Glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Plutocrats | Wealthy individuals and corporate magnates - wield outsized influence over public discourse. Their funding networks shape think tanks, political campaigns, and media outlets that cast doubt on scientific consensus, particularly around climate change and public health. Science General |
| Population | The entire group the researcher is studying. If the researcher cannot gather data from the population, studying large random samples taken from the population can be used to estimate how the population would respond. Science |
| Prebunking | A proactive strategy to build resilience against misinformation by teaching people to recognize manipulation tactics before they encounter them. Based on psychological inoculation theory, it works like a vaccine: exposing people to a "weakened" dose of disinformation techniques to help them develop mental "antibodies". Antiscience |
| Precession | The wobble over thousands of years of the tilt of the Earths axis with respect to the plane of the solar system. Climate Change Denial |
| Precision | The degree to which repeated measurements or observations under the same conditions show the same results. Science |
| Pretraining | Pretraining is the large-scale learning phase that gives an AI model broad knowledge before fine-tuning. LLMs are pretrained to predict the next token using a massive dataset that includes the whole public internet and any private, licensed, and synthetic data the developers can find or create. Artificial Intelligence |
| Proof | A scientific proof generally refers to a high-level accumulation of evidence, experiments, and observations supporting a theory. It does not signify absolute 100% certainty. Antiscience |
| Proportionality Bias | The cognitive tendency to assume that major, impactful events must have equally major or complex causes. Also known as the "major event/major cause heuristic," it stems from our psychological discomfort with mundane or accidental explanations for catastrophic, world-changing events. Antiscience |
| Protein | Proteins are fundamental components of all living cells. Proteins are made up of one or more chains of amino acids, which are folded into a specific three-dimensional shape. They exhibit an enormous amount of chemical and structural diversity, enabling them to carry out an extraordinarily diverse range of biological functions. Proteins help us digest our food, fight infections, control body chemistry and in general, keep our bodies functioning smoothly. GMOs |
| Proxy | Something that represents something else. A proxy data source is an indirect source of data that scientists use when direct measurements are not available. For example, annual tree rings are a proxy for precipitation data. Science General |