CF·Dictionary

The Complete Index · 217 Entries

Index of Entries

Every term in the volume, in alphabetical order and numbered. Jump by letter, or filter by tradition.

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A

  1. № 001 Accumulating Progress Keeping, organizing, and retaining what you learn so progress compounds over time instead of being relearned from scratch.
  2. № 002 Arbitrary/Possible/Probable/Certain Scale Peikoff's Objectivist scheme rating an idea arbitrary, possible, probable, or certain, with ideas climbing toward certainty as evidence accumulates.
  3. № 003 Argument Strength The widespread idea that arguments and evidence carry varying degrees of strength or weight that can be summed and compared to decide which idea is best.
  4. № 004 Articulation of Intuitions Converting inexplicit intuitive knowledge into stated claims so it can be examined and criticized like any other idea.
  5. № 005 Automatization The process by which consciously-learned ideas and skills become fast, low-error, subconscious responses that need little conscious attention.
  6. № 006 Autonomous vs Dependent Errors A distinction between errors that stand on their own as causal actors and errors that survive only because supporting ideas keep propping them up.
  7. № 007 Auxiliary Hypotheses Problem The danger that a refuted theory can be saved by ad hoc add-ons that block the contradiction without genuinely improving the theory.
  8. № 008 Axioms (Existence, Identity, Consciousness) Objectivism's three self-evident bases of all knowledge: existence exists, every existent has identity, and consciousness is awareness of existence.

B

  1. № 009 Balanced Plant A factory designed so every workstation has equal capacity and full utilization, which underperforms its expected output because variance combined with dependencies starves and stalls the chain.
  2. № 010 Baseline The body of skills you have finished learning, where you can complete tasks successfully and check your own work with confidence and ease.
  3. № 011 Bias Automatization Problem The risk that biases, emotions, or errors get built into subconscious habits during practice, becoming stable and hard to notice or change afterward.
  4. № 012 Binary Epistemology The thesis that ideas should be judged by exactly two outcomes—refuted or non-refuted—rather than placed on an analog scale of strength, goodness, or probability.
  5. № 013 Binary Evaluation Judging each factor or idea as pass (1) or fail (0) by whether it is good enough for the goal, so that any single failure sinks the whole.
  6. № 014 Brainstorming Listing many possibilities without much worry about whether each is right, deliberately deferring quality filtering to a separate critical phase afterward.
  7. № 015 Brandolini's Law The popular claim that refuting nonsense takes far more energy than producing it; CF argues the opposite, since one decisive error refutes an idea no matter how cheaply or expensively it was made.
  8. № 016 Breaking Projects into Parts Splitting a complex project into independently judgeable sub-projects, each with its own goal and pass/fail evaluation, so success or failure is detected early and often.
  9. № 017 Breakpoint A point on an analog spectrum where a quantitative change becomes a qualitative one, splitting a continuum into discrete pass/fail categories.
  10. № 018 Bucket Theory of Mind Popper's name for the mistaken view that the mind passively accumulates knowledge as raw observations pour in through the senses, like water filling an empty bucket.
  11. № 019 Buffer Spare resources held in front of the constraint to absorb variance so output is not lost.

