Knowing Things is Hard

Posted on January 11, 2025 Updated on January 15, 2025 No comments yet

Knowing things is hard, even about the past. Over the years I have compiled pithy names for some of the reasons why this is. This week I decided to share them in the style of Andrew Gelman’s Handy Statistical Lexicon or Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Right now many entries are blank or just link to other people’s websites and articles. If I ever turn these into a book, I will expand them. Until then I can add entries one at a time as they become necessary.

A

Abstraction: Wikipedia’s explanation needs work.

Computer scientists use abstraction to make models that can be used and re-used without having to re-write all the program code for each new application on every different type of computer. They communicate their solutions with the computer by writing source code in some particular computer language which can be translated into machine code for different types of computers to execute. Abstraction allows program designers to separate a framework (categorical concepts related to computing problems) from specific instances which implement details. This means that the program code can be written so that code does not have to depend on the specific details of supporting applications, operating system software, or hardware, but on a categorical concept of the solution.

All Publicity is Good Publicity: see Truth Sandwich

Analogy

Anecdote: its wise not to trust them unless you have checked an original source. All too often the story that you use to represent a situation in miniature was made up by a journalist in 1928 or an opera writer in 1782. See Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes for more details.

Anchoring Effect (skepdic): once you have a number for something, you tend to feel that other numbers for it should be similar, even if the first number was pulled out of a hat. This is one reason why Decorative Statistics (q.v.) are not harmless, and why Anecdotes (q.v.) should not be trusted.

Archaeological Visibility: ceramics and lithics survive much better than skin, wood, or textiles, but most things in the ancient world were made of those materials which rarely survive. So we know the most about objects of the less common materials.

Argumentative Theory of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber): You cannot reason someone out of a position which they did not reason themselves in to, yet hearing other views helps you develop your own. If we were always as cautious and unsure as the evidence warrants, little ancient history would be written!

Authoritarian Teleology (Iza Ding, 2023):

Broadly speaking, it’s a style of thinking that interprets whatever an authoritarian govt does as a ‘strategy’ to ‘stay/remain/survive in power.’ … We also see a functionalism that explains everything by staying in power. Repress? To stay in power. Ease repression? To stay in power. … This might not be wrong, but it is unfalsifiable. … Another big problem is that ‘between action and consequence lies a chasm that no one can bridge, let alone control.’ … Other factors like emotions, pettiness, petulance, values, commitments, laziness, narcissism, and mere stupidity get set aside or coopted
Iza Ding, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University (Illinois), @izading@twitter.com, 18 November 2023 http://archive.today/oagGs

She has now used this term in at least one lecture. See also Illusion of Control.

Autobiographical Heuristic: Assuming that elements in a work of literature reflect the writer’s life and experience, rather than earlier texts, things they had been told, or pure imagination.

ancient biographers of famous poets … had access to extremely little genuine information about famous poets’ lives, but they desperately wanted more information, so they tried to interpret those poets’ works biographically, assuming that their characters’ personalities reflect aspects of the poets’ own personalities and that events the poets portray as happening to their characters reflect actual events that happened to the poets themselves in real life. The problem is that, in the absence of reliable biographical information about the author of a given work, it is impossible to reliably distinguish which aspects of the work are inspired by the author’s real life and which aspects are purely fictional with no basis in reality. Moreover, even when events in a play do probably draw inspiration from real-life events, they also draw from the literary tradition. For instance, although Sophokles’s depiction of the plague in the Oidipous Tyrannos does probably owe some inspiration to the real-life Plague of Athens, it almost certainly also draws inspiration from the Iliad, which similarly begins with a plague sent by Apollon devastating the Achaian troops.
Spencer McDaniel https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2024/04/30/what-do-the-newly-read-herculaneum-papyri-actually-tell-us-about-plato/

B

Big, modern, educated brains: don’t use them to imagine how you would solve a problem when you can ask skilled but less educated people from another culture how they did it! Your solution might not be worse than a historical solution, but it will almost certainly be different.

Brandolini’s Law, the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle (2013): “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” https://www.theifod.com/brandolinis-law-the-bullshit-asymmetry-principle/

Burden of Proof: its the obligation of the person making a claim to support it, not of the audience to refute it. See Brandolini’s Law.

