Index of Tools

Conceptual modeling

  • All-models-are-wrong-but-some-are-useful: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
  • Raw-data-of-reality: “Just the facts”
  • Conceptual-boxes: “Yeah, well, that’s just, like, a social construction, man.”
  • Concept-composition: “What’s the evidence for that?”
  • Concept-partiality: “Yes and no…”
  • Concept-plurality: “Yes and other explanations too…”
  • Acting-as-if: “For the moment let’s consider that’s true…”

NPCs (are stupid)

  • NPC-think: (1) Raw-data-of-reality -> (2) Belief-confirmation-bias -> (3) NPC-auto-react -> (4) post-hoc-rationalization.
  • Human-don’t-really-think: “Humans get answers automatically from their meat-brains; and rarely bother to question those answers.”
  • Belief-confirmation-bias: The first law of NPCs is that they are pre-programmed.”
  • NPC-auto-react: “The second law of NPCs is that they react based on their programming.”
  • Post-hoc-rationalization: “The third law of NPCs is that they don’t know their source code so they just make up reasons for why they act the way they do”
  • Ignore-rationalizations-consider-intentions: “What particular beliefs and/or biases are causing the NPC to act this way?”
  • Mental-physics-has-no-gravity: “Your house of cards explanations do not fall apart because they are not subject to the gravity of reality.”
  • Human-action-patterns: “Women love shoes and no further explanation is necessary.”
  • Cockroach-in-soup: “Avoid people who consider you a cockroach in their soup.”
  • Police-interrogation: “Never ever talk to a cop or journalist or anyone who is interrogating you, their only purpose is to convict you of a crime.”
  • Crowds-are-dormant-volcano-lynch-mobs: “The threat of a lynch mob will force people to join that lynch mob or else they too could be lynched.”
  • Narrative-confirmation-black-hole: “The slippery slope is endless unless you have opposing gravitational forces.”
  • Narrative-transcendence-partiality-plurality: “Sure that might be at partially true, but it is not completely true, and there are other and different explanations as well.”
  • Moral-debt: “You owe me, so you have to do what I say.”
  • NPC-reciprocity: “If you scratch my back then I’ll scratch your back.”
  • Belief-outsourced-to-the-tribe: “You still believe that?  I mean come on, it’s the current year.”
  • Fundamental-attribution-error: “Forget it, Jake.  It’s Chinatown”
  • Game-theory-games-rules-agents-goals-incentives-strategies: “Don’t hate the prisoner, hate the prisoner’s dilemma.”
  • NPC-is-an-action-verb: “Never ask why someone is taking a crazy-action, instead ask why they are not taking some other crazy-action.”
  • Many-truths-into-single-action: “The brain reduces many possibilities (thoughts) into a singular actuality (an action).”
  • Strawman-vs-steelman-vs-good-enough: “You are a very brave man to attack opponents made only of straw.”
  • Framing: “Framing someone of a crime is illegal, your framing of this argument is so misleading that it should also be illegal.”
  • Reframing-with-whataboutism: “Your framing is so misleading that we need to whataboutism to another frame.”
  • Argument-concept-deconstruction: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

The nature of man (is beautiful)

  • Abstract-individual-man: “Individualism is solipsism”
  • Stereotypes: “Stereotypes are learned wisdom of human types”
  • 100-people: “What would be the diverse skills, reactions, and relations of 100 people”
  • Family-man: “The individual is always a sub-part of a family and genetic line”
  • Tribal-man: “Man in tribe, tribe of men”
  • For-the-good-of-the-tribe: “All for one, and one for all” – the three musketeers
  • Tribe-wants-you-strong: “The health of the people should be the supreme law”
  • Evolutionary-fitness: “Defeating the red queen and all her allies”
  • Transcendental-axiology-beauty-goodness: “In our garden we remove weeds”
  • Geographic-borders: “Mind your feet and know where you come from”
  • Biological-racial-inheritance: “You are your parents and your children are you”
  • Cultural-racial-inheritance: “And how can a man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods”
  • Only-two-sexes: “Only men and women produce babies over generations, the rest are ephemeral defects”
  • Culture-is-a-material-beehive: “Culture is not immaterial, it is the everything we do”
  • Castes-coordinate-to-serve-the-beehive: “The correct alignment of diversity is necessary and required for the beehive, or else genocide”
  • God-through-the-beehive: “Our cultural beehives at there best are cathedrals through which we experience God”

Politics (is about power)

  • Kind-politics-as-monthly-town-hall-meeting: “Among close kin politics can be kind”
  • Stern-politics-as-international-relations-and-war: “Among large groups politics is little different than war or international relations”