Frameworks & Definitions

Why this page exists

Every field on this site disagrees at the level of its primitives: what value is, what recovery is, what an error is, what a startup is, what a text authorizes. These answers are not interchangeable.

Bar the contested term and ask whether the parties can still state what they disagree about. If they can, the dispute is substantive and the definition was scaffolding. If they cannot, the argument cannot terminate until the term is settled.

How entries are sorted

Contested entries carry one of four tags. An entry with no tag is a convention of usage on this site and nothing more.

Empirical

A fact about the world. Measurement can settle it in principle.

Definitional

What a term means. Agreement, or showing the dispute dissolves, can settle it.

Normative

What is valued. Name the field and method that owns it.

Out of scope

A question the method has no procedure to address.

Where this page takes a position

Evidence and inference set rules for the claims on this site. Economics and entrepreneurship declare defaults. Recovery and systems name competing accounts. Scripture states a prior commitment rather than deriving one.

Evidence and inference

The standard applied to every post here, including to my own claims. Where a post and this page disagree, this page governs and the post gets corrected.

Finding

What a study establishes given the design it actually used. Distinct from what its authors concluded and from what I conclude.

Effect size

The magnitude of a difference. Statistical significance is a statement about the sample. Effect size is a statement about the world.

Comparison group

A set measured under the same conditions minus the thing under study. Without one, a number describes the people measured and not what produced it.

Causal claim

A claim that one thing produced another. Made only where the design rules out alternatives, and named as an association everywhere else.

External validity

Whether a result travels from the setting measured to the setting claimed.

Base rate

How often something occurs absent the proposed explanation. Named before any claim that an explanation is needed.

Replication

Independent repetition producing the same result. One study is one study, regardless of how well known it is.

Prior

What I believed before the evidence, stated where it is doing work in the conclusion.

Reach

What I actually read: full text, abstract only, or a secondary account. An abstract is not a study.

Mine rather than the literature's

A claim of my own that no cited work supports. It is marked so the reader can see what remains without it.

Correction and revision

A correction changes a fact. A revision changes a position. Both are dated and made in place.

Withdrawal

A sentence I previously published and no longer stand behind. The sentence stays visible with its date and reason.

Economics

The Hayekian side. A deductive claim about incentives is a hypothesis with a strong prior, not a result. Where deduction and measurement conflict, measurement wins.

Frameworks in use

Property rights economics

Residual claimants, transaction costs, and the boundary of the firm.

Hayekian knowledge

Prices compress dispersed knowledge no participant holds in full.

Public choice

Actors inside institutions face incentives like everyone else.

Experimental economics

Institutions are testable and markets can produce results theory did not predict.

Popperian falsifiability

A claim that cannot be wrong is not doing work.

Neoclassical, behavioral, institutional, Post-Keynesian, Marxian, feminist, population health

Competing accounts of optimization, uncertainty, value, unpaid care, institutions, and the relevant unit of analysis.

Definitions

Price

An observed exchange rate, not cost.

Cost

The foregone alternative. Accounting allocation is named when meant.

Profit

Economic profit includes the opportunity cost of all inputs, including capital.

Efficiency

Named as Pareto, Kaldor-Hicks, technical, or allocative.

Rent

Return above what keeps a factor in its current use.

Value

Subjective and imperfectly revealed through choice.

Risk and uncertainty

Knight’s distinction: risk has a distribution, uncertainty does not.

Market, regulation, shortage

Institutions governing exchange; barrier-raising versus conduct-constraining; quantity demanded exceeding quantity supplied at the prevailing price.

Recovery

No adjudication between disease and choice. This work traces where definitions acquire consequences in coverage, regulation, and disability law.

Frameworks in use

Disease or brain disease model

Addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disorder.

Behavioral and choice models

Behavior responsive to costs, constraints, and alternatives.

Developmental and learning models

Learned behavior acquired at a developmental stage.

Social and environmental

Conditions and dislocation as the unit of analysis.

Twelve-step and spiritual

A program of action and community, not a clinical theory.

Harm reduction

Reduction of harm rather than cessation as the goal.

Definitions

Recovery

A process, not a state and not synonymous with abstinence.