C

Cherrypicking: choose the data or the interpretation which supports your preferred interpretation

Citing Nonexistent Sources: ChatGPT output is not the only text that does this!

Clash of Civilizations: very rarely a real thing but makes good stories. See Internal vs. External Conflict.

Classical Style of Argument (2016)

Confabulation (Skeptic’s Dictionary): see also Power of Fiction. NB. “children and many adults confabulate when encouraged to talk about things of which they have no knowledge.” (think about what this implies about LLMs and spicy autocomplete)

Confirmation Bias: Most people are much better at making up arguments for something they want to believe or against something they don’t want to believe than at finding the truth. This is one reason why academia is based around debates. One possible reason for this is the Argumentative Theory of Reason (q.v.). See nullius in verbis.

Constitutive Other: many neurotypicals define themselves against one, even if that other is mostly made up. The Wikipedia page on Other (Philosophy) points to 20th century philosophers, but the specific phrase Constitutive Other is hard to find in Google Books before 1991. I would like to explore the history of this concept further!

Cool URIs don’t change. Changing them breaks the link from citation to source. Knowing where something actually comes from is key to historical scholarship, because if the original argument was bad, often nobody since has made a better argument.

Counterfactuals (Meyer v. Weber): you can’t discuss cause and effect without making claims about what would have happened without this, but predicting what would have happened in that case is very very hard. Predictions, like advice, often tell you more about the person giving them than about the world.

D

Deconstruction …

Decorative Statistics (Ray Fisman, Andrew Gelman, and Matthew C. Stephenson, “The Statistics That Come Out of Nowhere,” The Atlantic, March 2023)

These numbers are what we might call “decorative statistics.” Their purpose is not to convey an actual amount of money but to sound big and impressive. That doesn’t keep them from being added, subtracted, divided, or multiplied to yield other decorative statistics.

Defensiveness: its embarrassing to be wrong in public, so once you have publicly committed to a position its hard to change your mind. See also Confirmation Bias and Identity Protection and Partisanship.

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E

Ecological fallacy: the average person in the past saw about two children reach adulthood, but many had none and many had five. Peasant societies are diverse and dynamic when you look closely, they only seem static and unchanging when you zoom out and look for overall trends. One family often rose and fell in income, one village specialized in millstones or weaving cloaks, its only when we look at an economy as a whole that we see average income staying about the same and millstones and cloaks being made.

Empty Citations (Anne-Will Harzing)

Ethnographic analogy

Equifinality

Archaeologists worry about equifinality, for example, a principle according to which many different past processes can result in the same or similar outcomes in the present. Is that “stone tool” the result of human planning and action, or is it the result of a mudflow? How do we tell the difference?
Andre Costopoulos https://archeothoughts.wordpress.com/2024/04/18/flint-dibble-and-graham-hancock-on-joe-rogan-key-takeaways/

Everest Fallacy (Keith Hopkins) https://www.livius.org/articles/theory/everest-fallacy/

Euhemerism: a species of rationalization (q.v.) where you postulate that a myth is a distorted version of a true story and ignore that people in the distant past had imaginations (q.v.)

F

Folk Models, Folk Psychology, etc. (see also The Map is Not the Territory and Abstraction)

Forgery: see eg. Oscar White Muscarella, ed., The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures (Brill, 2002) or Ariel Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (2020)

Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes (2010) “Distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit” http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2010/09/sceptical-rule-of-thumb.html via https://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2010/12/bruce-vs-bohun.html and https://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2013/10/distrust-any-historical-anecdote.html (backed up at https://archive.is/REti1)

Founder Effects (Wikipedia): these affect research traditions too!

G

Gish Gallop: a technique where dishonest debaters throw out a lot of nonsense very quickly hoping that the other side will try to respond point by point and run out of time leaving the impression that they could only answer part of it. Brandolini’s Law explains how this works. Named after American creationist Duane Gish (d. 2013)

God of the Gaps

Goropizing (livius.org)

Gresham’s Law of Information (2006?): on the Internet, clickable information drives out good https://www.livius.org/articles/theory/bad-information-drives-out-good/

H

Harmonization of Sources: erasing the parts of sources which disagree with each other, such as building a Christmas narrative out of bits of all four Gospels. There was an ancient proposal to write a new gospel from the canonical four to avoid all the troubling questions about the similarities and differences.

