Numeracy

"A Random Walk Down Wall Street, written by Burton Gordon Malkiel, a Princeton economist, is an influential book on the subject of stock markets which popularized the random walk hypothesis. Malkiel argues that asset prices typically exhibit signs of random walk and that one cannot consistently outperform market averages. The book is frequently cited by those in favor of the efficient-market hypothesis. As of 2015, there have been eleven editions and over 1.5 million copies sold."- Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"Related to the Time Value of Shipping, the right investment decision changes based on the time period you are optimizing for. "Choosing to ask “How can we create the most impact in the next 3 months?” or “How can we create the most impact in the next 3 years?” will result in dramatically different decisions for your team. It follows then that aligning with your team and stakeholders about what time horizon to optimize for is often the first discussion to have." — Brandon Chu

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

A market that tends towards one dominant player. (related: lock-in; monopoly; monopsony)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

1. Be self-reflective and make sure your people are self-reflective. 2. Know that nobody can see themselves objectively. 3. Teach and reinforce the merits of mistake-based learning.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder; it “discovers” and “endorses” and “focuses” reasons over many generations. The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales,” a term that has apparently jangled the nerves of more than a few thinkers, who suspect I am conjuring up ghosts of some sort, strange immaterial ideas that have no business appearing in a sober materialist’s account of reality. Not at all. Free-floating rationales are no more ghostly or problematic than numbers or centers of gravity. There were nine planets before people invented ways of articulating arithmetic, and asteroids had centers of gravity before there were physicists to dream up the idea and calculate with it. It is a mistake to confuse numbers with the numerals (Arabic or Roman or whatever) that we use as their names. Numerals are human inventions; numbers are not. Reasons, in the sense I am using the term, are like numbers, not numerals. We should all be happy to speak of the reasons uncovered by evolution before they were ever expressed or represented by human investigators or any other minds. Consider the strikingly similar constructions in the figures facing page 240.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“A means of leaving one’s current situation, either after a predetermined objective has been achieved, or as a strategy to mitigate failure.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) or multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a sub-discipline of operations research that explicitly evaluates multiple conflicting criteria in decision making (both in daily life and in settings such as business, government and medicine). Conflicting criteria are typical in evaluating options: cost or price is usually one of the main criteria, and some measure of quality is typically another criterion, easily in conflict with the cost. In purchasing a car, cost, comfort, safety, and fuel economy may be some of the main criteria we consider – it is unusual that the cheapest car is the most comfortable and the safest one. In portfolio management, we are interested in getting high returns but at the same time reducing our risks, but the stocks that have the potential of bringing high returns typically also carry high risks of losing money. In a service industry, customer satisfaction and the cost of providing service are fundamental conflicting criteria" - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Evolution by natural selection was once called “the greatest idea anyone ever had.” In the 19th century, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace simultaneous realized that species evolve through random mutation and differential survival rates. If we call human intervention in animal-breeding an example of “artificial selection,” we can call Mother Nature deciding the success or failure of a particular mutation “natural selection.” Those best suited for survival tend to be preserved. But of course, conditions change. - Shane Parrish "Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in heritable traits of a population over time. Charles Darwin popularised the term "natural selection", and compared it with artificial selection...Natural selection acts on the phenotype, or the observable characteristics of an organism, but the genetic (heritable) basis of any phenotype that gives a reproductive advantage may become more common in a population. Over time, this process can result in populations that specialise for particular ecological niches (microevolution) and may eventually result in speciation (the emergence of new species, macroevolution). In other words, natural selection is a key process in the evolution of a population. Natural selection can be contrasted with artificial selection, in which humans intentionally choose specific traits, whereas in natural selection there is no intentional choice." - Wikipedia (James Clear) “The differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in heritable traits of a population over time.” - Gabriel Weinberg

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d

An unconscious failure to look at past odds in determining current or future behavior.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“A type of defensive tactic used by a corporation’s board of directors against a takeover. Typically, such a plan gives shareholders the right to buy more shares at a discount if one shareholder buys a certain percentage or more of the company’s shares.” (related: proxy fight).

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Often ignored in mainstream economics, the concept of bribery is central to human systems: Given the chance, it is often easier to pay a certain agent to look the other way than to follow the rules. The enforcer of the rules is then neutralized. This principle/agent problem can be seen as a form of arbitrage.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“The costs associated with switching suppliers.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Your brain is importantly not in the same predicament you would be in, trapped in the control room. Its task is—must be—partly solved in advance by the way some inputs are “wired up” to some outputs so that there is some leverage in the brain with which to learn and refine further appropriate relationships. This is another way of dramatizing the widely recognized claim that our brains are not “blank slates” at birth (Pinker, 2002), but are already designed by natural selection to embody various preferences, anticipations, and associations. And as long as some of the appropriate connections are built in, they don’t have to be labeled. Before there can be comprehension, there has to be competence without comprehension. This is nature’s way

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

"Homeostasis is the property of a system within an organism in which a variable, such as the concentration of a substance in solution, is actively regulated to remain very nearly constant. Examples of homeostasis include the regulation of body temperature, the pH of extracellular fluid, or the concentrations of sodium, potassium and calcium ions, as well as that of glucose in the blood plasma, despite changes in the environment, diet, or level of activity. Each of these variables is controlled by a separate regulator or homeostatic mechanism, which, together, maintain life. The concept was described by French physiologist Claude Bernard in 1865 and the word was coined by Walter Bradford Cannon in 1926." - Wikipedia

James Clear Mental Models Overview

“All the people/culture compromises made to ‘just get it done’ in the early stages of a startup.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

An idea introduced by Warren Buffett and Charles Munger in relation to investing: each individual tends to have an area or areas in which they really, truly know their stuff, their area of special competence. Areas not inside that circle are problematic because not only are we ignorant about them, but we may also be ignorant of our own ignorance. Thus, when we're making decisions, it becomes important to define and attend to our special circle, so as to act accordingly.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Note even though all the robot’s intentional states and acts are derived from your purposes, they are beginning to become detached somewhat from your purposes. Since you designed the robot to “think for itself” to some degree, its “thinking” may escape your anticipated boundaries. For a real-world, nonfictional example of such an artifact, consider a chess-playing computer that can beat its creator at chess. It is true that the only reason we can say that the computer is currently “investigating” queen-side rook options and “deciding” not to castle is that it is an artifact designed by a human artificer to do just that sort of thing. We are artifacts, designed over the eons as survival machines for genes that cannot act swiftly and informedly in their own interests. Our interests as we conceive of them and the “interests” of our genes may well diverge—even though were it not for our genes’ “interests,” we would not exist. Their preservation is our original raison d ‘être, even if we can learn to ignore that goal and devise our own summum bonum, thanks to the intelligence, the capacity to learn, that our genes have installed in us. So our intentionality is derived from the intentionality of our “selfish” genes.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

"A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model studied in computability theory, mathematics, physics, complexity science, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessellation structures, and iterative arrays." Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"A whole bunch of ways in which we can get cooperation [inaudible] dilemma. It can be repeated, direct reciprocity; it c ould be reputation, indirect reciprocity. >> Yeah. It can be a network effect. It can be group selection, where groups fight against each other, and so the groups that cooperate are likely to win. There can be kin selection, where what happens is that I cooperate with people who are like me. "- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

1.Introversion vs. extroversion. 2. Intuiting vs. sensing. 3. Thinking vs. feeling. 4. Planning vs. perceiving. 5. Creators vs. refiners vs. advancers vs. executors vs. flexors. 6. Focusing on tasks vs. focusing on goals. 7. Workplace Personality Inventory. 8. Shapers are people who can go from visualization to actualization.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

In all human systems and most complex systems, the second layer of effects often dwarfs the first layer, yet often goes unconsidered. In other words, we must consider that effects have effects. Second-order thinking is best illustrated by the idea of standing on your tiptoes at a parade: Once one person does it, everyone will do it in order to see, thus negating the first tiptoer. Now, however, the whole parade audience suffers on their toes rather than standing firmly on their whole feet.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"Collective action refers to action taken together by a group of people whose goal is to enhance their status and achieve a common objective.[1] It is enacted by a representative of the group.[2] It is a term that has formulations and theories in many areas of the social sciences including psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and economics." - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"In software development, a breakpoint is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes. It is also sometimes simply referred to as a pause." - Wikipedia "Farnam Street give a very good explaination of the nature of break point -- Multiplicative System. What’s 1,506,789 x 9,809 x 5.56 x 0? Hopefully you didn’t have to whip out the old TI-84 to solve that one. It’s a zero. and that zero, is our concept of break points. Break Point can be understand as Weakest Link in the multicaptive system, it could be place in the system intentionally, such as fuse in electrial circuits, or shar pins in boat propellers." - Rational Pov