C

  1. № 020 Cargo Culting Adopting sophisticated terminology and high-level concepts without having built the foundational knowledge beneath them, leaving empty jargon instead of real understanding.
  2. № 021 Certainty An error-proof, guaranteed status for an idea, which CF holds is unattainable because we can never get 100% certain proof of anything.
  3. № 022 Certainty (Contextual) Objectivism's idea that one can be certain relative to one's full context of knowledge, rather than with absolute or infallible finality.
  4. № 023 Chain and Weakest Link A chain's strength is fixed by its single weakest link, so improving any other link does nothing for the whole.
  5. № 024 Complex World The observation that ordinary objects, words, and situations hold vastly more complexity than we attend to, so we must focus on a tiny fraction and many errors hide in the unattended remainder.
  6. № 025 Concept Application Practice A practice exercise where the learner brainstorms scenarios an idea does and doesn't apply to, uses it, explains why it's right, and answers objections.
  7. № 026 Concepts (Concept-Formation) Mental integrations that unite many particulars into a single unit, formed by distinguishing essentials from non-essentials.
  8. № 027 Conceptual Hierarchy The layered structure in which advanced concepts depend on, and are built up from, simpler and more basic ones.
  9. № 028 Conceptual Unit A single mental whole formed by integrating two or more ideas or dimensions so the mind can treat them as one item.
  10. № 029 Conjecture and Refutation The method of learning by creating ideas as fallible guesses and seeking errors to eliminate them: brainstorming plus critical thinking.
  11. № 030 Conscious Bottleneck CF's claim that focused conscious thinking is sharply limited, on the order of a few quality hours per day, making it the binding constraint on the rate of learning.
  12. № 031 Conscious Ideas Mental content you can put into words and deliberately attend to, operating under a tight limit on how much can be held in focus at once.
  13. № 032 Constraint The one part of a system that limits its throughput toward a goal, like the weakest link in a chain.
  14. № 033 Constraint Applied to Epistemology CF's transfer of Goldratt's constraint concept into reasoning: spend detailed attention only on the few factors that actually bind an idea's success, and grade the rest pass/fail.
  15. № 034 Content over Source Ideas should be evaluated by what they actually say, not by who said them or how they were produced.
  16. № 035 Context (Objectivist) The discipline of holding every idea within the body of relevant knowledge and circumstances that makes it apply, and tracking that context as it changes.
  17. № 036 Contextual Knowledge The view that an idea is always evaluated relative to a goal and context, so whether it succeeds or fails is context-dependent and a changed context can demand reassessment.
  18. № 037 Corroboration Popper's term for a theory having survived severe testing so far, explicitly not confirmation or positive support, leaving the theory a conjecture.
  19. № 038 Credences and Degrees of Belief Numbers attached to beliefs to express how confident one is, which CF rejects as the wrong tool for evaluating ideas.
  20. № 039 Critical Fallibilism Elliot Temple's rational philosophy that evaluates ideas in a binary, error-correction way and acts only on ideas with no known refutation, synthesizing Critical Rationalism, Theory of Constraints, and Objectivism.
  21. № 040 Critical Preferences Popper's method of choosing, among non-refuted rival theories, the one judged best after weighing how vigorously it was criticized and how well it survived.
  22. № 041 Critical Rationalism Karl Popper's fallibilist, evolutionary epistemology: knowledge grows by conjecture and criticism, not by induction or justification.
  23. № 042 Criticism An explanation of why an idea fails at a goal, contradicting the idea so the two cannot both be accepted.
  24. № 043 Current Reality Tree A cause-and-effect diagram that traces a system's many undesirable effects back to a small number of root causes, so you can fix the underlying problem instead of fighting symptoms.
  25. № 044 Cycling Between Topics Deliberately alternating between working on prerequisite skills and the advanced topic they support, instead of fully finishing each prerequisite before starting the next layer.

D

  1. № 045 Debate Policy A publicly written, advance-committed document specifying which topics you will debate, with whom, and by what methods, so that refusals are transparent, predictable, and open to criticism.
  2. № 046 Debates A discussion focused on resolving a specific disagreement, valued because it is the social mechanism best suited to actually getting errors corrected.
  3. № 047 Decisive Consideration A single factor that by itself settles whether an option succeeds or fails at a goal, regardless of how it scores on everything else.
  4. № 048 Decisive Criticism A criticism logically incompatible with the idea it targets, so accepting it forbids accepting the idea; it either refutes the idea or accomplishes nothing, with no degree in between.
  5. № 049 Degrees of Freedom Goldratt's complexity measure: the fewest points you must touch to affect the whole system, which often gauges complexity better than counting a system's elements.
  6. № 050 Deliberate Relearning The intentional practice of overwriting an automatized false belief or bad habit with a better one, which requires first consciously understanding both options and genuinely agreeing the replacement is better.
  7. № 051 Demarcation Problem The problem of distinguishing genuine empirical science from non-science, which Popper answered with falsifiability rather than verifiability.
  8. № 052 Dependent Events Activities chained so that a later step cannot proceed until an earlier one delivers, making each step's output depend on the steps before it.
  9. № 053 Digital Error Correction The thesis that reliable error correction requires discrete (digital) categories like true/false, because analog better-or-worse scales offer no way to definitively exclude any value as wrong.
  10. № 054 Dimension A type, kind, or category of factor—such as length, weight, time, money, or color—within which quantities share an underlying nature; factors in different dimensions are qualitatively unlike.
  11. № 055 Drum-Buffer-Rope A Theory of Constraints scheduling method where the constraint sets the production tempo (drum), a buffer shields it from starvation, and a rope ties new-work release to that tempo to stop overproduction upstream.