So, who are we going to believe? Livy’s 1000 iugera of public land, Plutarch’s 500 iugera of land (unspecified), or Appian’s 500 iugera of public land plus 250 for every son? Many historians harmonize these bits of information, saying that the land bill allowed a man to own 500 iugera of public land, plus 250 for his two first sons. This may well be true, but it is also contradicted by all sources.
Jona Lendering https://www.livius.org/articles/theory/testis-unus-testis-nullus/

Hermeneutic Cycle (livius.org s.v. explanation)

Higher Naiveté (Donald Kagan attributes to “a former colleague of mine”)

My principle is this. I believe anything written in ancient Latin or Greek unless I can’t. Now, things that prevent me from believing what I read are that they are internally contradictory, or what they say is impossible, or different ones contradict each other and they can’t both be right. So, in those cases I abandon the ancient evidence. Otherwise, you’ve got to convince me that they’re not true.
Donald Kagan as quoted at https://www.sociology.education/p/how-skeptical-is-too-skeptical-the

History is Written by Losers (2013): winners are busy swimming in vaults full of gold, having a nice dinner and drinks, and going to bed with bevies of cute people, losers have time and grudges and writing is cheap. Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust, and Sima Qian were not winners.

History from Square Brackets

As every working historian knows, there is a peculiar brand of historical fiction created by those (most often primarily historians, not epigraphists) who build far-ranging historical theories on words or phrases which their epigraphist predecessors have inserted- meaning no harm, and often exempli gratia– between square brackets in a fragmentary text. The epigraphic facts will be admitted, sometimes even discussed, with the conclusion that the supplement is ‘necessary’ or ‘inevitable.’ As every epigraphist knows, and some historians as well, such a statement, especially in non-stoichedon texts and non-formulaic phrases, is often a warning that the wish has been father to the thought, and that scrutiny is needed.
Ernst Badian, “History from ‘Square Brackets’,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Bd. 79 (1989), pp. 59-70 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20187151 Stoichedon is what computer typographers call monospaced, a script where every character occupies the same width

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I, J

Identity Protection: most neurotypicals identify strongly with groups which they imagine themselves to be members of, and defend those groups against criticism. Those groups make up all kinds of stories about their origins and past actions and teach them as true. History is the science of discovering truth about the past, so it always conflicts with these stories and threatens identity groups. Therefore, powerful and unscrupulous people will always be hostile to the practice and teaching of history. See also Deconstruction, Invented Tradition.

Illusion of Control: states are not governed by philosopher-kings. Grand Admiral Thrawn, Xanatos, and Professor Moriarty are not real. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy. The tide will not stop for King Canute. Parliament can’t solve every problem by passing legislation. Its all to easy to assume that kings and councils in the past had master plans based on careful thought and were not bumbling their way through things or acting on impulse like the people in the news or at our hobby club today.

Imagination: never assume that people in the past could not just make stuff up! See also Power of Fiction.

Incorrect Premises: many people’s beliefs about the past are rooted in false assumptions, such as assuming that riding a horse was as convenient as driving a car or of course there were nonpartisan, impersonal courts following formal procedures with jurisdiction over everyone or obviously everyone was either superstitious and ignorant or a liberal humanist. People have trouble expressing these assumptions (see also Tacit Knowledge). Identifying and addressing these is the hardest part of teaching history (see also Modelling Minds). Bret Devereaux has a series on ancient polytheism, what Christians and post-Christians tend to misunderstand about it, and how its a good rule of thumb that people in other societies took their religious as seriously as Americans take political theories or some Europeans take World Cup soccer.

Internal vs. External Conflict, Narcissism of Small Differences (Sigmund Freud: Wikipedia s.v. Narcissism of Small Differences): the most vicious fights are often between people who are very similar, such as fascist dictators and communist dictators, different wings of the same political movement in the same country, or neighbouring communities. Fights that line up along cultural or civilisational differences are rare.