James Clear Mental Models Overview

“The imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.” (related: Queuing theory — “the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"You will learn the most about the customer after you launch the product, don’t waste the opportunity to build on those learnings. Everything is a hypothesis until customers are using the product at scale. While what your team invests in “pre-launch learning” — the customer interviews, prototype testing, quantitative analysis, beta testing, etc. — can give you a massive leg up on the probability of being right, there are always behaviours and edge cases that emerge once you ship the feature to 100% of customers. As a percentage of customer insight learned, you will gain the majority of learning after launch. To not investing accordingly by iterating the product (sometimes drastically), doesn’t make sense with that in mind." — Brandon Chu

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

Game theory describes situations of conflict, limited resources, and competition. Given a certain situation and a limited amount of resources and time, what decisions are competitors likely to make, and which should they make? One important note is that traditional game theory may describe humans as more rational than they really are. Game theory is theory, after all. - Shane Parrish Business - Economics: "Scarcity refers to the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market. The concept of scarcity also includes an individual capacity to buy all or some of the commodities as per the available resources with that individual" - Wikipedia (James Clear)

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models

"if we write down a Simple Model of Growth - Economic Growth that involves investing money in new machines. That there are limits to growth. That the model is going to max out at this point, when the number of machines lost to depreciation is exactly offset by the number of machines that we invested in the previous period. If we start with no machines, growth is going to happen really really fast initially, but then it's going to fall off when it reaches this equilibrium level. So to get sustained growth, that's going to require new technologies - new innovations. And that's where we are going next. We're going to construct Solow's Growth Model which includes this Innovation Parameter. " - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"A fire is not much more than a combination of carbon and oxygen, but the forests and coal mines of the world are not combusting at will because such a chemical reaction requires the input of a critical level of “activation energy” in order to get a reaction started. Two combustible elements alone are not enough." - Shane Parrish “The minimum energy which must be available to a chemical system with potential reactants to result in a chemical reaction.” - Gabriel Weinberg "In chemistry, activation energy is the energy which must be available to a chemical system with potential reactants to result in a chemical reaction.[1] Activation energy may also be defined as the minimum energy required to start a chemical reaction. The activation energy of a reaction is usually denoted by Ea and given in units of kilojoules per mole (kJ/mol) or kilocalories per mole (kcal/mol). Activation energy can be thought of as the height of the potential barrier (sometimes called the energy barrier) separating two minima of potential energy (of the reactants and products of a reaction). For a chemical reaction to proceed at a reasonable rate, there should exist an appreciable number of molecules with translational energy equal to or greater than the activation energy." - Wikipedia (James Clear )

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d" --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models

The primatologist Robin Dunbar observed through study that the number of individuals a primate can get to know and trust closely is related to the size of its neocortex. Extrapolating from his study of primates, Dunbar theorized that the Dunbar number for a human being is somewhere in the 100–250 range, which is supported by certain studies of human behavior and social networks. - Shane Parrish Managing: “A suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships..with a commonly used value of 150.” - Gabriel Weinberg

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d"

Species tend to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive, given the combination of their genetics and their environment – an always-unavoidable combination. However, adaptations made in an individual's lifetime are not passed down genetically, as was once thought: Populations of species adapt through the process of evolution by natural selection, as the most-fit examples of the species replicate at an above-average rate.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"How do you draw the best possible line through the data? ... it's a lot of data out there. One thing you can do is you can fit that data to linear models. What linear models will do is they'll explain some percentage of the variation. Maybe a lot, maybe a little. These linear models will also tell us the sign and magnitude of coefficients. So it'll tell us whether a variable. It's got a positive effect but it's got a negative effect. And also tell a sort of how big that effect is, and that allows us to make policy choices. You know, investing in things like teacher quality as opposed to class size because they have a larger effect. This is what I call big coefficient thinking." - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

A process can often look like a normal distribution but have a large “tail” – meaning that seemingly outlier events are far more likely than they are in an actual normal distribution. A strategy or process may be far more risky than a normal distribution is capable of describing if the fat tail is on the negative side, or far more profitable if the fat tail is on the positive side. Much of the human social world is said to be fat-tailed rather than normally distributed.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“Eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers.” (related: Hick’s Law, “increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"A state where a positive or negative feedback loop is feeding on itself and accelerating from it’s own momentum. How it’s useful Flywheels are a related concept to feedback loops, but are important for managing platforms and marketplaces. For example, imagine you run Apple’s iOS app platform. You have two users: app developers, and app users. The flywheel is the phenomenon where more app users attract more app developers (because there is more opportunity to sell), which in turn attract more app users (because there are more apps to buy), which in turn attract more app developers, and so on. As long as you nurture the flywheel, not only will you grow, but you’ll grow at an accelerating rate. If you’re managing a flywheel, you have to do everything you can to keep it spinning in the positive direction, because it’s just as powerful the other way. For example, if there are so many apps on the platform that new apps can’t get discovered anymore, app developer growth will slow and break the flywheel — you need to solve that. " — Brandon Chu

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

"The problem hypothesis is a way to think about the viability of your product in a concrete, testable way. It works by reframing your idea for a product as a very specific problem. Say you’ve built a website that lets people order groceries and get them faster. That’s an idea that sounds like it could be good. It could also be bad. It’s hard to tell. When you reframe it as a problem, however, you see it differently: People like to buy groceries, but it takes them too long to get to the store and actually buy them. This is no longer a situation where you can say, “Hmm, could be good—could be bad.” Instead, you have a clearly verifiable statement. People like to buy groceries, but it takes too long—this is something that you can easily prove to be true or false in a few steps: * Go out and talk to the people waiting outside of Whole Foods for their Lyft to arrive. * Ask them how much time they spend grocery shopping every week. * Look everywhere for data to either prove that your hypothesis is correct or incorrect. * Use what you learn to either keep building, ditch the project, or pivot to build something more aligned with what people really need. * The simplicity of this technique is deceptive. Used correctly, the problem hypothesis can turn seemingly arbitrary decisions into ones you can validate quite easily. - Hiten Shah

Hiten Shah's 3 Mental Models Every PM Needs to Make Decisions

"There are three types of product development: Experiments, Features, and Platforms. Each have their own goal and optimal way to trade-off speed and quality. How it’s useful By recognizing the type of product development your project is, you will define more appropriate goals for each type, and you will right-size the speed and quality trade off that you make. Experiments are meant to output learning, so that you can invest in new features or platforms with customer validation. If you optimize for learning, you will consider doing things that otherwise wouldn’t be palatable: for example using hacky code that you intend to throw away, and faking sophisticated software when it’s just humans doing it behind the scenes. In contrast to experiments, platforms are forever. Other people will build features on top of them, and as such making changes to the platform after it’s live is extremely disruptive. Therefore, platform projects need to be very high quality (stability, performance, scalability, etc.) and they need to actually enable useful features to be built. A good rule of thumb when building platform is to build it with your first consumer, i.e. have another team simultaneously building a feature on your platform while you’re developing it — this way, you guarantee the platform actually enables useful features." — Brandon Chu

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

“Allows one to estimate what the exchange rate between two currencies would have to be in order for the exchange to be at par with the purchasing power of the two countries’ currencies.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Customer experiences don’t end at the interface. What happens before and after using the product are just as important to design for. How it’s useful When designing a product, we tend to over focus on the in-product experience (e.g. the user interface, in software). It’s just as important to design the marketing experience (how you acquire customers and set their expectations for the product before they use it), and the support/distress experience (how your company handles the product failing). Creating great distress experiences, in particular, are amazing opportunities to earn long term customer trust. For example, Amazon earns the most trust from you as a customer when you have to return something." — Brandon Chu

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

1. Fail well. 2. Don’t feel bad about your mistakes or those of others. Love them!

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"One of the simplest models in probability theory. A description of an urn model is as follows: Consider some vessel — an urn — with black and white balls. One ball is drawn at random from the urn, and then it is returned to the urn together with cc balls of the same colour as the ball drawn and dd balls of the other colour. After mixing the balls in the urn, the procedure is repeated a certain number of times. It is assumed that initially the urn contains a>0a>0 white and b>0b>0 black balls. The numbers cc and dd, the parameters of the urn model, may also be negative." - Encycopedia of Mathmatics

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

The equally famous Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram Experiments demonstrated what humans had learned practically many years before: the human bias towards being influenced by authority. In a dominance hierarchy such as ours, we tend to look to the leader for guidance on behavior, especially in situations of stress or uncertainty. Thus, authority figures have a responsibility to act well, whether they like it or not.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Higher-level behavior tends to emerge from the interaction of lower-order components. The result is frequently not linear – not a matter of simple addition – but rather non-linear, or exponential. An important resulting property of emergent behavior is that it cannot be predicted from simply studying the component parts. - Shane Parrish “Whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.” (related: decentralized system, spontaneous order) - Gabriel Weinberg