E

  1. № 056 Elevate the Constraint Adding resources to raise the constraint's capacity, undertaken only after it is fully exploited and everything else is subordinated to it.
  2. № 057 Emotional Development Through Practice Reworking emotional reactions by treating feelings as automatized ideas, thinking new reactions through consciously, then practicing them until they run automatically.
  3. № 058 Empiricism (CR Critique) The doctrine that knowledge is derived from sensory experience; Critical Rationalism rejects this as a source of justification while keeping empirical testing as a way to find errors.
  4. № 059 Endless Meta Levels The threat that a disagreement can regress without limit into meta-discussion about how to discuss, which CF manages with logical priority, repetition limits, and reusable written reasons.
  5. № 060 Error An error is a reason that an idea fails at a goal in a context.
  6. № 061 Error Bars A documented range stating how far a measurement might deviate from the true value, which bounds quantitative error rather than removing it.
  7. № 062 Error Correction Finding and fixing mistakes; CF treats one's error-correction ability as a budgetable resource whose rate must keep pace with the rate of making errors.
  8. № 063 Error Correction Cadence How often you judge a project's success or failure: most learning chunks within a day, never more than a week, with difficulty roughly halved after each failure.
  9. № 064 Error Correction Capacity Your finite, manageable capacity for finding and fixing errors, treated as the key resource that determines how much you can successfully take on.
  10. № 065 Error Propagation How a flaw in a foundational idea spreads into everything built on top of it, with damage that grows the higher the structure rises.
  11. № 066 Error Rate The weighted frequency of mistakes an activity generates, which must stay below your capacity to correct them.
  12. № 067 Error Rate Management Setting the reliability an idea or skill must reach in proportion to how often and how deeply it will be reused, since errors in heavily-reused building blocks multiply through everything built on top of them.
  13. № 068 Essentials vs Non-Essentials Distinguishing a concept's defining, fundamental features from its merely incidental ones, especially when forming and judging definitions.
  14. № 069 Evaporating Cloud A Theory of Constraints diagramming technique that dissolves an apparent conflict win/win, without compromise, by exposing and refuting a mistaken assumption beneath one side of it.
  15. № 070 Evasion The willful refusal to look at, think about, or engage relevant facts and criticisms — a deliberate suspension of the mind that blocks error correction.
  16. № 071 Evolutionary Epistemology The theory that all knowledge is created by evolution — replication with variation and selection — with ideas evolving literally as genes do.
  17. № 072 Excess Capacity Capability a factor has beyond what the goal requires, present in every non-constraint of a stable working system.
  18. № 073 Explanation An account of how or why something is so; in CF a criticism counts only when it explains why an idea fails at a purpose, not merely scores it.
  19. № 074 Explanatory Error Correction Fixing an error by explaining what is wrong with an idea and devising a different solution that no longer has that flaw.
  20. № 075 Exploit the Constraint Wring the most useful output from the constraint as it currently is, before spending anything to add capacity to it.

