Small Names for Big Ideas

An aggregation of useful ideas from someone who likes thinking about systems.

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Replication crisis - Wikipedia

the idea:

we're currently in an extremely difficult period in scientific research because many classic studies haven't proven replicable later by other researchers. this is particularly prevalent in the more human-based fields (ex: psychology, sociology, social anthropology, and economics) because it's especially difficult to isolate variables. but the replication crisis is a broad problem across most scientific disciplines for other reasons, such as the pressure for published research caused by both academic institutions and private medical research companies. this is also related to bonini's paradox, "all models are wrong", and the more general concept of the map-territory relation: it's extremely difficult to build a model or hypothesis that is true for a specific study population yet still useful and relevant when trying to generalize to a broader population.

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Petite Romance

the idea:

the opposite of grand romantic gestures, which roberts points out aren't sustainable long-term. petite romance, on the other hand, are any romantic gestures that foster affection and intimacy in smaller ways. they aren't necessarily small but are sustainable. importantly, petite romance shouldn't be limited to gestures for your significant other(s), but should also be part of your friendships and potentially other kinds of relationships.

my original source:

kylee c. roberts' original tiktok defining the term.

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Milkshake Duck

the idea:

milkshake duck has become a shorthand for someone who gains prominence, usually on the internet for meme content. then after increased public visibility and scrutiny, they put their foot in their mouth and/or do something problematic, eliciting a follow-up public backlash. this is can be, but isn't necessarily, related to the gartner hype cycle and hype backlash.

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Paranoid vs. Reparative Readings

the idea:

For someone to have an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin on that person any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences... Paranoia is anticipatory. Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic. Paranoia is a strong theory. Paranoia is a theory of negative affects. Paranoia places its faith in exposure.

from eve kosofsky sedgwick's original essay (see below).

Reparative readings are open to pain as useful and potential, and are by definition attempting generosity.

from lee mandelo's essay.

paranoid readings of a piece of media are, essentially, defensive and preemptively suspicious readings of that media. reparative readings, in contrast, assumes that a piece of media can be problematic or even harmful but still have something to offer the reader. kosofsky's original essay also suggests that paranoid readings have become the norm in academia and society at large.

my original source:

lee mandelo's essay "that twitter thread (on criticism)", which was a response to the publishing of, and subsequent popular response (especially on twitter) to, isabell fall's "i sexually identify as an attack helicopter".

further reading:

"paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you're so paranoid, you probably think this introduction is about you" by eve kosofsky sedgwick, originally published in 1997.

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Glass cliff - Wikipedia

the idea:

women are, proportionally, more likely to be appointed to executive-level positions when a company is failing than when it's successful. the phrase "glass cliff" has also been extended to talk about the same phenomenon happening to non-white executives, as well as high-level positions in non-corporate settings, such as elected government positions.

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Vocational Awe

the idea:

“Vocational awe” refers to the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique... I challenge the notion that many have taken as axiomatic that libraries are inherently good and democratic, and that librarians, by virtue of working in a library, are responsible for this “good” work. This sets up an expectation that any failure of libraries is largely the fault of individuals failing to live up to the ideals of the profession, rather than understanding that the library as an institution is fundamentally flawed.

"vocational awe and librarianship" by fobazi ettarh (see below).

vocational awe refers to the misplaced cultural idea of putting librarianship (and other public service-oriented professions) on an idealized pedestal. this has led to a variety of problems, including the increased load of social services libraries are expected to handle due to the erosion of other public goods, and the justification for underpaying librarians because of the perceived social importance of the career. as a result, librarians as individuals are especially susceptible to being pressured into overworking, which eventually leads to burnout. and libraries themselves are often viewed uncritically as safe spaces and/or sanctuaries regardless of whether they're actually successfully serving that purpose.

my original source:

anne helen petersen's essay "the librarians are not okay" (originally in her newsletter culture study).

further reading:

the original essay "vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves" by fobazi ettarh is available online in full.