Addiction

A colloquial term. The clinical category is substance use disorder, with severity.

Dependence

Physiological adaptation, distinct from addiction.

Relapse

Return to a prior pattern. A single episode is a lapse.

Success

Retention, abstinence, employment, housing, and mortality are distinct outcomes.

Medication treatment

Medication for opioid use disorder, not a lesser form of recovery.

Anonymity

Tradition Eleven constrains affiliation claims, not disclosure of recovery.

Systems

The no-villain frame is used in most posts, but not as an excuse to ignore who set the resource constraint at the sharp end.

Frameworks in use

Normal accidents

In tightly coupled, interactively complex systems, catastrophic failure is structural.

High reliability organizations

Hazardous technology can operate with very low failure rates through describable practices.

Old and new views of human error

Error as cause versus error as a symptom demanding inquiry.

Safety-I and Safety-II

Absence of adverse events versus capacity to succeed under varying conditions.

Just culture

A stated and consistently applied line between blameless and blameworthy behavior.

Definitions

Error

Deviation from intent. Deviation from procedure is named separately.

Root cause

Avoided. Proximate cause and enabling conditions are named separately.

Latent condition

A pre-existing weakness contributed by design or resourcing.

Sharp end and blunt end

Where work meets hazard, and where the conditions of that work were set.

Near miss and adverse event

An event that did not reach the patient, versus injury caused by care.

Reliability and handoff

Consistency of a process; transfer of responsibility and information together.

Entrepreneurship

Kirznerian by default: operating work is about noticing gaps in coordination rather than disruption. Schumpeterian disruption is named when meant.

Frameworks in use

Kirznerian entrepreneurship

Alertness to gaps that already exist in a market.

Schumpeterian entrepreneurship

Creative destruction that disrupts an equilibrium.

Effectuation

Expert entrepreneurs reason from available means toward emergent goals.

Lean startup and customer development

Search for a repeatable model through tested hypotheses.

Resource-based view

Advantage from resources that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and organized.

Transaction cost

The boundary of the firm as a cost comparison.

Definitions

Entrepreneur

Kirznerian alertness unless stated otherwise.

Startup

An organization searching for a repeatable and scalable model under uncertainty.

Growth and scale

More output, versus more output without proportional increases in inputs.

Runway and burn

Stated as gross or net, with treatment of receivables and accruals specified.

Failure

Closure, insolvency, sale below invested capital, and abandonment are distinct.

Owner, founder, operator

Residual claim, origination, and day-to-day control are distinguished.

Scripture

Acts 17:11 licenses testing a teacher against scripture. It does not license testing scripture.

Frameworks in use

Grammatical-historical

Meaning communicated to the original audience through language and context.

Historical-critical

Source, form, and redaction analysis.

Canonical

The final form received by the community as the object of interpretation.

Redemptive-historical

The canon as one unfolding account.

Literary and narrative

Structure, character, and rhetoric as bearers of meaning.

Jewish and confessional traditions

Different authority structures and accounts of who interprets.

Definitions

Inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility

Separate claims, stated separately where load-bearing.

Literal

Sensus literalis: what the author meant, including figure and genre.

Law

Torah as instruction. Legal code is named where meant.

Covenant

Named by covenant and framework.

Justice

Mishpat as judgment rendered and tzedakah as right relation.

Wisdom

Rightly ordered practical judgment.

Translation

Named and held throughout where a rendering carries the argument.

Terms that cross categories

Cost

Economics: foregone alternative. Accounting: conventional allocation. Systems: often uncompensated hours borne by a family.

Risk and uncertainty

Economics and Entrepreneurship follow Knight. Systems often uses probability times severity.

Success

Recovery needs an outcome and interval. Entrepreneurship needs a stated event. Systems often means absence of failure.

Error

Systems: deviation from intent. Economics: a residual in an estimate.

Value

Economics: subjective. Scripture: moral worth. Entrepreneurship: enterprise value, which is a price.

Recovery

A process in Recovery; restoration of a prior state in systems and business usage.

What this page is not

• Not a claim that disagreements are usually verbal.
• Not a defense or a hierarchy.
• Not fixed. A change of position is dated and noted.
• Not exhaustive. New load-bearing terms are added.