F

  1. № 076 Factor A trait, characteristic, or quality used to evaluate an option, which CF reframes as a binary sub-goal asking whether the option is good enough at that thing.
  2. № 077 Failure Streak Recovery A control rule that cuts the next task's difficulty exponentially for each consecutive failure, rebuilding success before ramping difficulty back up.
  3. № 078 Fallibilism The position that people can always err and no idea can be guaranteed true, so any belief might turn out mistaken.
  4. № 079 Fallible Ideas Elliot Temple's pre-CF body of philosophy and its discussion community, synthesizing Popper, Rand, Deutsch, and Godwin, which Critical Fallibilism develops further.
  5. № 080 Falsifiability A theory is falsifiable when it forbids some observable outcomes, so that evidence could in principle contradict it; Popper's mark of empirical claims.
  6. № 081 Finding Breakpoints and Limits Deliberately varying conditions and pushing until performance flips from success to failure, so as to locate the points where your real limits and errors actually are.
  7. № 082 Five Focusing Steps Goldratt's repeatable cycle for managing a system's constraint: identify it, exploit it, subordinate everything else to it, elevate it, then start over when the constraint moves.
  8. № 083 Flow The smooth movement of work through a system toward its goal, the rate of which the constraint governs.
  9. № 084 Focus The volitional choice to direct one's mind to full, active awareness and clear thinking, as opposed to drifting or evading.
  10. № 085 Focusing on the Constraint Directing optimization effort solely at the system's limiting factor, since improving anything else yields no gain toward the goal.
  11. № 086 Foundational Review Going back to find and fix major errors in earlier-learned foundations when learning progress stalls, instead of brute-forcing the advanced material.
  12. № 087 Future Reality Tree A cause-and-effect diagram that maps how a proposed change would produce the desired effects, while hunting for negative branches where it also causes new problems.

G

  1. № 088 Goal The specific aim an idea is meant to achieve; CF evaluates ideas only relative to a stated goal, since an error just is a reason an idea fails at a goal.
  2. № 089 Good Enough A factor that clears its goal-relevant threshold with margin to spare, so improving it further yields no benefit — in ToC terms, good enough not to be a constraint.
  3. № 090 Gradations of Certainty The practice of ranking non-refuted ideas by assigning them degrees of support, probability, or confidence rather than judging them as refuted or not.
  4. № 091 Gradual Transition Plan An honest, incremental plan for personal change that every part of you can endorse, instead of a sudden, disruptive shift that suppresses one side of an inner conflict.

H

  1. № 092 Habits Automatized behaviors or skills run on autopilot with little conscious attention, which become harder to change as their mechanics drop out of awareness.
  2. № 093 Hierarchy of Ideas Knowledge organized in layers from concrete details up to high-level concepts, cross-connected so any idea can be unwrapped to inspect what it was built from.

I

  1. № 094 Idea Comparison by Purpose One idea is better than another only when it succeeds at a specific purpose the other fails at, never because it has a higher overall rating.
  2. № 095 Idea Trees Tree diagrams that map the structure of an argument or discussion, showing which ideas reply to which and which criticisms remain unanswered.
  3. № 096 Idea Variant A modified version of an idea that counts as a new idea and may survive in a context where the original was refuted.
  4. № 097 Ideas (as Units of Thought) An idea is the smallest unit of coherent thought, but it is recursively divisible: larger ideas decompose into sub-ideas, with no fixed boundary marking where one idea ends and the next begins.
  5. № 098 IGC (Idea, Goal, Context) The unit CF evaluates: an idea paired with a specific goal and context, judged refuted or non-refuted as a triple rather than judging the idea in isolation.
  6. № 099 Impasse A participant's signal that the discussion process itself has stopped working, which takes priority over continuing the original topic.
  7. № 100 Impasse Chains A nesting of impasses—where failure to resolve an impasse about a prior impasse becomes the next-level impasse—giving a fair, finite way to conclude a debate unilaterally.
  8. № 101 Incremental Progress Advancing by many small, individually-checkable steps from your current baseline, instead of attempting large jumps that produce more errors than you can correct.
  9. № 102 Induction The supposed method of deriving general theories from observations; CF rejects it as a myth, since infinitely many patterns fit any finite data and evidence can only contradict ideas, never support them.
  10. № 103 Inertia and Constraint Moves The warning that once you raise the limit at one bottleneck, the constraint shifts elsewhere, so you must re-identify it rather than keep running on policies that no longer fit.
  11. № 104 Infallibilism The rejected view that infallible knowledge - a 100% guarantee against error, such as certainty or proof of truth - is attainable.
  12. № 105 Integration Combining several ideas into a single, more powerful conceptual unit, where the more layers built on an idea, the lower its tolerable error rate must be.
  13. № 106 Intentional vs Unintentional Practice The distinction between deliberately directed practice that keeps improving a skill and incidental repetition that automatizes whatever you happen to do, errors included.
  14. № 107 Internal Conflict A disagreement between different ideas within one mind about whether or how to act, which should be resolved by a win/win solution all sides accept rather than by suppressing one side.
  15. № 108 Introspection Understanding yourself by analyzing your own ideas, emotions, and traits, which is hard mainly because you must untangle decades of poorly-learned, uncriticized ideas.
  16. № 109 Intuition Subconscious or inexplicit ideas, including emotions, hunches and gut feelings, that influence judgment but resist being put into words.
  17. № 110 Intuitive Objection An unrefuted criticism held by part of your mind, which under fallibilism you have no right to dismiss without addressing.
  18. № 111 Intuitive-Explicit Conflict A disagreement between a person's conscious, articulable arguments and their subconscious intuitions, which CF treats as an unsolved problem rather than a license to override either side.
  19. № 112 Inventory In Goldratt's three operational measures, all the money a system has tied up in things it intends to sell — raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished goods.
  20. № 113 Irrationality as Blocking Error Correction Irrationality is whatever blocks error correction or prevents problem-solving, not a matter of low intelligence or strong feelings.