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d

A deepity is a proposition that seems both important and true—and profound—but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That’s a deepity. Example: Love is just a word. “love” is an English word, but just a word, not a sentence, for example.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

"The tipping point is an expression used in epidemiology that was taken by Malcolm Gladwell, a New York Times writer, and applied to other areas of life—including business—in his 2000 book “The Tipping Point”. The subtitle, “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”, explains more clearly what the whole thing is about. In epidemiology the tipping point is that moment when a small change tips the balance of a system and brings about a large change; for example, when the normal spread of influenza throughout a population suddenly turns into an epidemic. In recent years the language of epidemiology has spread (like a virus?) within business. Managers talk about viral marketing (see article), the infectious enthusiasm of their teams, and “outbreaks” of corporate greed—and even, as was reported once about JetBlue, an American low-cost airline, an “outbreak of passenger abuse”. A lot of this language owes its spread to the influence of the internet, where viruses are common and where dormant information can sometimes erupt suddenly and infect us all." - Economics

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"These sort of contagion phenomena that happened [inaudible] pure effects. That sometimes. The tail wags the dog. What do I mean by that. What I mean is that sometimes. The people at the end of distribution. The extremists. Are the ones that really drive what happens. And as a result. That means it's gonna be incredibly difficult to predict what's gonna go on. " - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Whenever you introduce something new (e.g. a new product, service offer, process, KPI, etc.) take out two existing, similar ones. It´s like following a health diet and working out at the same time. Careful not becoming too lean at a certain point however. You need sufficient energy to outrun your competitors.

How Smart And Successful People Think And Acts

A system is spring-loaded if it is coiled in a certain direction, positive or negative. Positively spring-loading systems and relationships is important in a fundamentally unpredictable world to help protect us against negative events. The reverse can be very destructive.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Whatever a person is doing, she should stay human, approachable, and show respect towards others. One should choose being people-focused over task-focused, even and especially, when push comes to shove. Believing in the good and staying open-minded. Being curious without being naive and willing to confront one´s own weaknesses to learn and grow. Giving and supporting others without expecting anything in return. Possessing solid core values. Adapting if necessary without betraying what one believes in and what one stands for.

How Smart And Successful People Think And Acts

The normal distribution is a statistical process that leads to the well-known graphical representation of a bell curve, with a meaningful central “average” and increasingly rare standard deviations from that average when correctly sampled. (The so-called “central limit” theorem.) Well-known examples include human height and weight, but it’s just as important to note that many common processes, especially in non-tangible systems like social systems, do not follow the normal distribution.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Most famously demonstrated by the Linda Test, the same two psychologists showed that students chose more vividly described individuals as more likely to fit into a predefined category than individuals with broader, more inclusive, but less vivid descriptions, even if the vivid example was a mere subset of the more inclusive set. These specific examples are seen as more representative of the category than those with the broader but vaguer descriptions, in violation of logic and probability.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“By taking the overall system as well as its parts into account systems thinking is designed to avoid potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences.” (related: causal loop diagrams; stock and flow; Le Chatelier’s principle, hysteresis — “the time-based dependence of a system’s output on present and past inputs.”; “Can’t see the forest for the trees.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public, or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus (that the action or policy is not harmful), the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action that may or may not be a risk.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

The evolution-by-natural-selection model leads to something of an arms race among species competing for limited resources. When one species evolves an advantageous adaptation, a competing species must respond in kind or fail as a species. Standing pat can mean falling behind. This arms race is called the Red Queen Effect for the character in Alice in Wonderland who said, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"If I'm writing a model of people, I don't wanna say, I know what these people are gonna do. Instead, I might say, well, you know, they're probably gonna do this, but who knows. You know, they're people. They're crazy. They might do anything. So we put in a little bit of an error term, All sorts of reasons why things may not go as we expect. There can be noise, there can be error, there can be capriciousness, there can be uncertainty, there can be complexity in the underlying process. So when we think about these models, these random models that we're gonna study, there's all sorts of things that can come into play to make the outcome not be what we expect, but to include little error term." - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

" when we talk about path dependence, what we're talking about is the sequence of previous events influencing not only outcome in this period, but possibly the long run equilibrium. So our definition of path dependence is that the outcome probabilities depend on the sequences of past outcomes. So in the case of a path dependent outcome where you see even the outcome depends on it."- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“Strict punishment for infractions of a stated rule, with the intention of eliminating undesirable conduct.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

A complex adaptive system, as distinguished from a complex system in general, is one that can understand itself and change based on that understanding. Complex adaptive systems are social systems. The difference is best illustrated by thinking about weather prediction contrasted to stock market prediction. The weather will not change based on an important forecaster’s opinion, but the stock market might. Complex adaptive systems are thus fundamentally not predictable.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

A fundamental building block of diverse biological life is high-fidelity replication. The fundamental unit of replication seems to be the DNA molecule, which provides a blueprint for the offspring to be built from physical building blocks. There are a variety of replication methods, but most can be lumped into sexual and asexual.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“A spatial region or concept division over which a state or organization has a level of cultural, economic, military, or political exclusivity, accommodating to the interests of powers outside the borders of the state that controls it.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

For reversible decisions: “If the decision was a bad call you can unwind it in a reasonable period of time. An irreversible decision is firing an employee, launching your product, a five-year lease for an expensive new building, etc. These are usually difficult or impossible to reverse.” (related: Jeff Bezos on Type 1, Type 2 decisions)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Percolation theory deals with fluid flow (or any other similar process) in random media. If the medium is a set of regular lattice points, then there are two main types of percolation: A site percolation considers the lattice vertices as the relevant entities; a bond percolation considers the lattice edges as the relevant entities. These two models are examples of discrete percolation theory, an umbrella term used to describe any percolation model which takes place on a regular point lattice or any other discrete set, and while they're most certainly the most-studied of the discrete models, others such as AB percolation and mixed percolation do exist and are reasonably well-studied in their own right." - WolframWorld

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

A concept introduced by the economist and ecologist Garrett Hardin, the Tragedy of the Commons states that in a system where a common resource is shared, with no individual responsible for the wellbeing of the resource, it will tend to be depleted over time. The Tragedy is reducible to incentives: Unless people collaborate, each individual derives more personal benefit than the cost that he or she incurs, and therefore depletes the resource for fear of missing out.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

1. All of your “must-dos” must be above the bar before you do your “like-to-dos.” 2. Chances are you won’t have time to deal with the unimportant things, which is better than not having time to deal with the important things. 3. Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

This simple theory of intentional systems is a theory about how and why we are able to make sense of the behaviors of so many complicated things by considering them as agents. It is not directly a theory of the internal mechanisms that somehow achieve the rational guidance thereby predicted. The intentional stance gives you the “specs,” the job description, of an intentional system—what it should discriminate, remember, and do, for instance—and leaves the implementation of those specs to the engineers (or evolution and development, in the case of an intentional system that is an organism).

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Product market fit is when you’re in a good market and the product you’re working on satisfies the market. Getting to PMF is crucial because the biggest company killer is a lack of market."

 Andy Rachleff via "13 Mental Models Every Founder Should Know"

"By looking at Lyapunov functions and comparing it to some of our other models, like Markov processes and the Langton model, we begin to see how having multiple models in our heads enables us to understand some of the richness we see out there in the world, and actually have deeper understandings of the processes we see. To understand, like, this process is going into equilibrium because it's a Markov process, and it's a stochastic equilibrium. And this process, an exchange market, is going to equilibrium because of the fact that it's a Lyapunov function and happiness is going up. So what you get is different processes in that equilibrium for very different reasons. And having different tools for understanding why equilibrium exists is [a] very useful thing for making sense of the world."- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

We might term this Boredom Syndrome: Most humans have the tendency to need to act, even when their actions are not needed. We also tend to offer solutions even when we do not enough knowledge to solve the problem.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“With nineteen traction channels to consider, figuring out which one to focus on is tough. That’s why we’ve created a simple framework called Bullseye that will help you find the channel that will get you traction.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Rule-based modeling is a modeling approach that uses a set of rules that indirectly specifies a mathematical model." - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Highly responsive to incentives, humans have perhaps the most varied and hardest to understand set of incentives in the animal kingdom. This causes us to distort our thinking when it is in our own interest to do so. A wonderful example is a salesman truly believing that his product will improve the lives of its users. It’s not merely convenient that he sells the product; the fact of his selling the product causes a very real bias in his own thinking.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

From the master of creativity himself. An offspring of his vivid imagination to produce truly fantastic(al) ideas. To generate and evaluate new ideas Walt Disney would have shifted his perspective three times by playing three separate and distinct roles: the dreamer (generating as many fantasies as possible), the realist (working the fantasies into practical ideas), and the critic (poking holes into the idea).

