Knowledge Atlas · Reference

Glossary & ontology

Terms are defined once and translated with care — terminology must survive translation intact.

Schelling point: A focal point: the option people tend to choose when they must coordinate without communicating, because it seems natural or salient to everyone.
Separation of powers: The division of government into legislative, executive and judicial branches that check one another, so that liberty is not endangered by the concentration of power.
Smart contract: A program on a blockchain that automatically executes agreed rules, such as releasing funds when conditions are met.
Social choice: The study of how individual preferences, judgements or votes can be combined into a collective decision, using formal conditions to compare voting rules and welfare criteria.
Social contract: A method of justifying political authority or principles by appeal to an agreement, real or hypothetical, among free and equal persons.
Sortition: Selecting office-holders or decision bodies by lot, usually from a stratified random sample.
Sovereign wealth fund: A state-owned investment fund, often built from resource revenues, that invests for the long term on behalf of the public.
Sovereignty: Supreme authority within a territory or over a membership, including the final say over law and its enforcement.
Special economic zone: A defined area where business, trade or tax rules differ from those in the rest of the country.
Spontaneous order: A pattern of social coordination that emerges from the actions of many individuals none of whom intends or designs the overall result, as with language, markets or common law.
State of nature: A hypothetical condition without government, used in social-contract theory as a baseline against which to judge political authority.
Subsidiarity: The principle that decisions should be taken at the lowest level able to handle them effectively.
Supermajority: A threshold above a simple majority, such as two-thirds or three-fifths, required to adopt certain decisions.
Sybil attack: Creating many fake identities to gain disproportionate influence in a system that counts participants.
Syndicalism: A labour-movement doctrine holding that revolutionary trade unions, using direct action and ultimately the general strike, should take over and run production.