Philosophy, Law & Politics

Stoicism

Zeno of Citium / Epictetus / Seneca / Marcus Aurelius

Focus on what you control, accept what you cannot, build virtue.

The Socratic Method

Socrates

Systematic questioning to expose assumptions and clarify thinking.

Thucydides Trap

Thucydides / Graham Allison

Rising power vs ruling power — structural stress makes conflict the default.

Burden of Proof

Who must prove what? Burden of proof answers that question. The party making a claim bears the obligation to support it with evidence. The party defending the status quo or...

Cargo Cults

Richard Feynman

Copying the surface without the substance produces ritual, not results. Cargo cults take their name from Pacific islanders who, after Allied forces left post–WWII, built bamboo...

Cave of Plato

Plato

What we take for reality can be shadows on a wall. In Plato's Republic, prisoners are chained in a cave, facing a wall. They see only shadows cast by a fire behind them — shadows...

Chilling Effect

A chilling effect occurs when the threat of legal action, retaliation, or sanction causes people to avoid lawful conduct. The harm is not the penalty itself but the...

Consequentialism

The right action is the one that produces the best outcome. Consequentialism judges acts (or rules, or character) by their consequences — not by intent, duty, or intrinsic...

Due Process

How a decision is made can matter as much as what is decided. Due process is the requirement that decisions affecting rights or interests be made through fair procedures: notice,...

Effective Altruism

Do the most good you can with what you have. Effective altruism (EA) applies evidence and reason to the question of how to help others: compare interventions by impact (lives...

Ethos Pathos Logos

Aristotle

Persuasion runs on three rails: who you are, what they feel, and what you can prove. Aristotle distinguished ethos (character, credibility), pathos (emotion), and logos (reason,...

Golden Rule

The Golden Rule — treat others as you would have them treat you — is a reciprocity norm found across traditions: Judaism (Hillel), Christianity (Jesus), Islam (Hadith),...

Good Faith

Deal honestly; don't exploit the letter while violating the spirit. Good faith is the obligation to act with honesty, fairness, and fidelity to the purpose of an agreement or...

Historic Recurrence

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Historic recurrence is the observation that similar patterns — boom and bust, rise and fall of empires, technological disruption, political...

Importance of Geography

Place shapes outcome. Geography — location, terrain, climate, resources, neighbours — constrains and enables. It's not destiny; it's a set of conditions that make some paths...

Inclusive Economic & Political Institutions

Daron Acemoglu / James Robinson

Inclusive institutions spread power and opportunity. They enforce property rights for a broad cross-section of society, allow free entry into markets and politics, and constrain...

Nuclear Option

The nuclear option is an action so costly or destructive that it is rarely used — but the threat of it shapes behaviour. The term comes from literal nuclear weapons: their use...

Precedents

A precedent is a past decision or outcome that is used to guide or justify a current one. In law, precedents (case law) bind or persuade future courts: what was decided before...

Regulatory Capture

George Stigler

Regulatory capture occurs when a regulator comes to serve the interests of the industry it oversees rather than the public. The regulator may have been captured at birth (designed...

Secrets

Peter Thiel

A secret, in Peter Thiel's formulation, is something important that is true but not widely believed. It is not a fact everyone knows, and not a belief that is false — it is a...

Ship of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment: if you replace every plank of a ship, one by one, is it still the same ship? If you take the old planks and reassemble them into a...

Shirky Principle

Clay Shirky

The Shirky Principle, named after Clay Shirky: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." A drug-rehab centre has an incentive to have clients...

The Overton Window

Joseph Overton

The Overton window is the range of ideas that are acceptable to discuss in public at a given time. Named after Joseph Overton of the Mackinac Center, the concept describes how...

The Trolley Experiment

Philippa Foot / Judith Jarvis Thomson

The trolley problem is a thought experiment: a runaway trolley will kill five people unless you pull a lever, diverting it onto another track where it will kill one. Do you pull...

Utilitarianism

Jeremy Bentham / John Stuart Mill

Utilitarianism is the view that the right action is the one that produces the greatest total well-being (utility) for the greatest number. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill gave...

Veil of Ignorance

John Rawls

The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment from John Rawls: when designing the rules of society (or any collective), imagine you don't know which position you'll occupy. You...

Agnosticism

Agnosticism is the intellectual position that some questions cannot be answered with certainty — and that honest acknowledgment of this uncertainty is more valuable than false...