How Smart And Successful People Think And Acts

"Most of the engineering marvels of the world have been accomplished with applied leverage. As famously stated by Archimedes, “Give me a lever long enough and I shall move the world.” With a small amount of input force, we can make a great output force through leverage. Understanding where we can apply this model to the human world can be a source of great success." - Shane Parrish “The force amplification achieved by using a tool, mechanical device or machine system.” (related: Theory of constraints — “a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints.” - Gabriel Weinberg Math & Engineering: "Mechanical advantage is a measure of the force amplification achieved by using a tool, mechanical device or machine system. The device preserves the input power and simply trades off forces against movement to obtain a desired amplification in the output force. The model for this is the law of the lever. Machine components designed to manage forces and movement in this way are called mechanisms.An ideal mechanism transmits power without adding to or subtracting from it. This means the ideal mechanism does not include a power source, is frictionless, and is constructed from rigid bodies that do not deflect or wear. The performance of a real system relative to this ideal is expressed in terms of efficiency factors that take into account departures from the ideal." - Wikipedia (James Clear)

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d" --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models

“A loss of economic efficiency that can occur when equilibrium for a good or service is not achieved or is not achievable.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. It is often used in conjunction with its cognitive opposite, convergent thinking, which follows a particular set of logical steps to arrive at one solution, which in some cases is a ‘correct’ solution.” (related: groupthink; Maslow’s hammer — “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection is an idea about genetic variance in population genetics developed by the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher. It uses some mathematical notation but is not a theorem in the mathematical sense." - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“Giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Also called Paradoxical Thinking. It involves creating a paradox or contradiction by conceiving of two opposing ideas as being currently true. Examples are "Winning by losing“ or "Disagreeing and committing“ or "Setting realistic yet challenging goals.“ The contradiction and its meanings will generate new insights and ideas.

How Smart And Successful People Think And Acts

The inability to survive can cause an extinction event, whereby an entire species ceases to compete and replicate effectively. Once its numbers have dwindled to a critically low level, an extinction can be unavoidable (and predictable) given the inability to effectively replicate in large enough numbers.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“The belief that military success can only be achieved through the direct physical presence of troops in a conflict area.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

The way we think affects our body as well as our life. As such also the lives of our colleagues, team members, family, and friends. You might have heard the phrase "Mind over Matter", meaning that there is a strong connection between mind and body. Your every thought produces a biochemical reaction in the brain. The brain then releases chemical signals that are transmitted to the body, where they act as the messengers of the thought. The thoughts that produce the chemicals in the brain allow your body to feel exactly the way you were just thinking. So every thought produces a chemical that is matched by a feeling in your body. Essentially, when you think happy, inspiring, or positive thoughts, your brain manufactures chemicals that make you feel joyful, inspired, and uplifted.

Human beings are one of many social species, along with bees, ants, and chimps, among many more. We have a DNA-level instinct to seek safety in numbers and will look for social guidance of our behavior. This instinct creates a cohesive sense of cooperation and culture which would not otherwise be possible, but also leads us to do foolish things if our group is doing them as well.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"What a man wishes, he also believes. Similarly, what we believe is what we choose to see. This is commonly referred to as the confirmation bias. It is a deeply ingrained mental habit, both energy-conserving and comfortable, to look for confirmations of long-held wisdom rather than violations. Yet the scientific process – including hypothesis generation, blind testing when needed, and objective statistical rigor – is designed to root out precisely the opposite, which is why it works so well when followed. The modern scientific enterprise operates under the principle of falsification: A method is termed scientific if it can be stated in such a way that a certain defined result would cause it to be proved false. Pseudo-knowledge and pseudo-science operate and propagate by being unfalsifiable – as with astrology, we are unable to prove them either correct or incorrect because the conditions under which they would be shown false are never stated."- Shane Parrish “The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.” (related: cognitive dissonance)" - Gabriel Weinberg “It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.” — Francis Bacon

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d --- Thucydides via 13 Mental Models Every Founder Should Know https://medium.com/the-mission/13-mental-models-every-founder-should-know-c4d44afdcdd

What is a self?? I propose that it is the same kind of thing as a center of gravity, an abstraction that is, in spite of its abstractness, tightly coupled to the physical world. You, like every other material object, have a center of gravity (or more properly a center of mass, but we’ll ignore that nicety here). If you are top-heavy, your center of gravity is higher than average for people of your height, you have to work harder to stay upright, and so forth. There are many ways of locating your center of gravity, which, depending on such factors as the shoes you have on and when you last ate a meal, moves around in a smallish area in the middle of your body. It is a mathematical point, not an atom or molecule. The center of gravity of a length of steel pipe is not made of steel and indeed is not made of anything. It is a point in space, the point on the midline running through the center of the pipe that is equidistant from the ends (roughly, depending on imperfections, etc.). The concept of a center of gravity is a very useful thinking tool in its own right. In effect it averages over all the gravitational attractions between every particle of matter in a thing and every particle of matter on the planet, and tells us that we can boil all that down to two points—the center of the earth (its center of gravity) and the center of gravity of the thing—and calculate the behavior of the thing under varying conditions. For instance, if a thing’s center of gravity at any time falls outside all the points of its supporting base, it will topple. What you are is that rolling sum of experience and talent, solemn intention and daydreaming fantasy, bound together in one brain and body and called by a given name. The idea that there is, in addition, a special indissoluble nugget of you, or ego, or spirit, or soul, is an attractive fantasy, but nothing that we need in order to make sense of people, their dreams and hopes, their heroism and their sins.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“Recursively breaking down a problem into two or more sub-problems of the same or related type, until these become simple enough to be solved directly. The solutions to the sub-problems are then combined to give a solution to the original problem.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

In tennis, an “error in a service or return shot that cannot be attributed to any factor other than poor judgement and execution by the player; contrasted with a forced error,” “an error caused by an opponent’s good play.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"For instance, when I have agreed to wait for six days for online discounts to start, I don’t mind waiting for one more day. Well, if I can wait for six, goes the rationale, waiting for seven shouldn’t be a big deal! But when I am told that I can get something today instead of tomorrow, my temptation refuses to wait for another day.Scientists, as usual, have a name for this tendency – Hyperbolic Discounting. I am not going to explain the meaning of a hyperbolic function by drawing some fancy graphs. That’s beyond the scope of this post and my abilities. ‘Discounting is hyperbolic’ simply means a reward that is very close gets drastically more attractive. In other words, the closer a reward is, the higher our ‘emotional interest rate’ rises and the more we are willing to give up in exchange for it. I hope you understand that for most humans, including me and most probably you too, this behavioural quirk comes ingrained in the psyche. It’s the way nature has wired us, an outcome of evolutionary process. So don’t feel bad. " - Safal Niveshak.

James Clear Mental Models Overview

"In 1971, the American economist Thomas Schelling created an agent-based model that might help explain why segregation is so difficult to combat. His model of segregation showed that even when individuals (or "agents") didn't mind being surrounded or living by agents of a different race, they would still choose to segregate themselves from other agents over time! Although the model is quite simple, it gives a fascinating look at how individuals might self-segregate, even when they have no explicit desire to do so." - Harding University Computer Science Department

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“Extraversion tends to be manifested in outgoing, talkative, energetic behavior, whereas introversion is manifested in more reserved and solitary behavior. Virtually all comprehensive models of personality include these concepts in various forms.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

In short, although Clapgras does not complain about any problems of color vision, and indeed passes all standard color-naming and color-discriminating tests with, well, flying colors, he has undergone a profound inversion of all his emotional and attentional reactions to colors. What has happened to Clapgras, Dr. Chromaphil tells his amazed and skeptical colleagues, is simple: he’s undergone a total color qualia inversion, while leaving intact his merely high-level cognitive color talents—his ability to discriminate and name colors, for instance, the talents a color-sensitive robot could have. Here is the main weakness in the philosophical methods standardly used in these cases: philosophers tend to assume that all the competences and dispositions that normal people exhibit regarding, say, colors, form a monolithic block, invulnerable to decomposition or dissociation into independent subcompetences and sub-dispositions. This handily excuses them from addressing the question of whether qualia are to be anchored to some subset or specific disposition.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

"A decision tree is a decision support tool that uses a tree-like graph or model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. It is one way to display an algorithm. Decision trees are commonly used in operations research, specifically in decision analysis, to help identify a strategy most likely to reach a goal, but are also a popular tool in machine learning." - Wikipedia (Scott Page) “A decision support tool that uses a tree-like graph or model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility.” (related: expected value) - Gabriel Weinberg

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8n7SRF_3SI&index=22&list=PLfeNPtL-aoavLTWo_UMtQgneBpnmyyqH- --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d