Intertexuality: when you have three sources, sometimes Ctesias is playing with a story in Herodotus and Herodotus is adapting a story in Aeschylus rather than engage with the world outside of texts. When a description of cavalry combat in Arrian’s history of Alexander is especially vivid, that is because he cribbed it from Xenophon to make a point that Alexander was even mightier than Cyrus the Younger. See also Small World, Big Drama and Tacit Knowledge.

Vi Hart’s Internet Votes (written 2015, published 2017):

On the internet, content rises to the top if it wins the popular vote. But unlike modern implementations of democracy, you get as many votes as you have time to give, all day every day, and most of those votes are taken by web companies without asking. And unlike the popular vote in democracy, internet popularity votes do not imply endorsement. Votes that come from gut reactions take less time than anything involving actual thought. … In theory when you want to work but feel uninspired, browsing the web should lead you to a great many wonderful things that really make you want to create something. But if you are browsing in a part of the web that promotes things using internet votes, you are all but guaranteed to only find things that elicit a quick easy user action and then leave the user unsatisfied and looking for more. In practice, inspiring and satisfying pieces of content are dead ends for user actions. Thoughtful pieces of content that take twenty minutes to read get one vote in the time it takes for pretty pictures and amusing memes to get dozens.

Invented Sources: according to a UN report, 97% of statistics are just made up. If you just make up a source it will say whatever you want it to say and nobody can find it and show that something in it contradicts you. See Historia Augusta (livius.org), Geoffrey of Monmouth, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Invented statistics: see Invented Sources and Decorative Statistics

Invention of Tradition (Hobsbawm): Many things which people tell you are ancient were invented last Tuesday. Pericles’ funeral speech may have been a tradition just a few decades old but Thucydides still calls it an ancestral custom. Clan tartans were invented when Victoria was queen of England. See also Identity Protection.

Irresponsible Passive

As an instructor concerned with the writing of history I have often inveighed against historians who use the ‘irresponsible passive.’ For example, in the sentence ‘Black slaves were bought from blacks in Africa,’ the identity of the responsible party vanishes into the abyss of the passive. Compare ‘White slave traders bought black slaves from other blacks in Africa.’ That way we know who did it.
J.H. Hexter, On Historians, London 1979, p. 2 n. 2) as quoted in David Whitehead, Aineas the Tactician, How to Survive Under Siege: A Historical Commentary, second edition (Bristol Classical Press: London, 2003) p. 3

Another term for this is avoidance of agency. That has the advantage that these grammatical structures do not always use the passive voice, and the passive voice can include agency (‘Black slaves were bought by Europeans and Arabs and carried overseas’).

L

Legibility (James C. Scott)

Lendering’s Law of Misconceptions (2009): “Of the fifty mistakes I have discussed in my little book on common errors (about the ancient world), thirty-seven were made by people with a Ph.D. speaking on subjects outside their field of competence.”

Lumpers versus Splitters: … See also Periodization, Reality is Continuous.

M

Maps: In societies which did not leave them, linking places to names is hard.

Map is not the Territory (Alfred Korzybski)

Maximalism and Minimalism https://www.livius.org/articles/theory/maximalists-and-minimalists/

McLean’s Heuristic of Recreation

In trying to recreate (the ancient or medieval world), (slightly later cultures in the same area) are useful places to look for hints if you can’t find the information in a source (from your culture). It’s not perfect, but a lot better than using your enormous 21st c. brain to attempt to deduce things you don’t know from first principles. Diderot’s Encyclopedie (from the 18th century) was a great help to me in trying to recreate medieval scabbards, for example.
https://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-on-earth-do-you-find-these-things.html

The dark side of this is using Viking Age technology to imagine Achaemenid technology, only to discover that the Viking age was later and they had invented some new things like firesteels.

McLean’s Heuristic of Anecdotes: distrust any anecdote memorable enough to circulate on its own. See Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes.

Memory: the everyday individual kind is fallable, as described in books like Elizabeth Loftus’ Eyewitness Testimony. The social collective kind like the stories we tell about unions or confederation is even more maleable.

Mentalités: people at other places and times don’t think the same way you do.

