Ideabank

Topics I want to look into 🤔

For additional ideas, generate a random Wikipedia page…

Intergroup bias and its implications
- Maas et al., 1989 (Language use in intergroup contexts: The linguistic intergroup bias.)
- Maas, 1999 (Linguistic Intergroup Bias: Stereotype Perpetuation Through Language)
- Schmidtke & Kuperman, 2024 (A psycholinguistic study of intergroup bias and its cultural propagation)
Biological contributors to homicide
- Sajous-Turner et al., 2020 (Aberrant brain gray matter in murderers)
- Raine, 2013 (The anatomy of violence: The biological roots of crime) - this is a book
The psychology of advertising and consumer behaviour - what psychological tactics are used in marketing and why do they work to influence consumer decisions?
Cultural influences on behaviour and cognition
- Individualism vs Collectivism (Hofstede’s Dimensions)
Attachment styles and their impact on adult romantic relationships
- Specifically, I find avoidant attachment styles to be pretty interesting
Why do people watch horror movies (when they are intended specifically to evoke fear and negative emotions in viewers)?
- Andersen et al., 2021 (Playing With Fear: A Field Study in Recreational Horror)
Psychiatric disorders as dynamical systems
- Scheffer et al., 2024 (A Dynamical Systems View of Psychiatric Disorders-Theory: A Review)
- Tweet by Mitchell B. Slapik

Topic modelling - an overview of what it is, how it works, and how to apply it
- Blei, 2012 (Probabilistic Topic Models)
Game Theory
- Application of Game Theory - SHAP values in machine learning
NLP - go through Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin’s textbook

Onomastics (the study of the history and origin of proper names, especially personal names) and nicknaming
- Kennedy & Zamuner, 2006 (Nicknames and the Lexicon of Sports)
- Bechar-Israeli, 1995 (From 〈Bonehead〉 to 〈cLoNehEad〉: Nicknames, Play, and Identity on Internet Relay Chat)
The impact of social media on political speech
- Etymology Nerd’s article Algorithms are making political speech more extreme
Idiolects - the speech habits that are unique to specific people based on their own life experiences (education, sociological and geographical upbringing, etc.)
- Inspired by this short article by The Etymology Nerd: how to catch a gubernatorial candidate, or a domestic terrorist
Linguistic Game Theory
- Inspired once again by The Etymology Nerd (reel)
- Game Theoretic Linguistics (Applications of Game Theory in Linguistics)

Olbers’ Paradox
- Why is the sky dark at night? Via Britannica: “If the universe is endless and uniformly populated with luminous stars, then every line of sight must eventually terminate at the surface of a star. Hence, contrary to observation, this argument implies that the night sky should everywhere be bright, with no dark spaces between the stars.”

The Simulation Argument - are we living in a simulation?
- Via Wikipedia: “In 2001, philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed the simulation argument, which suggests that if a civilization becomes capable of creating conscious simulations, it could generate so many simulated beings that a randomly chosen conscious entity would almost certainly be in a simulation. The argument presents a trilemma: either such simulations are not created due to technological limitations or self-destruction; or advanced civilizations choose not to create them; or we are almost certainly living in one. This assumes that consciousness is not uniquely tied to biological brains but can arise from any system that implements the right computational structures and processes.”

Tiktaalik and transition fossils
- The evolution from swimming fish to four-legged vertebrates

Doesn’t quite fit the theme of an encyclopedia I suppose, but I’d enjoy writing up movie and book reviews here as well.

Movies (movies I’ve watched that would be valuable to interpret):
- Get Out (2017)
- Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000)