March 2026
- Mar 2, 2026ConceptsKey Decision-Making Terms People MisuseWhy decision vocabulary changes the analysis. Knight's 1921 distinction holds that risk describes situations where outcomes are known and probabilities can be meaningfully assigned, while uncertainty does not permit that, so applying statistical tools to the second is a category error. The article also separates credence, a personal belief, from probability, and Simon's 1955 satisficing from optimizing.
- Mar 2, 2026ConceptsFrequently Confused Cognitive Terms ExplainedPairs that get used interchangeably but should not: intelligence and wisdom, knowledge and understanding, thinking and reasoning, logic and critical thinking, memory and recall, learning and memorization. Derek Muller's 2008 physics video study is the surprise: students watching clear, correct explanations rated them highly and felt they had learned, while their conceptual understanding barely moved. Videos that confronted misconceptions felt worse and taught more.
February 2026
- Feb 28, 2026ConceptsLearning Science Terms Explained ClearlyLoose vocabulary produces bad study habits: "reduce cognitive load" should mean cutting extraneous load, not the germane load that is the learning. This glossary draws the lines that matter, between fluency and real recall, blocked and interleaved practice, near and far transfer, activity and genuine engagement. Karpicke and Blunt (2011) found self-testers outlearned students who built concept maps and rated the maps as better.
- Feb 27, 2026ConceptsCommon Psychology Terms Explained Without JargonFestinger and Carlsmith paid participants $1 or $20 to call a dull task interesting. The $1 group rated it significantly more enjoyable, because they had no outside excuse for the lie and changed their belief instead. That is cognitive dissonance, properly defined. This sorts out introvert against shy, empathy against sympathy against compassion, the major defense mechanisms, and which clinical words get misused.
- Feb 26, 2026ConceptsTechnology Concepts Defined SimplyPlain definitions for the vocabulary that shapes daily life: algorithms, internet versus web, IP and DNS, bandwidth versus latency, APIs, open source, the cloud, encryption, cookies, 2FA, machine learning, blockchain and IoT. Each entry ends with the question to ask when a company makes a claim. Cases follow, including ProPublica's 2016 COMPAS analysis of over 7,000 Broward County cases, where accuracy was similar across groups but error types were not.
- Feb 26, 2026ConceptsSystems Thinking Vocabulary ExplainedThe vocabulary that makes system behavior legible: stocks versus flows, reinforcing versus balancing loops, delays, emergence, resilience and Donella Meadows' leverage points, ranked from parameters up to paradigms. Cases include Lake Erie, where phosphorus accumulated for decades before algae blooms appeared, so cutting inflow to near zero would still take decades to drain the stock, and Elinor Ostrom's Swiss villages, sharing alpine grazing land since the 13th century.
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