“The cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to size, output, or scale of operation, with cost per unit of output generally decreasing with increasing scale as fixed costs are spread out over more units of output.” - Gabriel Weinberg "In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to size, output, or scale of operation, with cost per unit of output generally decreasing with increasing scale as fixed costs are spread out over more units of output. Economies of scale apply to a variety of organizational and business situations and at various levels, such as a business or manufacturing unit, plant or an entire enterprise. For example, economies of scale apply to the fixed cost to produce units of output through production and manufacturing. When average costs start falling then economies of scale are in production with fixed costs being a requirement for the equation. With no fixed costs, the average cost and average variable cost would be equal"- Wikipedia (James Clear) Startups: "Economies of scale are simple economics where the costs of your product or service decreases as the volume increases. Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google all have strong economies of scale." - Adam Smith

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models" ---  Adam Smith via ""13 Mental Models Every Founder Should Know"" https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*CKuoDZYd9TaeYmXiZ7J0NA.png

To evolve and get better we need to learn. Learning (also) comes from failing. Therefore using failures as "stimulators and energizers" is very powerful for any organization. A setback is the second name of success. Failing early and failing often, and getting up again, and again. Failing represents a center piece of innovation. Welcome failure as an essential part of learning and improvement to establish "Lifelong Learning," i.e. an ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons. It does not only enhances social inclusion, active citizenship, and personal development, but also self-sustainability, as well as competitiveness and employability.

How Smart And Successful People Think And Acts

“Outcomes that are not the ones foreseen and intended by a purposeful action.” (related: collateral damage — “Deaths, injuries, or other damage inflicted on an unintended target.”, Goodhart’s law — “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”; Campbell’s law; Streisand Effect — “The phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet”; cobra effect — “when an attempted solution to a problem actually makes the problem worse.”; “Kick a hornet’s nest.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“A closed platform, walled garden or closed ecosystem is a software system where the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applications or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, where consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications, content, and much more.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“Captures the reasoning for initiating a project or task. It is often presented in a well-structured written document, but may also sometimes come in the form of a short verbal argument or presentation.” (related: why this now?)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

All organisms feel pleasure and pain from simple chemical processes in their bodies which respond predictably to the outside world. Reward-seeking is an effective survival-promoting technique on average. However, those same pleasure receptors can be co-opted to cause destructive behavior, as with drug abuse.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“the relative importance of an individual’s innate qualities as compared to an individual’s personal experiences in causing individual differences, especially in behavioral traits.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

One of the fundamental underlying assumptions of probability is that as more instances of an event occur, the actual results will converge on the expected ones. For example, if I know that the average man is 5 feet 10 inches tall, I am far more likely to get an average of 5′10″ by selecting 500 men at random than 5 men at random. The opposite of this model is the law of small numbers, which states that small samples can and should be looked at with great skepticism.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"A heuristic technique (/hjuːˈrɪstɪk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, guesstimate, stereotyping, profiling, or common sense." - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"Modeling people is tricky. Physicist Marie Gelmont once famously said, imagine how difficult physics would be. If electrons could think [laugh] so what did he mean human? What he meant was that you know if you take an electron or a carbon atom or even a water molecule it doesn't think it doesn't try to make sense of the world it doesn't have any goals or objectives or anything like that no beliefs so it's pretty straight forward to model how those things function when you look at people, people are much more complicated right? We're purposeful, we've got goals we've got objectives we've got things we want to do, we've got belief structures, we're messy. And because of that you just don't quite know how we're going to behave. Now on top of that we're diverse, right? We want different things. We have different goals and objectives. So this combination of sort of purposeful, thinking actors who are different means that it can be really hard to understand what they do and how they act. "- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Create great decision-making machines by thinking through the criteria you are using to make decisions while you are making them.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

“Manipulating an emotional response in place of a valid or compelling argument.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

The most amazing of all is the tenacity of living things, the thousands of ways they have of clinging to life and reproducing, eking out a living against formidable obstacles, thanks to millions of ingenious devices and arrangements, from the convoluted cascades of protein machinery within every cell, to echolocation in bats, to the elephant’s trunk, to the capacity of our brains to reflect on every topic “under the sun” and many others as well. All that magnificent adjustment of means to ends requires an explanation, since it cannot be pure chance or happenstance. There are only two known possibilities: Intelligent Design or evolution by natural selection. In either case there is a tremendous amount of design work to be done, either miraculously by an Intelligent Designer or ploddingly, unforesightedly, stupidly—but non-miraculously—by natural selection. A convenient way to imagine the design work that needs to have been done is to think of it as lifting in Design Space. What is Design Space? Like the Library of Babel and the Library of Mendel, it can best be conceived as a multidimensional space. In fact Design Space contains both of those libraries and more, because it includes not only all the (designed, authored) books and the (designed, evolved) organisms, but all other things that are well described by the design stance (see chapter 18), such as houses, mousetraps, battleaxes, computers, and spaceships.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“A wide range of cognitive biases that influence the responses of participants away from an accurate or truthful response.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“A method of determining the morality of a certain issue (e.g., slavery) based upon the following thought experiment: parties to the original position know nothing about the particular abilities, tastes, and positions individuals will have within a social order. When such parties are selecting the principles for distribution of rights, positions, and resources in the society in which they will live, the veil of ignorance prevents them from knowing who will receive a given distribution of rights, positions, and resources in that society.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Probably the most important pattern in our manifest image, because it anchors so many other categories that matter to us, is the pattern I call folk psychology. I proposed folk psychology as a term for the talent we all have for interpreting the people around us—and the animals and the robots and even the lowly thermostats—as agents with information about the world they act in (beliefs) and the goals (desires) they strive to achieve, choosing the most reasonable course of action, given their beliefs and desires.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

"Status quo bias is an emotional bias; a preference for the current state of affairs. The current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss. Status quo bias should be distinguished from a rational preference for the status quo ante, as when the current state of affairs is objectively superior to the available alternatives, or when imperfect information is a significant problem. A large body of evidence, however, shows that status quo bias frequently affects human decision-making." - Wikipedia

James Clear Mental Models Overview

"Relativity has been used in several contexts in the world of physics, but the important aspect to study is the idea that an observer cannot truly understand a system of which he himself is a part. For example, a man inside an airplane does not feel like he is experiencing movement, but an outside observer can see that movement is occurring. This form of relativity tends to affect social systems in a similar way." - Shane Parrish "The theory of relativity usually encompasses two interrelated theories by Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity.Special relativity applies to elementary particles and their interactions, describing all their physical phenomena except gravity. General relativity explains the law of gravitation and its relation to other forces of nature. It applies to the cosmological and astrophysical realm, including astronomy." - Wikipedia (James Clear)

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models

MacKenzie described Darwin’s idea of Absolute Ignorance being the source of “all the achievements　of creative skill” as a “strange inversion of reasoning,” since it turns upside down one of the most　“obvious” ideas we have: comprehension is the source of competence. Why do we send our children to school, and why do we emphasize “concepts” over “rote learning”? Because we think that the best　route to competence, in any sphere of activity, is comprehension. In general, the rule of thumb is hard to deny: comprehension is usually the key to (human) competence. Darwin really does invert that reasoning, showing, as MacKenzie so vividly put it, that Absolute Ignorance is the artificer. The process of natural selection is breathtakingly competent— think of Orgel’s Second Law—but utterly mindless. Moreover, the organisms it designs get the benefits of all their exquisite equipment without needing to understand why or how they are so gifted.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

"A special case of categorical modeling is logistic regression. You have to use this model when the dependent variable is ordinal. A page devoted to this problem also comes up shortly. You could also turn simple models like these around and analyze them as ANOVAs, but you shouldn't."- Sportsci.org

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

A vacuum “is space void of matter.” Filling a vacuum refers to the fact that if a vacuum is put next to something with pressure, it will be quickly filled by the gas producing that pressure. (related: power vacuum)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"One type of growth, what we're seeing in China now and what we saw in Japan post war. And what we saw in Europe and the United States post war, is growth that occurs through capital accumulation. Another type of growth, is what we're, which is what we see in the United States and Japan and Europe now, but not in China, occurs from technological advances, not from buildup of capital. And as you advance technology and you increase that A term, then it makes sense to. Buy more capital, but different types of capital and that's what drives growth. " - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"Exponential growth is exhibited when the rate of change—the change per instant or unit of time—of the value of a mathematical function is proportional to the function's current value, resulting in its value at any time being an exponential function of time, i.e., a function in which the time value is the exponent. Exponential decay occurs in the same way when the growth rate is negative. In the case of a discrete domain of definition with equal intervals, it is also called geometric growth or geometric decay, the function values forming a geometric progression. In either exponential growth or exponential decay, the ratio of the rate of change of the quantity to its current size remains constant over time." - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