J

  1. № 114 Justificationism The mistaken doctrine that positive arguments, evidence, or proofs can establish how good or true an idea is; CF rejects it for criticism-only evaluation.

K

  1. № 115 Knowledge Error-corrected information adapted to a purpose; more and better error correction yields more knowledge, which is attainable without certainty.
  2. № 116 Knowledge Skyscraper A metaphor picturing a body of knowledge as a building whose upper floors rest on lower ones, so attainable height is capped roughly ten floors above the first floor containing a major error.

L

  1. № 117 Learner-Driven Learning The principle that the learner is the active agent who creates and tests their own knowledge, always doing most of the work, while teachers play only a secondary role.
  2. № 118 Library of Criticisms A built-up store of written, reusable criticisms aimed at whole categories of bad ideas, so a single refutation answers many arguments instead of being re-argued each time.
  3. № 119 Like Terms vs Unlike Terms An algebra analogy CF uses to show that only terms sharing the same variable part (the same dimension) can be added, while terms with different variables cannot be combined into one.
  4. № 120 Local vs Global Optimization A local optimization improves an isolated part; a global optimization advances the whole system's goal, and any improvement away from the constraint is merely local.

M

  1. № 121 Major vs Minor Errors The distinction between errors that block further progress toward a goal (major) and errors that are compatible with success and not worth fixing (minor).
  2. № 122 Margin of Error Slack built around a breakpoint or measurement so a pass/fail verdict stays reliable despite imprecision and variation.
  3. № 123 Mastery The level of proficiency at which an activity is done reliably, with few errors and minimal conscious attention, using resources efficiently.
  4. № 124 Measurement Omission Rand's theory that a concept is formed by grouping things that share an attribute while omitting the specific measurements of that attribute, which may vary within a range.
  5. № 125 Mechanistic Thinking Analyzing a situation by identifying the concrete tools, processes, or systems that catch a specific class of error, rather than relying on vague aspirations to do well.
  6. № 126 Meta Levels Numbered layers of ideas-about-ideas, where you climb to a higher level to work on the problem of what to do about a problem you cannot yet solve.
  7. № 127 Mistaken Assumption The hidden false premise behind an apparent conflict, whose discovery dissolves the conflict and shows it was never a real tradeoff.
  8. № 128 Moral Judgment The Objectivist principle that one must never fail to pronounce moral judgment where it is warranted, and must be prepared to justify it.
  9. № 129 Multi-Factor Decision Making Choosing among options by combining many factors from different dimensions instead of optimizing a single criterion.
  10. № 130 Multiplication of Binaries Combining many pass/fail factors by multiplying their 1s and 0s, so a single zero on any necessary factor fails the whole option.

N

  1. № 131 No Inherent Conflicts of Interest The thesis that the rational interests of people do not inherently clash, so win/win solutions are generally available.
  2. № 132 Non-Contradiction as Failure to Contradict The relation between two ideas that do not conflict is merely the absence of a contradiction, never positive support for either.
  3. № 133 Non-Contradictory Integration The aim of combining all of one's knowledge into a single consistent whole with no contradictions left standing between its parts.
  4. № 134 Non-Justificationist Learning The view that we make intellectual progress without ever positively supporting ideas, advancing only by finding and rejecting errors.
  5. № 135 Non-Refuted Idea An idea with no currently known error against it, which is the best status any idea can hold and the only proper basis for action.
  6. № 136 Not Blocking Error Correction Refusing to use filters like status, popularity, topic, or apparent craziness to dismiss ideas without argument, since such filters can hide your biggest mistakes.