Misrepresenting Cited Sources (Anne-Will Harzing)

Misattributed Quotations: another name for these is apocrypha

Modeling Minds: its hard!

Monocausal Explanations (Heinlein’s leftist friends already warned him against these in 1941!)

Motivated Reasoning: man is the rationalizing animal (L. Sprague de Camp with apologies to Aristotle, later cribbed (?) by Elliot Aronson, “The rationalizing animal,” Psychology Today, May 1973, pp 38-44)

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N

Naturalism (Wikipedia) Not to confuse with naturism, although people do like to accuse other people’s epistemology of running around starkers!

Nirvana Fallacy: just because something has a flaw does not mean that its useless. See Map is Not the Territory, Deconstruction.

Numbers as references to other numbers versus numbers as measurements: Some Terrifying Numbers (2020). See also Decorative Statistics.

Nullius in verbis, “take nobody’s word for it”: not just for Horace and the Royal Society! Because of confirmation bias (q.v.), science cannot have authorities or sacred texts which must not be questioned. Memory (q.v.) is fallible.

Numbers from Nowhere (David Henige, 1998): see Decorative Statistics

P

Panglossianism: we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

Partisanship: many people much of the time are more interested in supporting their faction than finding the truth. Many of the customs of science were created to keep debates from becoming dominated by parties outside of science, but parties within science can emerge (eg. debates about the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain). See also Identity Protection.

Periodization: its arbitrary, and it tends to shape our thinking even after we ‘know’ that periods are arbitrary and the best known system of periods is not necessarily the best. Archaeologists and historians each have their own takes on this but I don’t know of one book or article to recommend!

Persona: writers and poets often speak in voices which are not their own voice. Its dangerous to assume that a love song is about a love affair that the author really had, or that the politics of a chronicle are the politics which the author would express over a jug of beer.

Positivism https://www.livius.org/th/theory/theory-positivist.html (N.B. this term has several different meanings in philosophy)

Postmodernism

Power of Fiction: many people’s understanding of the world they live in owes a lot to fiction. Even if you know how something worked in a past society, someone in the past may have had different ideas if they had little or no direct experience. And many people still get their ideas about the past from Asterix comics or Shakespeare plays or computer games which never claim to be history. See also Mentalités and Books of the Brave by Irving A. Leonard http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1f59n78v/.

Q

Quellenkritik “source criticism”

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R

Rationalization (2017)

Reality is Continuous: but we divide it up more or less arbitrarily to simplify it. Archaeologists divide objects into typologies, but the next object they find is often in between two types. Historians create periods but nobody wakes up and says “by Jove, according to the calendar its not the Mannerist period but Baroque today, fetch painters and have them redecorate my dining room.” An exception is when a new political regime imposes an official style, as when a new dynasty took over in ancient Egypt and the big man in every village started to put up the same style of stele.

Research Incumbency Rule: “Once an article is published in some approved venue, it is taken as truth. Criticisms which would absolutely derail a submission in pre-publication review can be brushed aside if they are presented after publication. This is what you call ‘the burden of proof on critics.'” (A. Gelman; cp. Egyptologists on Flinders Petrie’s chronology of Bronze Age Egypt based on Manetho‘s list of kings, which was established long before there was any form of absolute dating and tended to be used to interpret or correct absolute dates as they appeared, such as using the Pertrie dates of dynasties to calibrate C-14 dates of wood from those dynasties)

S

Selective Preservation: ancient manuscripts survive because they were chosen to be copied and recopied under different political regimes, not because they would be the most useful for researchers today

Selective Publication: if I publish the part of the evidence that speaks to my questions, that may not be what speaks to your questions https://brentnongbri.com/2018/05/27/the-oxyrhynchus-papyri-of-dubious-provenance-and-editorial-choice/ Not to confuse with publication bias in the statistical sciences, where its easier to publish a claim X than a failure to confirm X (the Research Incumbency Rule).