One of the most valuable military tactics is the habit of “personally seeing the front” before making decisions – not always relying on advisors, maps, and reports, all of which can be either faulty or biased. The Map/Territory model illustrates the problem with not seeing the front, as does the incentive model. Leaders of any organization can generally benefit from seeing the front, as not only does it provide firsthand information, but it also tends to improve the quality of secondhand information.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Human beings have been appropriately called “the storytelling animal” because of our instinct to construct and seek meaning in narrative. It’s likely that long before we developed the ability to write or to create objects, we were telling stories and thinking in stories. Nearly all social organizations, from religious institutions to corporations to nation-states, run on constructions of the narrative instinct.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Philosophers’ zombies, in contrast, can be delightful company, the life of the party, as loving and joyous and spontaneous as anybody you know. Some of your best friends might be zombies. Philosophers’ zombies are (by definition) behaviorally indistinguishable from normal conscious human beings, but “there’s nobody home”—they entirely lack any inner life, any conscious experience. They just appear from the outside to be conscious. If you agree with these philosophers that this is a serious issue, if you wonder—given the logical possibility of philosophers’ zombies—how there could ever be a scientific, materialistic theory of consciousness, then you are gripped by the Zombic Hunch.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

A catalyst either kick-starts or maintains a chemical reaction, but isn’t itself a reactant. The reaction may slow or stop without the addition of catalysts. Social systems, of course, take on many similar traits, and we can view catalysts in a similar light. - Shane Parrish "Catalysis (/kəˈtælɪsɪs/) is the increase in the rate of a chemical reaction due to the participation of an additional substance called a catalyst, which is not consumed in the catalyzed reaction and can continue to act repeatedly. Often only tiny amounts of catalyst are required in principle. In general, reactions occur faster with a catalyst because they require less activation energy. In catalyzed mechanisms, the catalyst usually reacts to form a temporary intermediate which then regenerates the original catalyst in a cyclic process." - Wikipedia (Gabriel Weinberg) “A substance which increases the rate of a chemical reaction.” (related: tipping point) - James Clear

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ ---- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalysis

“Holding that the consequences of one’s conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct.” (related: “ends justify the means”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Synopsis of Big Sort: Bill Bishop claims that we are increasingly self-sorting ourselves into neighborhoods politically and only associating with like-minded political neighbors with all kinds of horrible consequences. Much of Bishop and Cushing’s evidence about the corrosive effect comes from psycho-sociological experiments like Asch’s where group pressure causes people to behave immorally (a la Lord of the Flies or the Stanford Prison Experiment), or to censure their own dissonant voice even when they originally believed those views to be correct. [Note: Fiorina has made quite a name for himself on how the political elites in America have become ever more polarized and the masses have over time sorted themselves out more reliably into political parties but the masses views’ have not become any more extreme, so obviously the Big Sort doesn’t square with his other research that uses ongoing surveys like the General Social Survey, the American National Election Studies, etc.] There is a wonderful cartoon that the New York Times did about the Big Sort." -Social Capital Blog

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"we just took in a very simple growth model and in that growth model we saw that well, growth stopped, right. Once we got to 144 machines and an output of 120, we no longer got any growth. So we use that very simple model to get at. A really important fact, that without innovation, if technology stays fixed, growth will stop. Now, sure the labor supply could get bigger, we could have more workers or something like that. But holding the amount of labor fixed and holding that technology fixed, if we've got a fixed savings rate, and a fixed rate of depreciation, there's no more growth at some point. We're gonna go up, up, up, up, up, and then stop. Well. That hasn't been human experience right." - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Suppose Dr. Frankenstein designs and constructs a monster, Spakesheare, which thereupon sits up and writes out a play, Spamlet. Who is the author of Spamlet? To a Darwinian, this new element in the cascade of cranes is simply the latest in a long history, and we should recognize that the boundary between authors and their artifacts should be just as penetrable as all the other boundaries in the cascade. When Richard Dawkins (1982) notes that the beaver’s dam is as much a part of the beaver phenotype—its extended phenotype—as its teeth and its fur, he sets the stage for the further observation that the boundaries of a human author are exactly as amenable to extension. In fact, we have known this for centuries and have carpentered various semi-stable conventions for dealing with the products of Rubens, of Rubens’s studio, of Rubens’s various students. Wherever there can be a helping hand, we can raise the question of just who is helping whom, what is creator and what is creation.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

"Similarly, engineers have also developed the habit of adding a margin for error into all calculations. In an unknown world, driving a 9,500-pound bus over a bridge built to hold precisely 9,600 pounds is rarely seen as intelligent. Thus, on the whole, few modern bridges ever fail. In practical life outside of physical engineering, we can often profitably give ourselves margins as robust as the bridge system." -Shane Parrish “The difference between the intrinsic value of a stock and its market price.” - Gabriel Weinberg "This term, margin of safety, is an engineering concept used to describe the ability of a system to withstand loads that are greater than expected. There are many ways to implement a margin of safety in everyday life. The core idea is to protect yourself from unforeseen problems and challenges by building a buffer between what you expect to happen and what could happen. This idea is widely useful on a day-to-day basis because uncertainty creeps into every area of life. Let's explore a few ways we can use this concept to live better." - James Clear

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models

"To explain this model its' best to give the example of countries. Countries that can be free, partly free or run by dictators (not free). Start from a 2 state democracy model -> 5% of democracies switch to dictatorship and 20% the opposite. Trend towards freedom, but only 2/3 will be free unless the transition probabilities change. You can get a line chart or a bar chart to compare model and actual, and they are very similar! And line chart patterns look very similar!!" - Model Thinking Section 10: Markov Models

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"What are the functionalities of this sort of network? Look, here's an interesting functionality. Suppose I think about random node failures. So suppose nodes on the internet are gonna fail randomly. Well most nodes are connected to very few. Most nodes are over here. So that means if you have random failure, this node is gonna be incredibly robust. So no one said, hey, let's. Make connections in such a way that makes the internet robust, but the fact that it emerges from the structure of the network. What about targeted failures? What if you want to shut down internet? What if you want to target failure, then you go after these, lots and lots of connections. So although the internet is really robust in handling failure but it's not at all robust to targeted failure. That's a functionality that emerges from the preferential [inaudible] rule. Nobody built them in. They just happened. So what have we learned? We learned that it's sort of fun to talk about networks. There's pictures but we can really unpack it in a formal way by constructing models and networks. Cause models and networks can focus on the logic. How does the network form. The structure. What are the statistical properties within networks? And then finally the functionality. What does the network do? Right. Does the network robust to random failures or is it robust to strategic failures? Does it give us six degrees of separation or 400 degrees of separation? Is it connected or non-connected? So there's all these functionalities that emerge from the network structure. And the network structure in turn is a result of. The individual logic for how people make connections, or how firms make connections, or how. " - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

1. Know when to stop debating and move on to agreeing about what should be done. 2. Use believability weighting as a tool rather than a substitute for decision making by Responsible Parties. 3. Since you don’t have the time to thoroughly examine everyone’s thinking yourself, choose your believable people wisely. 4. When you’re responsible for a decision, compare the believability-weighted decision making of the crowd to what you believe.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

“The spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power.” (related: Veblen goods — “types of luxury goods, such as expensive wines, jewelry, fashion-designer handbags, and luxury cars, which are in demand because of the high prices asked for them.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

1. Build your organization from the top down. 2. Remember that everyone must be overseen by a believable person who has high standards. 3. Make sure the people at the top of each pyramid have the skills and focus to manage their direct reports and a deep understanding of their jobs. 4. In designing your organization, remember that the 5-Step Process is the path to success and that different people are good at different steps. 5. Don’t build the organization to fit the people. 6. Keep scale in mind. 7. Organize departments and sub-departments around the most logical groupings based on “gravitational pull.” 7. Make departments as self-sufficient as possible so that they have control over the resources they need to achieve their goals. 8. Ensure that the ratios of senior managers to junior managers and of junior managers to their reports are limited to preserve quality communication and mutual understanding. 9. Consider succession and training in your design. 10. Don’t just pay attention to your job; pay attention to how your job will be done if you are no longer around. 11. Use “double-do” rather than “double-check” to make sure mission-critical tasks are done correctly. 12. Use consultants wisely and watch out for consultant addiction.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

