Platonic fold: the place where our Platonic representation enters into contact with reality

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, a book which is chock-a-block full of interesting ideas, some novel, some fresh elaborations or perspectives on already well-established ideas. Just came across an ungated version of the book's glossary which captures some of the central ideas. A sampling -

Bildungsphilister: a philistine with cosmetic, nongenuine culture. Nietzsche used this term to refer to the dogma-prone newspaper reader and opera lover with cosmetic exposure to culture and shallow depth. I extend it to the buzzword-using researcher in nonexperimental fields who lacks in imagination, curiosity, erudition, and culture and is closely centered on his ideas, on his “discipline.” This prevents him from seeing the conflicts between his ideas and the texture of the world.

Empty-suit problem (or “expert problem”): Some professionals have no differential abilities from the rest of the population, but for some reason, and against their empirical records, are believed to be experts: clinical psychologists, academic economists, risk “experts,” statisticians, political analysts, financial “experts,” military analysts, CEOs,
et cetera. They dress up their expertise in beautiful language, jargon, mathematics, and often wear expensive suits.

Epistemic arrogance: Measure the difference between what someone actually knows and how much he thinks he knows. An excess will imply arrogance, a deficit humility. An epistemocrat is someone of epistemic humility, who holds his own knowledge in greatest suspicion.

Locke’s madman: someone who makes impeccable and rigorous reasoning from faulty premises—such as Paul Samuelson, Robert Merton the minor, and Gerard Debreu—thus producing phony models of uncertainty that make us vulnerable to Black Swans.

Narrative discipline: the discipline that consists in fitting a convincing and well-sounding story to the past. Opposed to experimental discipline. Narrative fallacy: our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected
or disconnected facts. The statistical application is data mining.

Platonic fold: the place where our Platonic representation enters into contact with reality and you can see the side effects of models.

Platonicity: the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.