"It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wizard of Earthsea
Naming (down definition[1]): The process by which a concept, often a complex or sophisticated concept, is mapped onto a single word (or occasionally a short phrase).
Naming (up definition): Facilitates memory of, identification of, communication of, and construction of models based on the concept to which the name in question refers.
When I was younger, around 15 or 16, I found--for the first time--a blog I really liked. It was called Wait But Why, and it was wonderful; half lucid, analytical essays, half riotously funny articles (see for instance Creepy Kids from Weird Vintage Ads). But there was one article in particular that hooked me. It's one thousand, two hundred and fifty five words--barely four pages, and it feels shorter. But it made a big enough impact that I'm talking about it here, now, to you. The article is called "Clueyness, a Weird Kind of Sad". I recommend you read it at some point, if you have time, but I'll proceed from this point as if you haven't read it. The article essentially boils down to the following definition: "[Clueyness is] an odd feeling of intense heartbreaking compassion for people who didn’t actually go through anything especially bad." That's it.
Why did something so simple stick with me? Well, for one, clueyness was something I'd experienced before! Having a name for it helped me look at it more directly: now, when I felt "cluey", I could say to myself "hey, I'm feeling cluey right now!" I could think "huh, what was the last time I felt cluey? Oh, right, it was that story about the kid who threw away the paper bag lunches his mom made for him." I could draw connections between times I felt cluey, even reason about the nature of clueyness itself, and while these things wouldn't have been impossible before I read the article, they probably wouldn't have happened.
Having a name for the phenomenon of clueyness crystallized it, solidified it, let me play with it as a solid, discrete object instead of a fuzzy hazy mess of feelings and experiences all overlapping and intersecting in an abstract cloud. Naming it turned it into a rock I could hold in my hand. This delighted me. This is the second reason the article stick with me: it was the first real hint I had that naming itself was something worth paying attention to. You can draw a direct line between that half-seen glimmer and the article you're reading right now.
Let's talk about something that happened to me a year or so back. I was looking for PhD programs to apply to, and my mentor told me that I should look for programs in "biophysics". I had never heard this word before, so I looked it up--and it was exactly what I wanted to study! I think a lot of people have had experiences like this: you find a subject that really interests you, you realize it has a name, and then knowing the name enables you to pursue that subject more effectively. This is exactly what happened to me. Knowing the name "biophysics" let me do things like google "biophysics phd programs," which was useful in an immediately practical sense. But it also let me get a more abstract sort of handle on the subject. The value of this handle is thus: knowing the name "biophysics" lets me summon up a sort of... vibe, in my head, an agglomeration of all the times I've heard people or institutions reference "biophysics" by name. Because the thing is, it's not a precisely defined term. The definition from Merriam-Webster is "a branch of science concerned with the application of physical principles and methods to biological problems", but that doesn't come close to capturing its nuances. As someone in the field, I think of "biophysics" not as a top-down construct--a box into which one may sort researchers, research papers, etc--but as a fuzzy label, something you can apply to a constellation of topics in an overlapping way. Instead of binary and exclusive--THIS is biochemistry, THIS is biophysics, THIS is the border in between--most subfields of biology are best understood as stickers that you can slap on a scientific object, even mix and match in fractional amounts. Your name-sense might tell you that (for instance) molecular dynamics has strong biophysics vibes, medium-strong computational biology vibes, medium-weak biochemistry vibes, and no, uh, ecology vibes (unless you're simulating a bunch of proteins in some ecosystem study I guess). Formally, you would call this kind of informational structure a "vector"[2] but we don't need to get that technical here. The point is: having a bunch of scientific-field names to play with, to toss back and forth like tennis balls while I pick up what other people associate these names with, lets me fit my intuition to the inherent structure of the academic study of the biosciences[3] in a way that gives me a flexible, feeling-charged "sense" for biological-research-in-the-modern-day which is difficult to convey to an outsider. This is part of the power of naming.
I think naming is an important and understudied aspect of human cognition. I think the ability to compress arbitrarily complex concepts into dimensionless, unitary referents[4] enables the abstraction that is so fundamental to the human ability to model the world. I wish I had more insight into this, and if you think you do, please leave a comment. I would love to start a conversation about this.
But you see what I'm doing here, right? I'm bringing to your attention an old, even ancient, name: "naming" itself.
I don't know if "all power is one source and one end", as the inimitable Le Guin writes, but I do know that naming is important. At this point, maybe you agree! I hope you do. If you do, I hope a) you think about it, write about it, and tell me about it, and b)read my other posts on the subject! I'll be writing a series of short posts about naming over the course of 2026 and linking them here. My dream is to accumulate a constellation of short (very short) essays about this subject, since I think there is a LOT to explore here. But for now: thanks for reading, and peace out.