O

  1. № 137 Objective Truth The view that reality exists independently of our minds and that we can gain real, though always fallible, knowledge about it.
  2. № 138 Objectivity Recognizing that reality exists independently of any mind and can only be known by reason applied in accordance with logic, against subjectivism and relativism.
  3. № 139 Objectivity in Filtering Filtering which debates to accept by measurable, public criteria such as word counts or demonstrated effort, rather than vague or biased personal judgments.
  4. № 140 Observation and Interpretation We never take in neutral raw data; what we observe is selected and interpreted in light of ideas, goals, and expectations we already hold.
  5. № 141 Operating Expense All the money a system spends to turn inventory into throughput.
  6. № 142 Options The distinct alternatives a decision chooses among, each evaluated against the goal by binary pass/fail rather than ranked by overall score.
  7. № 143 Overreach Attempting work whose error rate outpaces your ability to correct errors, so uncorrected mistakes pile into a growing backlog that trends toward failure.
  8. № 144 Overrides (Behavioral) A deliberately inserted higher-priority exception that interrupts an automatic behavior in a specific situation and can be practiced until it generalizes.

P

  1. № 145 Partial Truth CF's reinterpretation of loose phrases like 'mostly true' or 'strong argument' as the fraction of relevant idea-goal-context triples that are non-refuted, not as a genuine middle degree of truth.
  2. № 146 Paths Forward A methodology for organizing one's ideas and discussion so that errors others already understand can actually reach and correct you.
  3. № 147 Pattern Matching Specifying exact conditions that trigger a response so the subconscious can reliably recognize when a skill or rule applies.
  4. № 148 Patterns, Similarity and Relevance The Popperian position that learning is not extrapolation of patterns from repeated observation, because which patterns, similarities and relevances count is decided by prior critical ideas, not read off the data.
  5. № 149 Peer Review Academic gatekeeping in which a few anonymous reviewers privately accept or reject submitted work; CF criticizes it as opaque, elitist, and weaker at error correction than open public discussion.
  6. № 150 Philosophy as a Secondary Skill Pursuing philosophy not as an end in itself but as a general-purpose support skill that improves problem solving and learning across other fields.
  7. № 151 Piecemeal Reform Improving knowledge by making small, testable changes to what already exists rather than discarding it for a wholesale revolutionary redesign.
  8. № 152 Point System Model of Skill A simplified 0–100 scoring model in which your skill at a topic's prerequisites sets an approximate ceiling on your achievable skill at the topic itself.
  9. № 153 Positive vs Negative Arguments The asymmetry whereby a single negative argument can show an idea is broken, while no quantity of positive arguments can rule out a decisive flaw, so CF treats criticism as primary.
  10. № 154 Postmortem Investigating an error after it happens to find and fix the underlying thinking process behind it, so the whole pattern of related future mistakes is prevented rather than just the one instance.
  11. № 155 Practical Application Testing Right after learning a chunk of prerequisite skill, doing an activity that actually uses it on your higher-level goal to confirm it helps as intended.
  12. № 156 Practice Doing an activity deliberately for the purpose of learning and improving, until a known-correct method becomes automatic.
  13. № 157 Practice and Mastery (Objectivist Integration) Deliberate, repeated use of an idea or skill that drives it toward automatic, low-attention competence — an Objectivist learning theme CF integrates into Critical Rationalism.
  14. № 158 Prerequisite Tree A Theory of Constraints diagram that maps the obstacles blocking a goal and the intermediate objectives needed to clear them, in dependency order.
  15. № 159 Prerequisites The lower-level skills and ideas one must learn, usually in successive layers, before a higher-level skill can be properly understood or used.
  16. № 160 Prerequisites of Debate The conditions a debate needs before it can productively correct error rather than degenerate into disorganized adversarial talk.
  17. № 161 Primacy of Existence The Objectivist principle that reality exists independently of and has metaphysical priority over any consciousness that perceives it.
  18. № 162 Pro/Con List A common decision technique that lists an option's positives and negatives and informally nets them into an overall verdict.
  19. № 163 Problem of Induction The unsolved problem of how general conclusions could ever be derived or justified from particular observations, which Popper held is insoluble because induction does not exist.
  20. № 164 Problem Solving Stating a problem, conjecturing solutions, and eliminating errors, with CF adding that you can always retreat to a higher meta level to find a solvable problem.
  21. № 165 Procrastination Avoiding or resisting an activity because part of you objects to it, signaling an unresolved internal conflict rather than mere laziness.
  22. № 166 Proof A purported demonstration that an idea is true; CF holds positive proof of truth is unavailable and that demanding proof is not itself a criticism.

