A collection of abstract patterns

That does indeed fit, using the interpretation that introducing a pathogen in a controlled manner has its own risks, but may prevent the relatively severe effects of an infection. I'll add it as an example in the next push.

The dichotomy I usually use is between science and engineering. Science is about breaking systems down into components. Engineering is about composing components into systems. This project is very much on the science side of that. It doesn't propose any courses of action or anything. And yes, most of the concepts are pretty standard. The purpose of the project is to put them all out in the open so they can themselves be studied, and also so we can have a shared langauge about this sort of stuff.

> Both arrive in similar places, but usually for different reasons.

Kind of how I take philosophers/scientists to be (and other dichotomies that are variations on that kind of pattern). There's a funny [and highly paraphrased] quote I use from Heinz von Foerster that I think is highly relevant:

"The reductionist eventually comes to know everything about nothing (by way of distinction) - the wholist eventually comes to know nothing about everything (by way of generalization)."

That's like saying you don't need math. For the most part, in everyday life, that's true, but there are cases where functional human beings disagree, or we find ourselves in novel situations that we don't know how to handle. In those cases, we need new ways to think and communicate. Intuition works great for catching a ball, but you'll need math to land a rocket on mars.

Patterns are descriptors for how things relate, and arguably what makes someone smart or stupid is their ability to parse the dynamics of relationships among things.

There are a bunch of concepts from multiple disciplines that get used in companies every day. Some of them are stupid euphemisms used by managers who don't understand things, but a lot of them are about getting everyone to understand the importance of how one thing affects another.

Here are some:

- elasticity (of demand) - sunk cost - diminishing returns - scale - long poles - optionality - convexivity - long tail - fat tail - short position - indexing (over) - leverage - advantage - decisive power

Wikipedia is an incredible resource and I have relied on it heavily in the development of this project. But for specific areas, an integrated, specialized approach gives you more control over things like organization, format, and what content to include or exclude.