The Lindy Effect refers to the life expectancy of a non-perishable object or idea being related to its current lifespan. If an idea or object has lasted for X number of years, it would be expected (on average) to last another X years. Although a human being who is 90 and lives to 95 does not add 5 years to his or her life expectancy, non-perishables lengthen their life expectancy as they continually survive. A classic text is a prime example: if humanity has been reading Shakespeare’s plays for 500 years, it will be expected to read them for another 500.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"A random walk is a mathematical object, known as a stochastic or random process, that describes a path that consists of a succession of random steps on some mathematical space such as the integers. An elementary example of a random walk is the random walk on the integer number line, {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } \mathbb {Z} , which starts at 0 and at each step moves +1 or −1 with equal probability. Other examples include the path traced by a molecule as it travels in a liquid or a gas, the search path of a foraging animal, the price of a fluctuating stock and the financial status of a gambler can all be approximated by random walk models, even though they may not be truly random in reality. As illustrated by those examples, random walks have applications to many scientific fields including ecology, psychology, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology as well as economics. Random walks explain the observed behaviors of many processes in these fields, and thus serve as a fundamental model for the recorded stochastic activity. As a more mathematical application, the value of pi can be approximated by the usage of random walk in agent-based modelling environment.[1][2] The term random walk was first introduced by Karl Pearson in 1905." - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“Relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is…[and] highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.” (related: overconfidence effect)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Ruth Millikan (for instance) is right that given the nature of design constraints, it is unlikely in the extreme that there could be different ways of skinning the cat that left two radically different, globally indeterminate, tied-for-first-place interpretations. Indeterminacy of radical translation is truly negligible in practice. Still, the principle survives. The reason we don’t have indeterminacy of radical translation is not because, as a matter of metaphysical fact, there are “real meanings” in there, in the head (what Quine called the “museum myth” of meaning, his chief target). The reason we don’t have indeterminacy in the actual world is that with so many independent constraints to satisfy, the cryptographer’s maxim assures us that it is a vanishingly small worry. When indeterminacy threatens in the real world, it is always just more “behavioral” or “dispositional” facts —more of the same—that save the day for a determinate reading, not some mysterious “causal power” or “intrinsic semanticity.” Intentional interpretation almost always arrives in the limit at a single interpretation, but in the imaginable catastrophic case in which dual interpretations survived all tests, there would be no deeper facts to settle which was “right.” Facts do settle interpretations, but it is always “shallow” facts that do the job.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

As Charlie Munger famously pointed out, the mind works a bit like a sperm and egg: the first idea gets in and then the mind shuts. Like many other tendencies, this is probably an energy-saving device. Our tendency to settle on first conclusions leads us to accept many erroneous results and cease asking questions; it can be countered with some simple and useful mental routines.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“The study of how the uncertainty in the output of a mathematical model or system (numerical or otherwise) can be apportioned to different sources of uncertainty in its inputs.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"A finance concept: for every dollar you invest, how much are you getting back? In product, think of the resources you have (time, money, people) as what you’re “investing”, and the return as impact to customers. "The resources available to a product team are time, money, and [the number and skill of] people. When you’re comparing possible projects you could take on, you should always choose the one that maximizes impact to customers for every unit of resources you have." — Brandon Chu

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

" The reason we care about culture, and here's a quote from Ken Arrow, who's a Nobel Prize winning economist, is when you think about how the economy works, how political systems work, how society works, it's all mediated through these social exchanges, so as Arrow says in this quote, that a lot of economic backwardness can be explained by lack of mutual confidence, so lack of trust. So one of the things that we've seen in cultures is different levels of trust. And different levels of trust have huge implications for how well political, economic, social, and religious institutions are gonna perform in terms of meeting the needs of the citizens." - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

The introduction of algebra allowed us to demonstrate mathematically and abstractly that two seemingly different things could be the same. By manipulating symbols, we can demonstrate equivalence or inequivalence, the use of which led humanity to untold engineering and technical abilities. Knowing at least the basics of algebra can allow us to understand a variety of important results.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Without a strong self-preservation instinct in an organism’s DNA, it would tend to disappear over time, thus eliminating that DNA. While cooperation is another important model, the self-preservation instinct is strong in all organisms and can cause violent, erratic, and/or destructive behavior for those around them.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“A forcing function is any task, activity or event that forces you to take action and produce a result.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

As psychologists have frequently and famously demonstrated, humans are subject to a bias towards keeping their prior commitments and staying consistent with our prior selves when possible. This trait is necessary for social cohesion: people who often change their conclusions and habits are often distrusted. Yet our bias towards staying consistent can become, as one wag put it, a “hobgoblin of foolish minds” – when it is combined with the first-conclusion bias, we end up landing on poor answers and standing pat in the face of great evidence.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"In chemistry and physics, atomic theory is a scientific theory of the nature of matter, which states that matter is composed of discrete units called atoms. It began as a philosophical concept in ancient Greece and entered the scientific mainstream in the early 19th century when discoveries in the field of chemistry showed that matter did indeed behave as if it were made up of atoms." - Wikipedia

James Clear Mental Models Overview

“A zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s)…In contrast, non-zero-sum describes a situation in which the interacting parties’ aggregate gains and losses can be less than or more than zero.” (related: win-win — “A win–win strategy is a conflict resolution process that aims to accommodate all disputants.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

A management concept, originally championed by Apple, that good things come if someone is explicitly responsible for something. (related: diffusion of responsibility — “a sociopsychological phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present.”; bystander effect — “a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Disruptive innovation is when your product or service starts out as a simple solution at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing the established competitors and redefining the industry."

 Clayton Christensen via "13 Mental Models Every Founder Should Know"

Understand the power of the “cleansing storm.”

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

Gresham’s Law, named for the financier Thomas Gresham, states that in a system of circulating currency, forged currency will tend to drive out real currency, as real currency is hoarded and forged currency is spent. We see a similar result in human systems, as with bad behavior driving out good behavior in a crumbling moral system, or bad practices driving out good practices in a crumbling economic system. Generally, regulation and oversight are required to prevent results that follow Gresham’s Law.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“Holding that the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"We can think of networks as having nodes, edges, degrees, path length, and connected in a cluster coefficient. So this is a language for describing different network structures....When you look at the graphs or network, there's structure to graphs. We could measure degree which is on average how many nodes is another node connected to. We could talk about path length, which is how far is it from one node to another node. We could talk about connectedness, is the whole graph connected. And we can talk about clustering coefficient, which is how many triangles, of the possible triangles, how many of those are filled in. Now these are statistical measures."- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“A concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Even when it acts against our best interest our tendency is to be consistent with our prior commitments, ideas, thoughts, words, and actions. As a byproduct of confirmation bias, we rarely seek disconfirming evidence of what we believe. This, after all, makes it easier to maintain our positive self-image. Part of the reason this happens is our desire to appear and feel like we’re right. We also want to show people our conviction. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Society values consistency and conviction even when it is wrong. We associate consistency with intellectual and personal strength, rationality, honesty, and stability. On the other hand, the person who is perceived as inconsistent is also seen as confused, two-faced, even mentally ill in certain extreme circumstances." - Farnam Street

James Clear Mental Models Overview

Thinking that just because something is plausible means that it is true.

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

A curious feature of evolution by natural selection is that it depends crucially on events that “almost　never” happen. For instance, speciation, the process in which a new species is generated by wandering away from its parent species, is an exceedingly rare event, but each of the millions of species that　have existed on this planet got its start with an event of speciation. Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens—not once in a trillion copyings—but evolution depends on it. Moreover, the vast majority of mutations are either deleterious or neutral; a fortuitously “good” mutation almost never happens. But evolution depends on those almost rarest of rare events.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“a millenarian movement first described in Melanesia which encompasses a range of practices and occurs in the wake of contact with more technologically advanced societies. The name derives from the belief which began among Melanesians in the late 19th and early 20th century that various ritualistic acts such as the building of an airplane runway will result in the appearance of material wealth, particularly highly desirable Western goods (i.e., “cargo”), via Western airplanes.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“The Third Story is one an impartial observer, such as a mediator, would tell; it’s a version of events both sides can agree on.” (related: Most Respectful Interpretation)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

1.Realize that the conscious mind is in a battle with the subconscious mind. 2. Know that the most constant struggle is between feeling and thinking. 3. Reconcile your feelings and your thinking. 4. Choose your habits well. 5. Train your “lower-level you” with kindness and persistence to build the right habits. 6. Understand the differences between right-brained and left-brained thinking. 7. Understand how much the brain can and cannot change.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

“People’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains.” (related: diminishing marginal utility) - Gabriel Weinberg "In economics and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people's tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it's better to not lose $5 than to find $5. Some studies have suggested that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. This leads to risk aversion when people evaluate an outcome comprising similar gains and losses; since people prefer avoiding losses to making gains." - Wikipedia (James Clear)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

Using strategies and tactics that worked successfully in the past, but are no longer as useful.

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

In a physical world governed by thermodynamics and competition for limited energy and resources, any biological organism that was wasteful with energy would be at a severe disadvantage for survival. Thus, we see in most instances that behavior is governed by a tendency to minimize energy usage when at all possible.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Get over “blame” and “credit” and get on with “accurate” and “inaccurate.”

