Lexical Compendium

Mice lie and monkeys exaggerate.

-- David B. Weiner, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Chair, Gene Therapy and Vaccine Program, CAMB Co-Leader Tumor Virology Program, Abramson Cancer Program University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine

Dr. Weiner coined this aphorism while musing on the use of NHP (nonhuman primates) in HIV vaccines studies at a conference in 2008. In essence, animal models aren't necessarily predictive of how drugs will work in humans.

The phrase is often used in research papers and by science journalists. I can't recall where I first heard it, but I thought of it recently when a friend shared a blurb about how rapamycin is purported to have anti-aging benefits in humans. Though there is no evidence for this in humans, there have been studies with the drug on mice that have found that they live ~12% longer.

AGI stands for "Artificial General Intelligence." Unlike AI, AGI is meant to connote a system that exhibits human-like intelligence and is not trained for specific tasks.

Related: ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence), ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence), p(doom)

Somewhat recently my brother introduced me to this word. Agnotology is the study of how ignorance is deliberately produced, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading information.

This is precisely the type of word I love learning about. As of October 2025, I’ve been thinking a lot about how social media, news journalism, and even scientific publishing shape what we know -- and what we don’t.

Agnotology was coined in 1992 by Iain Boal at the request of Robert Proctor. Proctor writes about this in the postscript of his Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study)^[2]:

Some time into this project I learned that there already was a word that has been used to designate the study of ignorance, albeit with a quite different slant from how we shall be using the term. Apart from being obscure and somewhat inharmonious, agnoiology has often been taken to mean "the doctrine of things of which we are necessarily ignorant" in some profound metaphysical sense. My hope for devising a new term was to suggest the opposite, namely, the historicity and artifactuality of non-knowing and the non-known-and the potential fruitfulness of studying such things. In 1992, I posed this challenge to the linguist Iain Boal, and it was he who came up with the term agnotology, in the spring of that year.

Proctor, a Professor of the History of Science at Stanford, is best known for uncovering how the tobacco industry manipulated scientific research to keep the public ignorant of its harms ^[3] -- a quintessential example of manufactured doubt.

I suspect he intended agnotology to be applied to the scientific realm, but I think it works nicely when thinking about this topic generally. When the Trump administration repeatedly cites false data, that's an agnogenic practice -- the deliberate creation of ignorance.

Similarly alarming, credulously contrarian Bari Weiss (founder of "The Free Press") was recently named CBS News' new editor-in-chief ^[5], reporting directly to CEO David Ellison (Larry Ellison’s son). Larry, meanwhile, is part of the group overseeing U.S. operations of TikTok ^[6] -- a platform where an astonishing percentage of young people now get their news. ^[7] Add to that RFK Jr.'s steady promotion of half-baked "research" ^[8] to push his agenda, and it feels as though we’re barreling toward a Ray Bradbury–esque dystopia -- one where ignorance isn’t accidental, but curated. (And we didn't even touch the accelerating ease of deepfake generation. ^[1])

I think that agnotology dovetails with another Lexicon entry: Bespoke Reality. One concept explains how ignorance is manufactured, the other how it becomes personalized. Together they describe the feedback loop of our time -- ignorance produced at scale, then force-fed to everyone in their individual feed.

Albedo is the measure of reflectivity of a surface, specifically Earth's ability to reflect solar radiation back into space. It is expressed as a percentage, with higher albedo indicating greater reflectivity.

I first came across this term while reading a SciTechDaily post about how scientists have a theory as to why global warming in 2023 exceeded predictions. The year 2023 was also had a record-low albedo.

Orthosomnia is an obsession with getting "perfect" sleep. The word was coined in a 2017 article in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine titled Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far?

We termed this condition “orthosomnia,” with “ortho” meaning straight or correct, and “somnia” meaning sleep, because patients are preoccupied or concerned with improving or perfecting their wearable sleep data. We chose this term because the perfectionist quest to achieve perfect sleep is similar to the unhealthy preoccupation with healthy eating, termed orthorexia.

I first encountered this term while listening to an episode of The Guardian's Science Weekly podcast called Is sleep perfectionism making us more exhausted?

p(doom) stands for "probability of doom" and is a term used when talking about AGI.

Phononics is the study of the behavior and control of mechanical vibrations and acoustic waves in materials.

The word is derived from phonon (a quantum of vibrational energy in a crystal lattice, analogous to a photon in light). It seems to be a relatively new neologism, as it doesn't have an entry in conventional dictionaries.

I first came upon this word in a Science magazine article titled Does the mantis shrimp pack a phononic shield?. The study provides experimental proof that the mantis shrimp’s club acts like a biological shock absorber, using phononic filtering to prevent damage.

I learned, from sort of an unlikely source -- the National Park Service, the reason why "night vision" is reset after exposure to light.  That our pupils dilate  is probably obvious, but what I didn't know was that the body produces a protein called rhodopsin which, through a series of chemical reactions, gives our rods the ability to "see" in dim light.  The protein decays in bright light (though much slower in longer wavelengths, i.e. red light).  When depleted, it takes ~30m to regenerate.

Spaghettification refers to the streching and compressing that occurs as an object passes within a black hole's event horizon. The process was first described by Stephen Hawking in the book "A Brief History of Time."

Stochastic parrot is a term coined by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. in a 2021 paper on the ethical risks of large language models called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜."

It refers to how large language models generate text by probabilistically predicting the next word based on patterns learned from massive datasets, rather than understanding or reasoning like a human. The metaphor highlights how such systems mimic language without genuine comprehension.

In December 2022, shortly after ChatGPT was released, Sam Altman of OpenAI tweeted, "i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u."

Stochastic parrot was a 2023 American Dialect Society "Word of the Year."