notable epistemic hells

• Politics: actions aimed at getting into power; where policy is action taken by those in power. Or: War: attempting to enact policy via embedding metal in people. Politics: attempting to enact policy via words


• flood-fill (algo n.): Very simple connected-area algorithm used in e.g. MSPaint's bucket


• cuttlefish suit (tech n.): active camo


• Cx (corporate n.): customer experience, after UX (user experience).


• Irish goodbye (US pej. n.): Leaving without saying goodbye. See also French exit, filer à l’anglaise.


• cobot (tech n.): collaborative robot. Physical augmentation for human tasks; safe despite strength.


• absolutorium (Polish Latin n.): academic absolution; releasing a student from their studies.


• The Flippening (digital currency n.): the foretold point when Ethereum will overtake Bitcoin.


• The Great Span (Kottkean n.): whoahing at how extremely long-lived people can bridge extremely different eras, or at how short recorded history is, actually.


• bone rush (archaeology pej. n.): the present frenzy to genome sequence ancient skeletons, since they have upended large parts of our knowledge and there are legacies to be won.


• absence seizure (neurology n.): brief loss of consciousness without noticing or getting tired.


• infinity pool (n.): swimming pool with no apparent end, built with no edges and an optical illusion of meeting the horizon. Mark of ludicrous luxury.
  


• black hole echo (): conceivable phenomenon where some of a gravitational wave bounces off the photon sphere; modelled as a resonant cavity emitting periodic signals with decreasing amplitude. This could be evidence against general relativity in favour of quantum gravity theory.


• photon sphere (physics n.): region of space where gravity is strong enough that photons are forced to travel in orbits; outer limit of a black hole's weirdness, at 1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius.


• to repine (arch v.): to be discontent; to fret.


• mar-tech (corporate n.): marketing technology; called adtech by everyone else.


• Ramism (early modern theory n.): weird C16th education cult. Hard to work out exactly what it was about; this is one of the worst Wikipedia pages I've ever seen. I think it was a partial reaction against scholasticism, but a muddled and unscientific one.


• support (maths n.): subset of a function's domain that don't map to zero; the closure of the set of possible values of a random variable having that distribution.


• burstiness (stats n.): intermittent increases and decreases in activity or frequency of an event. Measured by e.g. the Fano factor (variance / mean).


• charette (French n.); a cramming session; crunch time; a sprint. Particularly for students of graphic design(?)


• Hi-Tech (US slang n.): codeine/promethazine syrup, often imbibed with Sprite. See also purple drank, sizzurp, lean, dirty Sprite.


• epistemic hell (philosophy of science n.): when we lack clear criteria for falsifying points of view, strongly disagree on methods, rely on second- or third-best substitute methods for causality, and are factional, relying on ad hominem attacks and politicisation to resist compromise or synthesis.


• epistemic Heaven (philosophy of science n.): when opponents have put forward testable theories, agree on a method for testing them, and disagreement is respectful.


• murky middle (philosophy of science n.): when theory-testing conditions are less than ideal but not yet hopeless. Adversarial collaboration is "unnecessary in heaven and impossible in hell".