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

Kenneth Arrow

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem proves that no ranked voting system can perfectly translate individual preferences into a collective decision while satisfying a small set of...

Categorical Imperative

Kant

The Categorical Imperative, Kant's foundational ethical principle, states: act only according to rules you could will to be universal laws. Before taking any action, ask: what...

Common Law

Common law is a legal system built not from top-down legislation but from the accumulated weight of judicial decisions over time. Each ruling becomes a precedent that shapes...

Condorcet Paradox

Marquis de Condorcet

The Condorcet Paradox shows that collective preferences can be irrational even when every individual's preferences are perfectly rational. If voters prefer A over B, B over C, and...

Constructivism

Constructivism holds that knowledge, meaning, and social reality are not discovered but constructed through human interaction, language, and shared interpretation. There is no...

Decline of Violence

Steven Pinker

Despite the constant drumbeat of alarming headlines, violence has declined dramatically over centuries and millennia — in every measurable form. Homicide rates, deaths in warfare,...

Distributive vs Procedural Justice

Justice has two faces. Distributive justice asks whether outcomes are fair — did everyone get what they deserve? Procedural justice asks whether the process was fair — were the...

Duty of Care

Duty of care is the legal and moral obligation to act with reasonable concern for the safety and well-being of others who could be affected by your actions or decisions. In law,...

Duverger's Law

Maurice Duverger

Duverger's Law states that single-member district, winner-take-all electoral systems tend to produce two-party systems, while proportional representation tends to produce...

Extremely Intense Ideology

Charlie Munger

Extremely intense ideology is the tendency for strongly held belief systems to distort thinking, override evidence, and make their adherents confidently wrong. Charlie Munger...

Futarchy

Robin Hanson

Futarchy is a proposed governance system where we "vote on values, bet on beliefs." Citizens define the goals they care about through democratic processes, then prediction markets...

Historical Wisdom

Historical wisdom is the practice of using the accumulated lessons of history as a decision-making tool. It rests on the observation that while specific events don't repeat, the...

Horseshoe Theory

Horseshoe theory proposes that the political spectrum is not a straight line from left to right but a horseshoe — with the extreme left and extreme right curving toward each...

Law of Non-Contradiction

Aristotle

The law of non-contradiction states that a proposition cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same respect. It is one of the foundational axioms of logic, first...

Limited Hangout

A limited hangout is a strategic disclosure of partial truth to prevent the full truth from emerging. When concealment is no longer viable, the actor reveals enough damaging...

Negligence

Negligence is the failure to exercise the level of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the same circumstances, resulting in harm to others. It sits at the intersection...

Political/Government Failure

Political or government failure occurs when government intervention in markets or society produces outcomes worse than the problem it was meant to solve. Just as markets can fail...

Presumption of Innocence

The presumption of innocence is the principle that any person accused must be considered innocent until proven guilty by sufficient evidence. In law, it places the burden on the...

Reasonable Doubt

Reasonable doubt is the threshold of certainty required before acting on a conclusion — the standard that separates justified conviction from premature judgment. In criminal law,...

Sayre's Law

Sayre's Law states that "in any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." The less that matters, the more fiercely people...

State Capture

State capture is the process by which private interests systematically redirect public institutions to serve their own ends — not through occasional lobbying but through...

The Golden Mean

Aristotle

The golden mean is Aristotle's principle that virtue lies between two extremes — excess and deficiency. Courage is the mean between recklessness and cowardice. Generosity is the...

The Magic Ratio

John Gottman / Marcial Losada / Emily Heaphy

The magic ratio — derived from John Gottman's research on marriages and later extended to teams — states that stable, high-performing relationships require a minimum ratio of...

The Meaning of Life

Viktor Frankl

The meaning of life — as a mental model, not a metaphysical quest — is the recognition that humans perform at their highest level when their work connects to a purpose they find...

The Platinum Rule

The platinum rule is the upgrade to the golden rule: instead of "treat others as you would want to be treated," it says "treat others as they want to be treated." The distinction...

The Reasonable Person

The reasonable person is a legal and philosophical standard: an imaginary individual of ordinary prudence, care, and judgment, used to measure whether someone's behavior was...

Third Rail

A third rail is a topic, policy, or decision so politically dangerous that touching it destroys you — named after the electrified rail in subway systems that kills on contact. In...

Three Buckets of History

The three buckets of history framework sorts historical events into three categories: things that have happened before and will happen again, things that have happened before but...