{
  "id": "ivory-tower.detachment",
  "term": "ivory tower",
  "sense": "detachment",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 12,
  "arena": "social",
  "domain": "levels and abstraction",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "a boundary that has drifted far from the ground where events happen, so the model inside no longer touches the actual",
  "folk_gloss": "a place where people are isolated from everyday realities",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "boundary.limit",
      "drift.aimless",
      "model.representation",
      "ground.level",
      "real.actual"
    ],
    "interaction": "none",
    "novel_properties": [
      "none"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "MIT's Media Lab pursued futuristic AI projects while ignoring ethical ground-level impacts documented in poor communities.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "The European Central Bank set interest rates based on abstract models as Greek municipal debts collapsed in 2011.",
      "domain": "economics"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Mars Climate Orbiter burned up because engineers used pounds while NASA's model assumed newtons.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "ivory tower"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "phrases:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.7,
    "sources": [
      "folk phrase — levels and abstraction"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-ivory-tower.detachment"
}