Q

  1. № 167 Quantitative Error Correction Reducing a measurable deviation from a correct value with numerical techniques (e.g. averaging repeated measurements), where error is typically documented with error bars rather than perfectly eliminated.
  2. № 168 Quantitative vs Qualitative The distinction between differences of degree (more or less of the same thing) and differences of kind (different types, categories or dimensions).

R

  1. № 169 Rational Confidence The easy, automatic, well-grounded knowing that comes from genuine mastery of a field, which CF holds should be attainable in philosophy just as it is in naming a familiar fruit.
  2. № 170 Rational Suppression (False Rationality) The fake-rational practice of overriding one's intuitions with willpower and acting only on explicit verbal arguments, treating an unrefuted gut objection as if it were nothing.
  3. № 171 Reason The best ways of using your mind to find and correct errors, judging ideas by whether they solve their problem in context rather than by any guarantee of truth.
  4. № 172 Reason vs Emotion Emotions are the products of one's value judgments and ideas, not a separate faculty for perceiving reality, so reason rather than feeling should guide cognition.
  5. № 173 Reason vs Observation The rejection of any forced choice between thinking and observing: both pure rationalism and pure empiricism are mistaken extremes, since reason and observation work together.
  6. № 174 Refutation The binary status an idea acquires when a known error is identified against it; a refuted idea has a known error, a non-refuted one currently has none.
  7. № 175 Rejecting on the Merits Openly declining a debate or topic for a stated, criticizable reason, while accepting that you no longer get to claim you have refuted the opposing view.
  8. № 176 Representatives A person, or oneself, who takes responsibility for a school of thought's positions and is willing to address criticism on its behalf, giving its ideas a path forward.
  9. № 177 Resource Budget The limited pool of conscious attention and effort available at once, which mastery effectively expands by offloading prerequisite skills to the subconscious.

S

  1. № 178 Satisficer vs Maximizer A satisficer sets a good-enough bar and accepts any option that clears it, whereas a maximizer tries to optimize every factor to find the single best possible choice.
  2. № 179 Searchlight Theory of Mind Popper's view that the mind actively shines attention like a searchlight, selecting what to observe according to prior theories, rather than passively soaking up data.
  3. № 180 Severe Tests Risky tests a theory will probably fail unless it is true, designed to seek errors rather than confirm; surviving one yields corroboration, never proof.
  4. № 181 Simplicity and Silver Bullets Highly connected systems are governed by very few causes, so a few simple high-leverage changes at the constraint beat many complex tweaks.
  5. № 182 Single Answer Principle One well-written, reusable answer can refute an argument for everyone who makes it, so a refutation is authored once and reused indefinitely rather than rewritten per opponent.
  6. № 183 Skill Gap Management Deliberately keeping your target skill a margin behind your prerequisite skill, because the further you lag the prerequisites the cheaper and lower-error each gain becomes.
  7. № 184 Small Steps Growing by tackling tasks only slightly beyond your current ability, so each step succeeds and your error rate stays manageable, rather than jumping into the deep end or staying in the shallow end.
  8. № 185 Solution Space The set of answers a problem permits; the tighter its constraints, the more candidate answers can be ruled out as errors trivially.
  9. № 186 Statistical Fluctuations and Variance The unavoidable variation in real processes, where a step averaging 30 units per hour does 20 in one hour and 50 in another, so nothing runs exactly to plan.
  10. № 187 Strict Superiority When one option scores at least as well as another on every factor and strictly better on at least one, so it dominates without any weighing.
  11. № 188 Sub-Goal A component target making up part of an overall goal, recursively splittable, and the lens through which CF reinterprets each decision factor.
  12. № 189 Subconscious Computing Power The brain's large reservoir of subconscious computation, holding the overwhelming majority of one's thinking power and dwarfing what conscious attention can do.
  13. № 190 Subconscious Ideas Inexplicit knowledge below conscious awareness that runs most of the brain's computation and shows up as intuitions, emotions, and automatic responses.
  14. № 191 Subconscious Truth-Detection A well-trained subconscious registers obvious reality automatically, making it harder to lie to yourself about things you have mastered.
  15. № 192 Subconscious-Conscious Alignment Practicing a consciously-understood idea until the subconscious applies it automatically, so that knowing an idea and actually using it in real situations stop diverging.
  16. № 193 Subordinate to the Constraint Align every non-constraint part of a system to serve the constraint's maximum output instead of maximizing its own local efficiency.
  17. № 194 Success Rate The fraction of your learning mini-projects that you complete successfully, used as a tunable dial for choosing task difficulty.
  18. № 195 Succession of Practice Activities A designed chain of practice exercises that keeps advancing in difficulty or relevance instead of repeating one activity indefinitely.
  19. № 196 Systemic vs Non-Systemic Errors A distinction between errors that degrade your error-correction process itself and isolated errors that don't.

