Each term is defined the way the book uses it: operationally, with the test that tells you whether it applies.
Telon
The direction a system's actual dynamics optimize toward: the orientation built into its structure, incentives and feedback loops, as distinct from its stated goals. A telon is a vector, not a destination; it has direction and strength but no finish line. To find one, watch what the system does, not what it says. The diagnostic question for any goal: what happens to this system on the day it wins?
Sucralosis
A system optimizes a proxy for a real end until optimization pressure pulls the two apart, and it keeps optimizing the proxy. Named for sucralose: sweetness without nutrition. Reward without realization. The test: when the metric improves, does the thing it was for improve too? When they conflict, which one wins?
Cancrity
Sustaining a system's own persistence by degrading the substrate it depends on. Competition is healthy when rivals sustain the conditions for each other's existence; it turns cancritic when one system's success is structurally decoupled from the health of what it feeds on. In one phrase: severed corrective coupling. A diagnosis has to name the substrate and show it being consumed faster than it's replenished.
Corrigibility
A system's structural capacity to receive and integrate correction. Shown evidence of its own misalignment, a corrigible system updates; an incorrigible one rationalizes, suppresses or attacks the input. The hardest marker to fake: can the system say what evidence would change its mind? (In AI alignment, "corrigibility" usually means accepting correction and shutdown from operators. This book's sense is the internal capacity for honest self-assessment. Related, and both needed.)
Incorrigibility
The system can't detect or repair its own failure, but isn't defending it. Computing analogy: bit rot. The remedy is external: add the missing channel.
Contracorrigibility
The correction machinery itself has been co-opted: attempts at correction are detected, absorbed or punished, and the repair tools report that all is well. Computing analogy: a rootkit, where the diagnostic tools are the compromised component. The remedy is to stop trusting self-reports and correct from outside the system's control. It works through four mutually reinforcing mechanisms: scope reduction, proxy displacement, identity capture and an enforcing environment.
Anti-memesis
The property by which a critique can't be perceived by its target, precisely because of the identity capture that made correction necessary. The critique isn't rejected; rejection would require it to arrive. The behavioral sign: structural feedback gets converted into a list of incidents that can be fixed without touching identity.
Telonic audit
The institutional diagnostic. First, can the system receive the answer at all? Then three questions: what does it claim to be for, and what does it actually optimize? Is what it optimizes sustaining or consuming the people and resources that sustain it? And who has the standing, the information and the protection to ask, and what happens to people who do?
Grex, collegium, egregore
Three kinds of collective system, told apart by how they coordinate. A grex coordinates by local rules without reflection: a murmuration, a crowd, a price signal. A collegium coordinates by shared models, standards and distributed oversight; its defining property is that it can be wrong and knows how to find out. An egregore coordinates by shared belief and participation: money, brands, languages, ideologies. Participants sustain it, and it shapes their identities in return. Most real organizations are hybrids.
Supporting ideas
Pattern identity: an institution is an organizing pattern, not a roster; it persists while every member turns over, and the pattern is what gets sick. Question-relative boundaries: the question you ask draws the system's boundary, so fix the question first. Upstream and downstream: a part is evaluated against the whole that constituted it; a captured system has inverted that, with the institution grading the public or the proxy grading the mandate.