Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 comments on If researchers shared their #1 idea daily, we’d navigate existential challenges far more effectively

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

“Crux” is its own word; it isn’t short for “crucial consideration” or anything else. From Merriam-Webster:

In Latin, crux referred literally to an instrument of torture, often a cross or stake, and figuratively to the torture and misery inflicted by means of such an instrument. Crux eventually developed the sense of “a puzzling or difficult problem”; that was the first meaning that was used when the word entered English in the early 18th century. Later, in the late 19th century, crux began to be used more specifically to refer to an essential point of a legal case that required resolution before the case as a whole could be resolved. Today, the verdict on crux is that it can be used to refer to any important part of a problem or argument, inside or outside of the courtroom.

The EA Forum wiki also notes that a “crucial consideration” is a related concept, not a synonym of “crux” or a longhand version of the term.