NxM Grids
a scrapbook
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
picturing a giant NxM matrix of every productive metaphor or toy model that's ever found an application (market clearing, coordination game, gresham viscosity, annealing, ponens-tollens, exit-voice-loyalty, spin glass, ... {}); wikipedia list of eponymous laws + wikipedia list of
Lee B. Cyrano @leebriskcyrano
it's interesting to think of meditation as "pricing in" your mental moves. letting the neural markets clear
in this light, anxious avoidance is running credit default swaps on your amygdala
11:41 AM · May 16, 2025 · 2.26K Views
2 Replies · 8 Reposts · 21 Likes
Image linked by @davidad on Twitter
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/6/4/495
The Topology of the 2×2 Games: A New Periodic Table
David Robinson and David Goforth
Some wikipedia lists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Eponymous_rules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_lists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Concepts_by_field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Concepts_in_science_by_field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Marginal_concepts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Engineering_concepts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conceptual_models
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conceptual_distinctions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophical_concepts
Some related tweets:
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
gain of function recombinant thought experiments
NxM grid of crosses of all 2-ply thought experiments and then higher dimensional grids for 3-, 4-, 5- etc
bourbaki @2oovy
Thought experiment: Squid game guy comes up to you and asks you to play a game: Flip a coin. If you flip heads you win $10. If you flip tails, a random person is put in the DeathBox, a 10ft^3 box that crushes them instantly if you don't hold down a button for 9 months (1/2)
3:30 PM · Dec 17, 2025 · 323 Views
1 Repost · 5 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
dennett's point about the many variable parameters in any classic thought experiment-- w LLMs, can immediately generate all permutations of commission/omission, default/change, actor/victim, familiar/alien, certain/uncertain, 1/99 v 99/1, etc etc, get the whole manifold at once
Limelihood ⏸️ Function 🔸🔸🔸 @StatsLime
A group of 100 people are walking by a trash compactor. All 100 people know that if >50 people fling themselves into the trash compactor, the trash compactor gets stuck and nobody will die, but if <50 fling themselves in, everyone who jumps in dies. Do you
5:42 PM · Aug 14, 2023 · 2.75K Views
2 Replies · 8 Reposts · 10 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
NxM chart of every possible pairwise merger of foods
🎭 @deepfates
Californians trying to figure out where to eat: What do you think sushi? or burrito. or maybe tacos? or maybe poke. or quesadilla? no I've got it. Sushirito
3:38 PM · Aug 8, 2025 · 630 Views
6 Replies · 11 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
image of a time lapse history of "cultural reference space" as a fixed address field gradually transforming from deep and enduring verticals of canonical works to increasingly wide, varied, & shallow 'lilypads' of present reference space, perhaps phase transitioning to a horizon
xilo @Xilo_K
Nobody in my university class knows the Illiad. You cannot make references anymore. "Apple of discord" or "Golden fleece" as figures of speech are out of reach for 99.9% of zoomers.
1:59 AM · Apr 27, 2025 · 3.59K Views
3 Replies · 9 Reposts · 41 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
NxM grid of all present techno-cultural "stuff" on one axis and all science fiction worldbuilding color on the other. Claude,
Ryan Moulton @moultano
I could have sworn this featured in several Ray Bradbury stories but I can't remember which.
1:08 PM · Jul 28, 2025 · 819 Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 7 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
he (Peter Watts) can't keep getting away with this (predicting our terrible future)
Yo Shavit @yonashav
On our current tech trajectory, I’d guess that before we have anything smart enough to recursively self-improve, we’ll have sub-human-level AI worms jumping around the internet that prove almost impossible to eradicate.
That would be… a learning experience.
2:35 AM · Jul 7, 2023 · 1.93K Views
2 Replies · 5 Reposts · 14 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
another day another product launch from sid meier's Alpha Centauri
Ben Nowack ☀️🌎🪞 @bennbuilds
@Andercot Yea, we will be in a sun synchronous orbit over the terminator. Thats when electricity prices are highest.
7:16 PM · Mar 13, 2024 · 5.29K Views
3 Replies · 10 Reposts · 46 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
'modal reader imputed theory of mind' failure where i assume everyone i "know" of on twitter knows pretty much all my tweets. or at least the best 100-500. but in actuality very likely that majority of them are unaware of the majority of my tweets and NxM mostly empty. sobering
2:56 AM · Apr 14, 2025 · 802 Views
2 Replies · 2 Reposts · 12 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
NxM table of all vibes and then all outsider's romanticized stylizations of those vibes, ideally one example per cell
Pleometric @pleometric
@norvid_studies The important point here, and the vibe described above is that it's an outsider's romanticization of it, hence the Swedish magazine doing the type of vibe
12:26 AM · Mar 14, 2025 · 578 Views
1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 5 Likes
From Literal Banana:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(folkloristics)
Also from Literal Banana: https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Propp_Vladimir_Morphology_of_the_Folktale_2nd_ed.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations
Gunkel and “Ideonomy” are related to this cluster.
henry@arithmoquine
oh, so you like ideas? name every one
wait no stop Patrick Michael Gunkel i was joking
3:08 AM · Jul 13, 2024 · 42.4K Views
8 Replies · 5 Reposts · 122 Likes
https://gracekind.net/writing/ideonomy/intro/
https://ideonomy.mit.edu/
quetzal_rainbow@quetzal_rainbow
@norvid_studies @lion_tender The secret of finding good ideas is to factorize possible ideas into several factors and then iterate over their possible combinations
10:56 AM · Oct 8, 2025 · 220 Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 4 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
have you tried just clauding up 1000 replicas of your verbal behavior to simultaneously explore the semantic topography of all adjacent positions to your own anon
niplav is @niplav_site
@norvid_studies More samples:
6:26 PM · Oct 23, 2024 · 229 Views
1 Repost · 1 Like
niplav is@niplav_site
@norvid_studies More samples:
6:02 PM · Oct 23, 2024 · 987 Views
2 Replies · 6 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
title validation algorithm
🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns
@norvid_studies the other day I gave Claude the title of one of my papers and asked if it knew anything about it, and it proceeded to confidently hallucinate a completely wrong author list, followed by a presumably equally hallucinated—but nonetheless largely correct!—description of our method
7:22 PM · Apr 5, 2024 · 1.15K Views
1 Reply · 4 Reposts · 11 Likes
Ryan Moulton@moultano
@norvid_studies Observing that projects in my department tended to have names that were based on the names of other projects via prefixes and suffixes, I made something that explored that space combinatorially, and it was a surprisingly good brainstorming tool.