Naming (down definition[1]): The process by which a concept, often a complex or sophisticated concept, is mapped onto a single word (or occasionally a short phrase).
Naming (up definition): Facilitates memory of, identification of, communication of, and construction of models based on the concept to which the name in question refers.
When I was younger, around 15 or 16, I found--for the first time--a blog I really liked. It was called Wait But Why, and it was wonderful; half lucid, analytical essays, half riotously funny articles (see for instance Creepy Kids from Weird Vintage Ads). But there was one article in particular that hooked me. It's one thousand, two hundred and fifty five words--barely four pages, and it feels shorter. But it made a big enough impact that I'm talking about it here, now, to you. The article is called "Clueyness, a Weird Kind of Sad". I recommend you read it at some point, if you have time, but I'll proceed from this point as if you haven't read it. The article essentially boils down to the following definition: "[Clueyness is] an odd feeling of intense heartbreaking compassion for people who didn’t actually go through anything especially bad." That's it.
Why did something so simple stick with me? Well, for one, clueyness was something I'd experienced before! Having a name for it helped me look at it more directly: now, when I felt "cluey", I could say to myself "hey, I'm feeling cluey right now!" I could think "huh, what was the last time I felt cluey? Oh, right, it was that story about the kid who threw away the paper bag lunches his mom made for him." I could draw connections between times I felt cluey, even reason about the nature of clueyness itself, and while these things wouldn't have been impossible before I read the article, they probably wouldn't have happened.
Having a name for the phenomenon of clueyness crystallized it, solidified it, let me play with it as a solid, discrete object instead of a fuzzy hazy mess of feelings and experiences all overlapping and intersecting in an abstract cloud. Naming it turned it into a rock I could hold in my hand. This delighted me. This is the second reason the article stick with me: it was the first real hint I had that naming itself was something worth paying attention to. You can draw a direct line between that half-seen glimmer and the article you're reading right now.
Let's talk about something that happened to me a year or so back. I was looking for PhD programs to apply to, and my mentor told me that I should look for programs in "biophysics". I had never heard this word before, so I looked it up--and it was exactly what I wanted to study! I think a lot of people have had experiences like this: you find a subject that really interests you, you realize it has a name, and then knowing the name enables you to pursue that subject more effectively. This is exactly what happened to me. Knowing the name "biophysics" let me do things like google "biophysics phd programs," which was useful in an immediately practical sense. But it also let me get a more abstract sort of handle on the subject. The value of this handle is thus: knowing the name "biophysics" lets me summon up a sort of... vibe, in my head, an agglomeration of all the times I've heard people or institutions reference "biophysics" by name. Because the thing is, it's not a precisely defined term. The definition from Merriam-Webster is "a branch of science concerned with the application of physical principles and methods to biological problems", but that doesn't come close to capturing its nuances. As someone in the field, I think of "biophysics" not as a top-down construct--a box into which one may sort researchers, research papers, etc--but as a fuzzy label, something you can apply to a constellation of topics in an overlapping way. Instead of binary and exclusive--THIS is biochemistry, THIS is biophysics, THIS is the border in between--most subfields of biology are best understood as stickers that you can slap on a scientific object, even mix and match in fractional amounts. Your name-sense might tell you that (for instance) molecular dynamics has strong biophysics vibes, medium-strong computational biology vibes, medium-weak biochemistry vibes, and no, uh, ecology vibes (unless you're simulating a bunch of proteins in some ecosystem study I guess). Formally, you would call this kind of informational structure a "vector"[2] but we don't need to get that technical here. The point is: having a bunch of scientific-field names to play with, to toss back and forth like tennis balls while I pick up what other people associate these names with, lets me fit my intuition to the inherent structure of the academic study of the biosciences[3] in a way that gives me a flexible, feeling-charged "sense" for biological-research-in-the-modern-day which is difficult to convey to an outsider. This is part of the power of naming.
I think naming is an important and understudied aspect of human cognition. I think the ability to compress arbitrarily complex concepts into dimensionless, unitary referents[4] enables the abstraction that is so fundamental to the human ability to model the world. I wish I had more insight into this, and if you think you do, please leave a comment. I would love to start a conversation about this.
But you see what I'm doing here, right? I'm bringing to your attention an old, even ancient, name: "naming" itself.
I don't know if "all power is one source and one end", as the inimitable Le Guin writes, but I do know that naming is important. At this point, maybe you agree! I hope you do. If you do, I hope a) you think about it, write about it, and tell me about it, and b) read my other posts on the subject! I'll be writing a series of short posts about naming over the course of 2026 and linking them here. My dream is to accumulate a constellation of short (very short) essays about this subject, since I think there is a LOT to explore here. But for now: thanks for reading, and peace out.
https://knowingless.com/2017/07/19/up-and-down-definitions/
(wink wink nudge nudge)
see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace
"pointers", maybe?