Glossary · 12
Glossary
One canonical sentence per concept, quotable without context. Made for people who restate us in their own words, and for agents who restate us in someone else’s.
- Civilizational SynchronismA philosophical movement that treats progress as the interconnected development of knowledge, technology, the human being, society and institutions, and proposes to make the detection of lags between them a standing function of civilisation.
- Capability–Understanding GapThe distance between what a civilisation is already able to do and how well it understands the object of its intervention, the consequences of it, and the environment in which it will act.
- Civilizational debtThe obligation that accumulates in law, ethics, psychology and institutions when a capability is created before the understanding of it, and which is repaid with interest — the later it is taken up, the more it costs.
- BottleneckThe specific area of missing understanding that is currently holding back the rest of the system most expensively, and therefore the first candidate for a redirection of resources.
- Reflexive civilizationA civilisation able to observe its own development, measure its imbalances, and change the very way in which it develops.
- Metasystem of progressA hypothetical diagnostic infrastructure that continuously sees civilisation as a whole, identifies bottlenecks, and redirects people and resources towards them.
- Category decompositionThe situation in which technology or new knowledge separates features that historically travelled together, after which a concept built on their correlation stops describing reality.
- Epistemic humilityThe stance on which «we do not know this yet» carries positive intellectual value: it marks the boundary of knowledge and turns it into a research programme.
- Confidence levelAn explicit estimate of how sure we are of our own position, published next to that position and accompanied by the condition under which we would revise it.
- Moral circle expansionThe process by which moral attention extends to new kinds of beings as grounds appear for regarding them as bearers of experience, interests or autonomy.
- Open futureThe value of a future in which many possible ways of living remain available, and the space of choice for later generations is not narrowed by the decisions of earlier ones.
- SynchronistSomeone who shares the frame of synchronism and takes part in the work on its corpus.