7:40 PM · Apr 5, 2024 · 1.39K Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 9 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
repeatedly surprised how much instant insight I get from "concept X + concept Y" or "concept X but in field Y". suggests you could learn a lot of your own adjacent ideas by something as stupid as making a giant list of all the concepts you understand and running a script to show
Cameron Harwick 👾🏛 @C_Harwick
Dunbar's Number but for concepts.
2:09 PM · Mar 19, 2023 · 1.79K Views
2 Replies · 6 Reposts · 17 Likes
For image model generation:
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
has anyone put up an aleatory script to make up prompts yet? [item 1] + [item 2] in the style of/painted by [item 3], few hundred for each bin
12:19 AM · Jul 29, 2022
1 Reply
Cameron Harwick 👾🏛@C_Harwick
This is an interesting thought. Occam's Razor (don't use too many concepts, and reuse the ones you have as much as possible) as a purely pragmatic rule to minimize knowledge decay.
Cody Moser @LTF_01
@psmaldino ...concepts are tied to mechanisms that rear their head time and time again in different parts of the system, while in social sciences concepts going into our theories are generally non-multipurpose.
5:47 AM · Nov 16, 2022
2 Replies · 1 Repost · 8 Likes
Cameron Harwick 👾🏛@C_Harwick
Sometimes I think about the claim that medieval scholarship reasoned mostly through analogies, as opposed to induction like modern scholarship. Certainly seems the more natural way to reason.
Vince Buffalo @vsbuffalo
The oddest thing to me is how their main point is argued: zero scientific evidence backing the claim, but a tremendous amount of hand-wringing about how we’ve misunderstood the cell because we project our social hierarchy onto it.
8:10 PM · Mar 27, 2024 · 794 Views
3 Replies · 7 Likes
Cluster around ATU Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson%E2%80%93Uther_Index
thebes@voooooogel
who's building the ATU index for memes. knowyourmeme isn't enough for me anymore
1:20 AM · May 3, 2024 · 5.16K Views
8 Replies · 7 Reposts · 67 Likes
thebes@voooooogel
the way the ATU system works, there's two levels: taletypes, broad outlines of stories, and motifs, elements shared between taletypes. so e.g. 510A Cinderella references the motif S31 Cruel Stepmother, which is shared with (among others) ATU 450 Little Brother and Little Sister
1:20 AM · May 3, 2024 · 518 Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 19 Likes
thebes@voooooogel
one cool thing you can do is use taletypes and motifs to trace the history of certain folktales
these researchers used a statistical model to build a phylogenetic tree of taletypes!
but it's also a lot of fun to just walk the index by motif and see what you stumble upon
1:21 AM · May 3, 2024 · 2.98K Views
3 Replies · 5 Reposts · 33 Likes
thebes@voooooogel
it'd be really neat to have this for memes. i want a meme phylogenetic tree, we have the technology
1:21 AM · May 3, 2024 · 644 Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 21 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
@voooooogel @AndyMasley . o O Biercean Devil's Dictionary or ATU Index centralized disinformation roach motel "Viral Wrong AI Ideas" bestiary that could with one click classify some reply as a "<501A: An AI cannot be aware of its unawareness> crossed with <S31 Gebru water libel>"
thebes @voooooogel
one cool thing you can do is use taletypes and motifs to trace the history of certain folktales
these researchers used a statistical model to build a phylogenetic tree of taletypes!
but it's also a lot of fun to just walk the index by motif and see what you stumble upon
2:28 PM · Dec 10, 2025 · 1.84K Views
4 Reposts · 9 Likes
Mechanical Dodo@Mechanical_Dodo
@norvid_studies There can be related indices in anthropological databases, maybe d-place.org
I don't have a relevant mythology link at hand, but see e.g. revenge-related norms d-place.org/parameters/SCC…
or evil eye belief d-place.org/parameters/SCC… (guess which societies are which):
4:11 AM · Jul 24, 2025 · 169 Views
1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 2 Likes
Écorché@3corch3
@norvid_studies the optimal temperature is not zero
11:25 PM · May 21, 2026 · 134 Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 1 Like
Écorché@3corch3
@norvid_studies I think divination is the best word. Oblique Strategies is the most modern attempt I know of but now there is also accidental LLMancy
Écorché @3corch3
the word for this is “divination”, notice this is like a description of the I Ching!
11:43 PM · May 21, 2026 · 129 Views
1 Repost · 1 Like
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
list of aesthetics
Alexandre @charmide
@norvid_studies i've been brushing off on this for the prompt era https://t.co/TPVxm8eCdM
8:09 PM · Mar 31, 2025 · 3.87K Views
1 Reply · 3 Reposts · 13 Likes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Gauge
other related clusters of thinking tools / visualizations:
- TQM / Lean Six Sigma
- vgr 2x2s
- farnam street "big book of mental models"
have you seen TRIZ? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Contradiction_Matrix_of_TRIZ_method_360dpi.jpg