Sherlock Holmes Method (N. Whatley)

The Fourth Aid is what I think I may call the Sherlock Holmes method. This again is used inevitably by all historians, especially in this age of Quellenkritik, but its own particular master is Munro. Reading his article on Marathon leaves me with just the same feeling as reading Conan Doyle. It is so attractive and such an artistic whole that it seems almost a crime to take it prosaically to pieces and inquire whether the steps in the first argument do follow one another so irresistibly as at first appears. … It seems so clear that the Sherlock Holmes method began to be employed in a mild way very early in Greek historiography and the chances that the earliest account of a Greek war that we possess is the best seem to me very great indeed.
N. Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon and Other Ancient Battles,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 84 (1964), pp. 119-139

Small World Big Drama: a surprising amount of low-tech writing comes out of face-to-face relationships and rivalries between people, most of which is not explained in surviving texts (see also Intertextuality and Tacit Knowledge). Look up the drama around Aristotle and his friends and students some time!

Special Pleading: “Special pleading is a form of inconsistency in which the reasoner doesn’t apply his or her principles consistently. It is the fallacy of applying a general principle to various situations but not applying it to a special situation that interests the arguer even though the general principle properly applies to that special situation, too.” – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy s.v. Fallacy

Statistics: they don’t exist in ancient literature, just in ancient archaeology (see also What you see is not all there was, Archaeological Visibility)

Suppressio Veri Suggestio Falsi (2016)

T

Tacit Knowledge …

Telephone, Game of: as stories are retold or texts are copied they change.

Teleology: history is one damn thing after another not a being with purpose. From Greek τέλος “end, result.”

Telescoping the Past: people naturally blend all times before the memories of the oldest person they listen to as ‘old times.’ As I write this WW II is passing from history into old times; about fifteen years ago fantasyland was acquiring material culture from the Old West such as guns, livery stables, and beds with steel springs.

Testis Unius, Testis Nullius “one source is no source” (livius.org has a good article)

Thought-Terminating Cliché (Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalitarianism, 1961) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 People often say that “it is what is is” in less naive language so the simple version lets you see the pattern. Thanks Alan Jacobs.

Three-Source Method: because evidence from the ancient world is scarce and unrepresentative, strong claims are backed by texts, art, and archaeology. Arguments based on just one or two of these may miss important perspectives. I took this for granted because of the structure of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria, but there must be further writing on this! See also Auxiliary Sciences of History.

Traduttore Traditore: a translator is a traitor.

Translation Shopping: a species of Cherrypicking (q.v.) where you pick the translation which says what you want it to say. This is common in theology and in historical fencing. See also Confirmation Bias.

Truth Sandwich (George Lakeoff, 2018?): trying to refute an idea can spread it, because your audience is probably not the audience that was first exposed. Another name is prebunking (but committing publicly to a position on something has dangers: if you turn out to be wrong, it will be harder to admit that).

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U, V

Uniformitarianism (James Hutton and Charles Lyell the geographers): the assumption that events distant in space or time were governed by the same physical laws and biological limits as events close in space and time. Armies which left no records were probably not much bigger than armies which left records; most claims about miracles or divine messages are unverifiable, so science can’t assume that your favorite one is true (see also Special Pleading and Naturalism)

Verified Trust (2022): what science is

W

Western Civilization: this term is bafflegab not a tool for serious discussions. Fortunately, as historians in Canada we gave up the idea sometime in the last century. I don’t know whether Ghandi really said it would be a good idea but he should have.

What you see is not what there was: Because of archaeological visibility, selective preservation, selective publication, etc. the traces of the past are nothing like a random sample of the past. See also Positivism.

Whig Theory of History: the purpose of history is certainly not to produce Our Glorious Selves. See Teleology.

Comments

I might rearrange some of these. For example, it might be worth to split barriers to finding the truth for yourself from problems communicating the truth or leading people to the truth such as “You cannot reason someone out of a position which they did not reason themselves in to.” (Jonathan Swift) When I was editing this I deleted an entry or two which did not belong such as Dead Air (the principle that in broadcast media, saying nothing is very expensive, so people find something to fill the gap).

My book with Franz Steiner Verlag has an index entry for some of these.

I wish it were easier in WordPress to have links within the page so that one entry could link to another. These are called internal links, anchor tags, or page jumps. A help page is https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/page-jumps/ Please let me know if you find any broken links on this page!

Knowing Things is Hard

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