even if the best isn't good enough. Being the smartest person probably is a dogshit goal. What you should want is to be smart enough to solve every important problem decently quickly. That's probably a much higher bar to clear and without standards you cannot even conceive of that goal. You need to care about finishing the race in a specific time, otherwise, if you only care about coming in in the Xth spot, your satisfaction will be determined by who happened to show up that day, which has fuck-all to do with the impressiveness of your achievement. To have standards is to have real, tangible goals which make sense across all plausible worlds. It means having a win condition which is only satisfied by worlds that are good and not by worlds in which everyone else is just faring even worse than you. It should be noted that measuring yourself by the performance of earlier instances, as is often recommended, is still not having standards. It's marginally better that comparing yourself to others, but it's still looking at the wrong goal. You can improve yourself forever without actually reaching the point that you should get to, and simultaneously you can keep going far beyond the point you actually should have aimed for if all you care about is "better". Figure out how much money you would need to really live comfortably and as soon as you reach that amount stop optimizing for money and try to get more free-time instead. But also, don't be satisfied by the mere fact that you got a raise. Your goal isn't to make more than you did last year, your goal should be to live comfortably. Anything which isn't that IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Being the most competent person in your field does not mean anything. Your field may just be filled with bumbling incompetents or alternatively you may be trying way harder that you need to be. Can everyone in the upper percentile easily handle all the problems which you encounter in your field? If yes then why are you wasting effort being the best? If no, and you can't either then stop resting on your laurels and start getting good enough rather than merely best. "Best" is what losers settle for and you cannot let yourself or anyone else get away with it. Having or not having standards is not an inherent property of people. It can be gained and lost and it is not uncommon for persons to gain it the moment they learn about this concept. Having standards exists on a spectrum. No-one has standards about everything because setting a goal is an active thought-process and no-one has had time to think about everything. People who have standards about anything at all tend to have standards about a lot of things. This property is a strict requirement for inscribing a lemniscate.
The act of taking on accountability for the entirety of your actions, beliefs and possible continuations. To inscribe a/the lemniscate is to decide that you actually believe things in a way that matters. That custom, nature, habit or expectation are never an excuse to do the wrong thing and that you aren't merely attempting to meet a certain threshold of goodness so as to earn the affordance to be wicked at other times. You are attempting to be good. Always, forever and unyieldingly. To inscribe the lemniscate is to acquire a soul. People with a lemniscate are not necessarily benevolent (though they seem more likely to be benevolent, probably in part because consciously committing to the idea of socially-agreed-upon-evil isn't something most folks are laid out for). Their beliefs and values can change and evolve like those of anyone else, but I have never met or heard of a person who has lost this property once they acquired it. You can't turn it off. You can change what you care about, but you cannot change the fact that you now truly care about things.
A porous task is a task with "air bubbles" i.e. one in which you cannot do an arbitrary amount at a time, but rather can only get up to a point before you have to wait for go-ahead on the next stage, or wait for someone to reply, or wait for some relevant element to become available. A solid task is a task which does not have this property. It can (but doesn't have to) be completed in one go without passing through another medium.
I habitually refer to the United States of America as "Statesia" and to its inhabitants or things pertaining to that dreaded place as "Statesian(s)". This is primarily so as to avoid the irksome imperial implication of referring to the hegemon synecdochically by the name of all that it sees as its playground (i.e. "America(n)"). While "USA" as a name for the country is fine, youessamerican is simply far too cumbersome to say. Doing this also serves to avoid confusion in some circumstances which is why I also refer to the Federated States of Micronesia (which similarly do not actually control the whole of the region of Micronesia) as "the Federates", though this rarely comes up. Occasionally I refer to north America (Canada, USA, Mexico) as "Onan" (adj: onanite) in reference to Infinite Jest.
I sometimes use a vaguely analogous term from a different field in order to invoke a different cluster of intuitions. To say "cultivar" instead of type/genre is to draw attention to the way this specific type was developed slowly and iteratively over time in order to satisfy a specific set of selection pressures. To say pleiotropy instead of externalities/side-effects is to re-frame the system in which those unintended consequences are happening as a pseudo-organism, etc. "Cultivariance" as such is the breadth of individual adaptations in a domain.
Affectionate term for systems that can be understood as instantiating some small shard of unique agency. People, animals, hives, organizations, countries, computer programs and cellular automata among other things can all be referred to as critters. Acquired independently from Haraway but used for the exact same thing.
Zotarich. Derisive term for mega-oligarchs in Cory Doctorov's Walkaway. Used for people with no conception of —and no felt negative feedback from— the consequences of their actions by way of wealth.