T

  1. № 197 Taking Responsibility for Ideas Putting your positions in writing (or endorsing others' writing as your own) so you are accountable for those claims and for any flaws in arguments you cite.
  2. № 198 Tentativity Holding your best current ideas as fallible and revisable while still committing to act on them seriously now.
  3. № 199 The Arbitrary Peikoff's category for a claim made with no evidence, treated as a separate plane of badness to be dismissed without argument.
  4. № 200 The Goal The single overarching purpose a system exists to serve, against which every local change must be judged for its effect on global success.
  5. № 201 Thinking Processes Goldratt's suite of logic-tree diagramming tools for answering what to change, what to change to, and how to cause the change.
  6. № 202 Three Stages of Practice A staged progression in learning a skill: first doing it successfully once, then raising the success rate by repetition, then making it efficient and automatic.
  7. № 203 Throughput The rate at which a system converts resources into success at its goal.
  8. № 204 Tradeoff A situation where improving one factor worsens another, so no option is best on every factor.
  9. № 205 Transition Tree A Theory of Constraints diagram laying out the ordered sequence of actions and their expected effects needed to move from the current state to the desired state.
  10. № 206 Truth Correspondence to a reality that exists independently of us and that we can come to know about, while never being certain we have reached it.

U

  1. № 207 Unbounded Criticism Treating every part of a position as open to criticism, with no premises declared off-limits or shielded from challenge.
  2. № 208 Undesirable Effects The visible negative symptoms of a situation which, traced through cause and effect, lead back to a few shared core problems.
  3. № 209 Unit Conversion Translating a quantity between units of the same dimension by multiplying it by a ratio that equals one; legitimate within a dimension, generally unavailable across dimensions.
  4. № 210 Unit Economy (Crow Epistemology) The mind can actively hold only a few items at once (roughly seven), so concepts economize by collapsing many concretes into single units.

V

  1. № 211 Values What one acts to gain or keep; in Objectivism the standards behind one's choices, and the source of emotions, which reflect one's value judgments.
  2. № 212 Verisimilitude Popper's notion of how close a false theory is to the truth, meant to express scientific progress as the accumulation of truth content over falsity content.

W

  1. № 213 Weighted Factor Analysis A decision method that scores each factor, multiplies each score by an importance weight, and sums the products into one overall evaluation.
  2. № 214 Win/Win Solution A resolution that fully satisfies every side of a conflict by exposing the mistaken assumption that made the sides look incompatible, rather than splitting the difference.
  3. № 215 World 3 Popper's category for the objective contents of thought—theories, arguments, problems—which exist and can be criticized independently of any mind that thinks them.
  4. № 216 Written Public Positions Putting your positions into public, stable writing (or endorsing someone else's) so disagreements are addressable and others can correct you.

Y

  1. № 217 Yes or No Philosophy Temple's framework that idea evaluation is fundamentally binary: you judge an idea refuted or non-refuted for a purpose, never scoring its degree of goodness.