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the idea:

bonini's paradox is most succinctly explained as "the map is not the territory", meaning the representation of the thing is never the same as the actual thing. this is related to rené magritte's the treachery of images, but Bonini's paradox's extension is that a model (or map)'s generalizability is inversely proportional to its level of precision. bonini's paradox is particularly relevant in scientific and mathematical models, where model designers must try to strike a balance between a model that describes their data accurately and one that describes other, similar, data accurately.

my original sources:

"on exactitude in science" by jorge luis borges, collected in collected fictions (translated by andrew hurley).

"the man who collected the first of september, 1973" by tor åge bringsvaerd, collected in the book of fantasy (edited by jorge luis borges, silvina ocampo, and a. bioy casares).

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Big Divorce Energy

the idea:

[The National are] a band playing exhausted, self-pitying songs about experiences in interior rooms, about the ongoing resignations and failures of courage between people who are pretty much fine, actually. The exact feeling of a National song is the part of that episode of Mad Men where Don Draper reads one (1) Frank O’Hara poem. Despite being a bunch of dudes with guitars who now play gigantic sold-out venues, they exist on roughly the same frequency as the novels of Updike or Cheever (the second of whom is referenced by name on 2017’s Sleep Well Beast), quietly concerned with the glossy surfaces atop our alienation from ourselves. Their songs chronicle wholly survivable catastrophes; they land like a long talk in a car parked in the driveway of a suburban home late at night. Their whole onstage person is that of a man eternally one drink away from starting every sentence with “my wife”... You don’t have to have actually, legally ended a marriage to have Big Divorce Energy. I know plenty of people in their first marriages and people who have never been married at all who have serious divorce energy, and I know plenty of people who have in fact been through one or more divorces who have little to no divorce energy. When I first started listening to The National, I assumed their music was a glimpse into their lives; I assumed Berninger must be in the middle of his marriage falling apart. But, as their latest record highlights, this band itself is an invention and their Big Divorce Energy is for show, fiction and not autobiography.

big divorce energy is a particular vibe of exhausted navel-gazing on mundane topics/problems that verges on solipsistic in tone or content. fitzgerald's essay (see below) doesn't really give a concise definition, instead mostly focusing on vibes, but she does quote a friend in the essay who describes the concept as "wine bar problems".

my original source:

helena fitzgerald (griefbacon)'s 2019 essay, "big divorce energy".

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Responsive Desire

the idea:

there are two general kinds of sex drive: spontaneous desire and responsive desire. spontaneous desire can be described as mental desire comes before physical arousal. most people are familiar with spontaneous desire because that's usually how sex drive and sexual attraction are portrayed in popular culture. responsive desire is the opposite, where physical arousal is required before someone experiences mental desire.

further reading:

whitni miller on tiktok (@bdemoves) has a variety of posts relating to responsive desire directly or indirectly. this video is a good place to start.

the term responsive desire was popularized by emily nagoski's come as you are, which recently got an updated version in early 2021.

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Homophobia Without Homophobes

the idea:

Walls (2008), for example, posits that there are four types of modern heterosexism espoused by individuals in a heteronormative society: aversive, amnestic, paternalistic and positive stereotypic. Aversive heterosexism refers to perceptions of gays and lesbians as “too militant” or receiving of too much attention. Amnestic heterosexism is the denial that anti-gay discrimination still exists, similar to Bonilla-Silva’s (2014) concept of Minimization of Racism. Paternalistic heterosexism is the expression of concern for the well-being of gays and lesbians, such as justifying one’s desire to not have a gay or lesbian child, because his or her life would be difficult. Positive stereotypic heterosexism is appreciating stereotypical notions of gays and lesbians, still othering queer identities.

overt homophobia, like overt racism, has become significantly less socially acceptable in the united states in recent decades, leading to increased forms of covert homophobia instead. (importantly, this does not include transphobia, which is still much more socially acceptable and thus often more overt.) teal and conover-williams (see below) draw on previous research and ideas to propose categories of modern, covert, homophobia with examples of each.

the paper also discusses the ways the charmed circle intersect with homophobia that have led to some parts of the lgbtq+ community to fall into the trap of respectability politics in an attempt to distance themselves from less generally socially acceptable queer communities. two examples of this that were especially prevalent in the 2000s and 2010s are: the dramatic shift to focus on achieving marriage equality at the exclusion of other kinds of rights, and the "born this way" discourse that deadlocked all lgbtq discource into essentialism. both rhetoric choices excluded significant portions of the lgbtq+ community and have had long-lasting, and hobbling, effects on the general public understanding of queerness.

my original source:

"homophobia without homophobes" by janae teal and meredith conover-williams.

further reading:

racism without racists by eduardo bonilla-silva was a major source and inspiration for teal and conover-williams' paper.

