Soon after I stopped blogging last year, I realized that I had a lot of things I wanted to say, just as before, and I had deprived myself of a channel for them. So I did the next best thing: I published notes on Facebook. For the first few days of this new blog’s life, I will simply cross-post those notes here, so if you’re already my friend on Facebook, you won’t be seeing any new material for a while; but I’m going to get through these one per day, so you won’t have long to wait.
I typically use the economic, logical, statistical, and psychological terms for their literal meanings. I am the kind of person who prefers to think about things quantitatively, so that, for example, I am likely to talk about leverage and indifference curves when on everyday topics, like dating.
On the other hand, the terms from computer science, biology, chemistry, and physics are domain-specific, and I have imported them out of their domain and into everyday conversation by analogy. For example, I have referred to my own capacity to chat with people as my “bandwidth”; “making a move” on an object of romantic interest might be called breaching the “activation barrier”; and, of course, I abuse the term “entropy” just like everyone else.
Biology, Biochemistry, and Ecology
- competitive inhibition
- fitness
- natural/artificial selection
- osmosis
Chemistry
- activation energy / activation barrier
- catalyst
- limiting reagent, excess reagent
- rate-limiting step
- single displacement reaction
- transition state
Computer Science and Informatics
- bandwidth
- cache
- input, output
- latency
- scale (v.)
- signal-to-noise ratio
- throughput
- uptime
Economics and Game Theory
- diminishing returns
- indifference curve
- leverage
- Nash equilibrium
- opportunity cost
- sunk cost
- utility
- zero-sum game
Mathematics, Logic, and Statistics
- ad hominem, ad populum; ad baculum; appeal to authority, appeal to hatred/spite/pity/fear/ridicule; argument from ignorance; argument from silence; denying the antecedent, affirming the consequent; post hoc ergo propter hoc; cum hoc ergo propter hoc (correlation does not imply causation)
- correlation
- extrapolation, interpolation
- extremum (local/global maximum/minimum); optimization
- first-order approximation
- null hypothesis
- pathological
- statistical significance
- vacuously true, vacuously false
Physics
- entropy; Second Law
- equilibrium
Psychology
- cognitive bias; (e.g., fundamental attribution error; confirmation bias; irrational escalation; gambler’s fallacy)
- decision fatigue
- ego depletion
- flow
- heuristic
- primacy effect; recency effect
- salience
B³₂ 
I find that I make a lot of analogies to activation energy, metastable states, etc. in everyday conversation.