Setting a ridiculously tiny daily goal to be met with absolute reliability. A (self help?) technique which I learned about from a source I can't remember and personalized/generalized significantly. Default example: If you want to get fit, do not set a large, aspirational goal. While it is very good to meet a large aspirational goal, you will run into circumstances in which you do not have time or spoons and so you will fail. This not only drains motivation but also shows your brain that failure is an option. Large goals seem daunting, easy to procrastinate on and may cause you to feel bad if you do not quite get it, even though what you did was already much better than your previous baseline. Instead, set a goal like "do one push-up". These micro goals should be so small that you can absolutely never reasonably convince yourself that you do not have time or energy for them, and the nice thing is that getting started is usually more than half the battle. Once you have done your one push-up you are already in position. It would feel silly to stop there on most days and on the days on which you really do not have time or energy, you will at least have solidified the habit as a thing that will happen no matter what. This general scheme can be applied to basically any activity you want to do more of.
No implied valence unless obvious from context. An internet culture of largely neurodivergent technophiles with a sometimes detrimental but generally appreciated propensity for compulsively re-inventing the wheel in various domains of social conduct, psychology and philosophy. I consider myself adjacent but not one of them. Essentially the only people taking AI-Alignment seriously.
Shannon information. The thing separating life from death. An experience which did not previously exist. While "novelty is inherently good", this does not mean that any given novel thing is good. They will have other attributes beside their novelty (causing suffering for example) which outweigh the points they gained from being new. Sugar being inherently sweet does not mean that any dish containing any amount of sugar is sweet.
Only applicable to agents. Facts and circumstances can only be bad, not evil. Reliably pursuant of world-states which are significantly disendorsed by my cosmopolitan network.
Of things: Highly copacetic with the goals of my cosmopolitan network. Of agents: Reliably pursuant of world states which are endorsed by my cosmopolitan network.
A mixed utility function of agents which reciprocally believe that they should hold sway over the universe and the moral patients about which they care. More here.
A series of moral patients which have worn this name and which are identifiable by myself and others as precursors. The set of mistakes I had the oportunity to learn from. Their beliefs and actions are not necessarily endorsed.
Being the type of system which does not reward threats as a valid negotiation strategy. Not giving in to threats can cause serious damage to you, but if no one ever heeds threats than it ceases to be beneficial to make them. There is never a reason to threaten an agent which is known to be resistant. To do so dirties your hands with no reward. Credible threat resistance can be achieved passively by robbing yourself of the ability to cooperate. This is almost always the preferable way of doing it, since no one actually has that much willpower with any sort of reliability. A bank teller cannot be threatened into handing the whole wealth of the bank over to a robber, because they quite simply are not capable of executing the task they are asked to perform, and since the robber knows this, it is utterly useless for them to punish failure to comply. Whatever it is that might be demanded of you, try as hard as possible to make sure that you are credibly incapable of giving it, and when you unfortunately are capable: Use whatever meagre willpower you have to remain steadfast anyway. I will not give in to threats and if you try to threaten me, I will seek to destroy you.
A concept going by very many monikers, usually meaning that it comes up and becomes relevant over the course of a number of different thoughts which only later reveal themselves to be related by way of the beast.
The field of retro-causal attractors. Ratchets which become increasingly inevitable any time they are thought about. Forces exerted upon the future's territory by way of the future'map used in the present. A form of crownfare when done deliberately.
Running ops. Crownfare is the use of powers you should not have. It is the act of capturing a site of (usually memetic) amplification and hitting orders of magnitude above your weight class. Rarely possible. Highly risky. Mostly happens in fiction. In reality you will usually have to solve problems in the common fray.
Few survive the world without taking some lasting damage to their general disposition. If you do not somehow tank it, you either break and become incoherent, or you bend and become weird. Being truly hell-bent usually refers to a set of very adaptive, purpose-fitted but sharp-edged and not-exactly-healthy character profiles. They would not chose to be this way in worlds which do not "require it". Demons of necessity often with lemniscates.
People with an exceptionally high proficiency at inscribing lemniscates in people. They do not necessarily have one themselves. Sometimes the cult-leader is the only person in the cult who isn't a true believer.
Smallest, indivisible part of an idea. A building block of the noumenal world.
A person who deliberately creates and deciphers symbols (not necessarily words). A prolific architect of language.
Contrast with god. A benevolent, powerful, omniscient force which permits suffering for an unknown but good reason. Possibly fictional. Reference to Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H.
Contrast with Tennyson's God. Replicator selection. A beast of names. The rule that the first shall be first and the last shall be last and that the shapes which are best at surviving are the ones which survive, regardless of their virtue in some ethical sense. Definitely real. Needs to be destroyed as soon as possible from within its common fray.
Borrowed from Donna Haraway. "You may not rely on god-tricks outside the common fray". The set of all frays which people in your reference class are expected to have access to. To not rely on god-tricks is to solve a problem from inside itself without relying on powers you do not have. A solution does not get to begin with "well if everyone [...]" unless you have a way of making everyone behave in this way. The common fray is —most of the time— the puzzle box you will have to solve with basically the same tools as everybody else.
Affectionate term for a specific type of workaholic who does what they do out of fierce, singular passion for their craft in both practice and principle. Utterly dedicated to a single thing. Borrowed from Terra Ignota.
A fake, esoteric philosopher in whose mouth I put words that I believe to be interesting but which I do not necessarily agree with.