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Nov 18, 2022: Idea Stacking

Class Recording

Timestamps

01:19 Recap

02:50 Idea Stacking

10:23 Create Ideas By Moving Up & Down The Idea Stack

13:44 Moving Down The Stack

32:09 How To

36:49 Group Exercise

51:32 Individual Exercise

1:05:42 Moving Up The Stack

1:11:40 Collecting

1:19:52 Comparing & Contrasting To Abstract

1:29:41 Categorizing

Class Summary

Recap

During the last class we talked about the vertical dimension of knowledge. Rather than viewing knowledge as fragmented disciplines and fields, we can look at it vertically. The tree is a great illustration of that hierarchy: there's a trunk, large branches, smaller branches, and then eventually leaves. The beautiful thing about looking at knowledge this way is that you can see how everything is connected rather than being fragmented. If you learn some of these deeper mental models, it helps you get the knowledge that will apply across lots of different fields.

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It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles (Musk calls these ‘first principles’), i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves /details or there is nothing for them to hang onto.—Elon Musk

In a world of information overwhelm, where there are a million things you feel like you need to learn just to stay afloat, mental models can be a respite for you as a learner to get leverage. But also, when you're teaching other people, you can help them understand a lot and connect the dots by explaining the underlying mental models.

Idea Stacking

Another way of viewing the tree is looking down on it from the top…

Ideas are made up of other ideas.

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There are two ways to make ideas:

  1. Break up ideas into their parts
  2. Combine parts into a whole

You can view it as idea legos:

  • Thoughts are things
  • Ideas are structures

Another way of viewing the tree is as an inverted hierarchy. If you turn the tree upside down, on the bottom there are simple ideas and data that can be combined into larger ones, which can be combined into larger ones and so on.

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You can create value by moving up and creating a theory of everything for your field at the very top, or at the bottom, by focusing on a small thing that you help someone do better.

At the bottom, you’re dealing with very simple ideas and at the top it's more complex and interconnected. Some thought leaders create whole new paradigms and change the way an entire field thinks by revealing hidden truths. Other thought leaders will focus more on simpler things. Both approaches have value and they attract different audiences.

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Each level has a unique value.

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Create Ideas By Moving Up & Down The Idea Stack

There are two ways we can create ideas that we can become known for: to move up ordown the idea stack.

There are two ways in which we can develop and manipulate mental concepts to represent observed reality: 1. We can start from a comprehensive whole and break it down to its particulars. 2. We can start with the particulars and build towards a comprehensive whole. —John Boyd, Famous Military Strategist

If you’re moving up, you’re moving towards…

  • Integrative Complexity
  • Holism
  • More generalizable
  • Higher leverage
  • Abstract

Moving down is moving towards…

  • Simplicity
  • Fragmentation
  • Easy to apply
  • Easily to explain
  • Easy to remember

Moving up, you’re using…

  • Integration
  • Induction
  • Synthesis

While moving down includes…

  • Differentiation
  • Deduction
  • Analysis
Being an effective expert-generalist requires you to be both an inductive thinker [intuitively recognizing patterns across fields] and deductive thinker [starting with a theory and then analytically testing it].—Orit Gadiesh, Chairman, Bain
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Each way of thinking has its strengths and weaknesses. By combining both ways, you get the strengths without the weaknesses.

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How To Move Down The Stack

In my experience, it's much, much easier and way faster to move down the stack toward simplicity than to move up.

Overview

When mental models are applied in a field they get a unique name.

For example, this is the archetypal idea of the feedback loop:

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The illustration below shows how this idea looks like when applied to money:

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But we don’t call this idea a “positive feedback loop applied to money”, we call it “compound interest”.

Examples of positive feedback in different domains:

  • Compound Interest
  • Screeching Microphone
  • Ferguson Reflux
  • Metcalfe’s Law
  • Network Effects
  • Gravity
  • Moore’s Law
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
  • Population Explosion
  • Bandwagon Effect
  • Placebo Effect
  • Stampedes
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The Big Opportunity: You can be the first to name mental model(s) in your field or a situation.

Case Studies

The 80/20 Rule

Success By Subtraction formula is an application of the 80/20 Rule.

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Antifragile

The antifragility model that Nassim Taleb came up with—things that grow stronger when you add stressors to them—is another model that applies across domains. Each applied model has a different name in the field it’s been applied to:

  • Mental: Post-traumatic growth
  • Physical: Exercise, sauna, cold shower, hypergrativity, vaccine
  • Diet: Vegetables, curcumin, fasting
  • Economy: Stress test
  • Plants: Pruning
  • Learning: Desirable difficulty

Early Facebook Model

Sometimes, in certain fields, having one model and having confidence in it can define a business. For example, in the early stages of social media, one thing that made Facebook unique is that it realized the power of the Network Effect model and that one of the most important things they could do is just get more people on Facebook. They got that as the number of nodes in the network grows linearly, the value of the network grows exponentially.

  • Mental Model: Network Effects. “Any situation in which the value of a product, service, or platform depends on the number of buyers, sellers, or users who leverage it. Typically, the greater the number of buyers, sellers, or users, the greater the network effect—and the greater the value created by the offering.”
  • Mental Model: Winner Take Most Market
  • Strategy Implication: Focus all effort on getting more users (not monetization).