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the idea:

someone whose entire relationship with a specific thing (usually a piece of media/franchise, sometimes a celebrity) is based around disliking the thing. this is especially common for media that has reached a specific critical mass, and even more so if the piece of media was not originally intended for a large general audience (ex: the twilight series, barney). groups of anti-fans sometimes cohere into a dedicated anti-fandom.

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Logic Looping

the idea:

a specific type of circular thinking, which (depending on the topic) may or may not fit within the concept of rumination. the loop cannot end until the person doing the looping feels like they understand the thing they didn’t initially get (usually either some kind of puzzle/problem, or a surprising social interaction), or have been understood by the other person involved a surprising social interaction. this may also manifest as external processing, and most often happens after an incident of cognitive dissonance.

my original source:

this tiktok.*

*op uses this term specifically to talk about her experience with audhd, so i’m not assuming it’s a universal experience. but i do think the idea is potentially useful to a broader audience, either to build understanding for a specific experience other people can have, and/or to describe a mental pattern that people might experience outside of audhd.

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First of all: I’m a non-binary woman. That means “woman” is a label that is significant to me, that I hold on to, and that I identify…

the idea:

"women's spaces" are a proxy, and an extremely imprecise one, for "spaces without patriarchy". this has led to a variety of attempts to execute patriarchy-free spaces by disincluding groups of people. marchán's proposed list of categories, in decreasing order of exclusivity, are: terfspace, justusgirls, noboyzallowed, nocisguys, and whatever. marchán notes that all categories (except terfspace) have valid uses. the most important thing in any space is to figure out what your goals are, work back from there, and then ensure that your vocabulary matches your intentions.

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Fixed vs. Growth Mindset

the idea:

fixed and growth mindsets are two opposite ways of thinking about intelligence and learning. to a person with a fixed mindset, intelligence is finite and limited: you will never get smarter over time, and you have a natural talent/ability for skills that is innate and which you will never surpass. to a person with a growth mindset, intelligence is flexible: you can improve in any ability if you practice it, and you will never hit a permanent wall in what you can learn and understand. growth mindsets are ultimately more resilient and more flexible when learning new skills.

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The Tyranny of Structurelessness

the idea:

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved... Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules.

all groups have social (and often hierarchical) structures, regardless of whether those structures are explicit or implicit. if power structures are not explicit, they still exist. they're just based on things like assumed authority or expertise, tenure, or simply who's the loudest voice in the group. unsaid in the original source (see below), the kinds of implicit power listed above are often tied to race, gender, and other kinds of privilege experienced in the rest of society outside of the group. as a result, unless power structures are explicitly decided upon within a group, the group is doomed to simply reproduce our existing society's biases and forms of control.

my original source:

jo freeman's original article from the 70s, "the tyranny of structurelessness."

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Penguin Pebbling

the idea:

a modern type of asynchronous, usually text-based, emotional bid that serves as a shorthand for "i saw this and thought of you". penguin pebbles are often memes or short pieces of media like videos, songs, or articles. this is related to, but not the same as, third things (which require synchronicity of gaze).

my original source:

this tiktok, which specifically proposes penguin pebbling as a neurodivergent love language.

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Spiral Curriculum

the idea:

any school topic can be taught at a basic level to young students. the best way to do this is to introduce the topic at a very basic age-appropriate level to young children, then revisit the topic periodically and in more depth as they get older and progress through their school careers. the theory is that revisiting topics both allows for more nuance later on when students are more mature, and also that the repetition through the years helps with long-term understanding and retention.

further reading:

many schools have resources on the theory of spiral curricula that appear in the top google results, but there's a helpful and pretty short pdf explainer on the (us) federal department of education's site.