Influence Ledger Glossary
Influence Ledger names the Dictionary’s practice of making its intellectual inputs visible.
The Dictionary is about education. That means it should be transparent about what it reads, watches, teaches, borrows from, argues with, and returns to. People, books, films, interviews, lectures, and essays appear here because they have influenced the Dictionary’s thinking, not because public names are ornaments or search-engine bait.
This matters especially in AI-assisted writing. When a human and an AI system write together, provenance becomes part of honesty. The reader should be able to see the living thought-world around the entry: William Gibson, Ethan Mollick, Amanda Askell, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Firefly, Serenity, old lectures, classroom examples, YouTube interviews, books on the desk, and weather remembered from childhood.
Influence is not endorsement. To list a person is not to canonize them. It is to say: this voice, scene, phrase, argument, or example is part of the path by which this Dictionary arrived at its current thinking.
That is a cheng move: show the sources of attention.