How To

Step #1: Learn the most useful and universal mental models

Mental models:

  • Thinking
    • 80/20 Rule
    • Cognitive Biases
    • Conjecture & Refutation
  • Behavior Change
    • Activation Energy
    • Antifragility
    • Habit Formation
    • Curiosity
  • Evolution
    • Universal Darwinism
    • Emergence
    • Phase change / tipping points / inflection point
    • Possibility/Design Spaces
    • Combinatorial Creation
    • Wisdom Of Crowds
    • Model Of Hierarchy Complexity
    • Janusian Thinking
  • Systems Theory
    • System Leverage
    • System Archetypes
    • Feedback Loops (positive, negative)
    • Second Order Effects
    • Root Causes

Step #2: Understand how the mental model is relevant to your field

Two approaches:

  1. Take an abstract mental model and make it applied.
  2. Take an applied mental model, make it abstract and then apply it to your field.

Applying the abstract model:

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De- & Reconstructing an applied model:

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Step #3: Make it concrete and applied

Make it relevant:

  • In your industry
  • For people like you
  • In your situation
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Concrete steps:

  • Provide a step-by-step recipe
  • Provide stories/examples
  • Use metaphors and analogies
  • Use words that hit our senses
  • Give it a unique name

Exercise #1

Brainstorm examples where you can apply the antifragility model to your day.

  1. Think about context
    1. Areas of your life (health, cognitive, relationships, etc)
    2. How you spend your time on a given day (chores, working, driving, watching TV, etc.)
  2. Make it a recipe
    1. How could you naturally introduce a little difficulty that would lead to growth?
    2. How could you do so in a way that is fun and has a high follow through?

Exercise #2

Situation:

  • The world is getting more complex.
  • Knowledge is growing exponentially.
  • Things are changing fast.
  • This is overwhelming.
  • This creates a need.
  • How can people feel less overwhelmed and find what really matters now?

How can you use the reverse fractal 80/20 in your field or in a specific situation? In other words, how can you slice through all of the complexity in a situation fast to see what really matters now?

How can you help people deal with the psychological difficulty of letting things go?

How To Move Up The Stack

Moving up the stack is 10x harder and longer.

Steps include:

  • Collect
  • Compare and contrast to see underlying pattern
  • Categorize to prioritize
  • Sequence to simulate

Case Studies

5D Thinking

As I was studying learning how to learn, I made a decision to study successful investors and over time, I noticed a few patterns: all of them were talking about mental models and frameworks; almost every person was a polymath; they were making conclusions based on cycles… So I developed the model I named 4D Thinking, but getting to each of the building blocks took me many dozens of hours and even more to reconcile them.

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I COCOA

I also really wanted to understand how virality works, why some people post something online and it gets no shares and other people post and it goes viral. Over time, I derived the virality formula I named I COCOA:

  • Identity
  • Counterintuitive
  • Outcomes
  • Cliff Hanger
  • Own your perspective
  • Authority

Even though now it sounds simple, to get to it I spent over 1,000h learning from the data and I did 4,000+ A/B tests of article titles.

Collect

Examples of what to collect:

  • Articles
  • Quotes
  • Courses
  • Titles
  • Trademark Ideas
  • Visuals
  • Mental models
  • Hacks
  • People
  • Strategies

How To Collect

#1: Determine the criteria of what to collect

Example of criteria:

  • Most viral articles
  • Most successful courses on the web
  • Most useful & universal mental models
  • People who’ve had the most success in most domains over the longest period of time

Ideal data is…

  • Large (avoid too small of a sample)
  • Diverse
  • Top-Performing
  • Disconfirming (look for anomalies - things that shouldn’t happen)
In theoretical physics, paradoxes are good. That's paradoxical, since a paradox appears to be a contradiction, and contradictions imply serious error. But Nature cannot realize contradictions. When our physical theories lead to paradox we must find a way out. Paradoxes focus our attention, and we think harder. When David Gross and I began the work that led to this in 1972, we were driven by paradoxes. In resolving the paradoxes, we were led to discover a new dynamical principle, asymptotic freedom.—Frank Wilczek, Nobel Laureate

Goal:

  • Find universal principles that apply across the data
  • Remove randomness and luck
  • Look for important and surprising principles (ie - working hard isn’t that surprising of a key to success)

#2: Determine how to collect the data

Collection methods:

  • Subscribe to a data source (ie - Buzzsumo)
  • Scrape the web
  • Manually collect

#3: Figure out what data within the data to collect

Data components:

  • Key / relavent variable
  • Result variable you’re trying to optimize

Personal example:

  • Key variable(s): Title / Image
  • Result: Shares

#4: Put everything you collect into a database or spreadsheet

Compare & Contrast To Abstract

It’s easier to understand things when you contrast it with other things that are slightly different.

How to compare and contrast:

  • Put everything you collected in front of you
  • Dissect their properties
  • Compare and contrast the properties
  • Notice universal pattern
  • Name the pattern

Case studies:

  • Theory of evolution
  • Linnaean taxonomy

Categorize

How to categorize:

  • Put everything you collected in front of you
  • Dissect their properties
  • Put into different groups
  • Name the groups
  • Organize the groups based on properties of groups:
  • Scale

Examples:

  • Social entrepreneurs
  • Resting bitch face
  • Orchid child

Sequence To Predict

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