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"The advantage of being stronger really depends on there being, you know, not as many fronts for over the troops. And then, we've seen if we go to a Multiplayer Blotto game, that we're likely to get cycles where one player beats two, two beats three, and then three can beat one or something like that, so we get these interesting cycles. We don't get sort of a consistent winner. So what Blotto does, if we have a situation, a competitive situation that looks like Blotto, we have some understanding of what the structure of winners should look like, and that's different than what we've seen in our other models." - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

The Second World War was a good example of a two-front war. Once Russia and Germany became enemies, Germany was forced to split its troops and send them to separate fronts, weakening their impact on either front. In practical life, opening a two-front war can often be a useful tactic, as can solving a two-front war or avoiding one, as in the example of an organization tamping down internal discord to focus on its competitors. - Shane Parrish “A war in which fighting takes place on two geographically separate fronts.” - Gabriel Weinberg

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d

“The idea that it is desirable to draw enemies to a single area, where it is easier to kill them and they are far from one’s own vulnerabilities.” (related: honeypot)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"In many fields—not just philosophy—there are controversies that seem never-ending and partly artifactual: people are talking past one another and not making the necessary effort to communicate effectively. When experts talk to experts, whether they are in the same discipline or not, they always err on the side of under-explaining. The reason is not far to seek: to overexplain something to a fellow expert is a very serious insult—“Do I have to spell it out for you?”—and nobody wants to insult a fellow expert. Solution for this problem: Have all experts present their views to a small audience of curious nonexperts (here at Tufts I have the advantage of bright undergraduates) while the other experts listen in from the sidelines. They don’t have to eavesdrop; this isn’t a devious suggestion. On the contrary, everybody can and should be fully informed that the point of the exercise is to make it comfortable for participants to speak in terms that everybody will understand. By addressing their remarks to the undergraduates (the decoy audience), speakers need not worry at all about insulting the experts because they are not addressing the experts. (I suppose they might worry about insulting the undergraduates, but that’s another matter.) When all goes well, expert A explains the issues of the controversy to the undergraduates while expert B listens. At some point B’s face may light up. “So that’s what you’ve been trying to say! Now I get it.”"

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

Ivan Pavlov very effectively demonstrated that animals can respond not just to direct incentives but also to associated objects; remember the famous dogs salivating at the ring of a bell. Human beings are much the same and can feel positive and negative emotion towards intangible objects, with the emotion coming from past associations rather than direct effects.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"In mathematics, the replicator equation is a deterministic monotone non-linear and non-innovative game dynamic used in evolutionary game theory. ... This important property allows the replicator equation to capture the essence of selection." - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

One of the most useful findings of modern psychology is what Daniel Kahneman calls the Availability Bias or Heuristic: We tend to most easily recall what is salient, important, frequent, and recent. The brain has its own energy-saving and inertial tendencies that we have little control over – the availability heuristic is likely one of them. Having a truly comprehensive memory would be debilitating. Some sub-examples of the availability heuristic include the Anchoring and Sunk Cost Tendencies.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“The view that the truth values of certain claims — especially metaphysical and religious claims such as whether God, the divine, or the supernatural exist — are unknown and perhaps unknowable.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"The confidence you have in i) the importance of the problem your solving, and ii) the correctness of the solution you’re building, should determine how much you’re willing to trade off speed and quality in a product build. How it’s useful This mental model helps you to build a barometer to smartly trade off speed and quality. It’s easiest to explain this by looking at the extreme ends of the spectrum above. On the right side: you have confidence (validated through customers) that the problem you’re focused on is really important to customers, and you know exactly what to build to solve it. In that case, you shouldn’t take any shortcuts because you know customers will need this important feature forever, so it better be really high quality (e.g. scalable, delightful). Now let’s look at the left side: you haven’t even validated that the problem is important to customers. In this scenario, the longer you invest in building, the more you risk creating something for a problem that doesn’t even exist. Therefore, you should err on launching something fast and getting customer validation that it’s worth actually building out well. For example, these are the types of situations where you may put up a landing page for a feature that doesn’t even exist to gauge customer interest." — Brandon Chu

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

"There are contextual tips where the environment changes. Once the environment changes, then the system is likely to move from one state to another once somebody lights the match. There's tips within class, where you move from one equilibrium to a new equilibrium. And there's tips between class, where a sy-, where a system tips from an equilibrium to, you know, a much more complex state, or a periodic state. So that's a simple taxonomy of tipping points. "- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Based on past association, stereotyping, ideology, genetic influence, or direct experience, humans have a tendency to distort their thinking in favor of people or things that they like and against people or things they dislike. This tendency leads to overrating the things we like and underrating or broadly categorizing things we dislike, often missing crucial nuances in the process.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“The selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.” (related: sampling bias)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“A very common continuous probability distribution…Physical quantities that are expected to be the sum of many independent processes (such as measurement errors) often have distributions that are nearly normal.” (related: central limit theorem)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“A fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, known as complementary variables, such as position x and momentum p, can be known.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Major factors explains major portions of the results, while minor factors only explain minor portions. (related: first order vs second order effects — first order effects directly follow from a cause, while second order effects follow from first order effects.)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“The smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction.” “In social dynamics, critical mass is a sufficient number of adopters of an innovation in a social system so that the rate of adoption becomes self-sustaining and creates further growth.” - Gabriel Weinberg "A critical mass is the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction. The critical mass of a fissionable material depends upon its nuclear properties (specifically, the nuclear fission cross-section), its density, its shape, its enrichment, its purity, its temperature, and its surroundings. The concept is important in nuclear weapon design." - Wikipedia (James Clear)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models"

"Entropy is a measure of disorder. And there are always far more disorderly variations than orderly ones. Here's the crucial thing about entropy: it always increases over time. It is the natural tendency of things to lose order. Left to its own devices, life will always become less structured. Sand castles get washed away. Weeds overtake gardens. Ancient ruins crumble. Cars begin to rust. People gradually age. With enough time, even mountains erode and their precise edges become rounded. The inevitable trend is that things become less organized. This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is one of the foundational concepts of chemistry and it is one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease. " - Wikipedia

James Clear Mental Models Overview

"A single chemical reaction is said to have undergone autocatalysis, or be autocatalytic, if one of the reaction products is also a reactant and therefore a catalyst in the same or a coupled reaction.[1] The reaction is called an autocatalytic reaction." - Wikipedia

James Clear Mental Models Overview

“A harmonized combination of multiple resources and skills that distinguish a firm in the marketplace.” (related: circle of competence — “you don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“A sequence of reactions where a reactive product or by-product causes additional reactions to take place. In a chain reaction, positive feedback leads to a self-amplifying chain of events.” (related: cascading failure, domino effect)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“The inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights by the threat of legal sanction…Outside of the legal context in common usage; any coercion or threat of coercion (or other unpleasantries) can have a chilling effect on a group of people regarding a specific behavior, and often can be statistically measured or be plainly observed.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Dwight Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States and was highly productive over decades of his life. His most famous productivity strategy is known as the Eisenhower Matrix which is a rather simple decision-making tool that you can use without any practice by separating your actions based on four possibilities: 1. Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately). 2. Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later). 3. Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else). 4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).

How Smart And Successful People Think And Acts

1. Think about people’s believability in order to assess the likelihood that their opinions are good. 2. Remember that believable opinions are most likely to come from people 1) who have successfully accomplished the thing in question at least three times, and 2) who have great explanations of the cause-effect relationships that lead them to their conclusions. 3. If someone hasn’t done something but has a theory that seems logical and can be stress-tested, then by all means test it. 4. Don’t pay as much attention to people’s conclusions as to the reasoning that led them to their conclusions. 5. Inexperienced people can have great ideas too, sometimes far better ones than more experienced people. 6. Everyone should be up-front in expressing how confident they are in their thoughts.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"When you think about designing mechanisms in effect what we are doing, we are designing incentive structures so that we get the sort of outcomes we want. Now to get those outcomes often what we're trying to do is we're trying to induce people into taking the right kinds of effort. So, for example, if I'm an employer, what I'd like to do is I'd like to write a contract so that people actually put forth a lot of effort in their work as opposed to slacking off. Alternatively, if I'm auctioning something off, what I'd like people to do is reveal their information. I like them to reveal how much they value something. So, another feature that we want when we construct mechanisms is revelation of information. So, when I think about mechanism design, two of the core problems are dealing with these hidden actions and dealing with hidden information. So, how do we write mechanisms or incentive structures that overcome those two problems? ..." - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"Recombination is incredibly powerful and if we have a few solutions. Or futuristic. We can combine those to create evermore and that may be the real driving force behind innovation in the economy, is that when we come up with a solution we can then recombine it with all sorts of other solutions and that leads to ever and ever more innovation." - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Though asymmetric insurgent warfare can be extremely effective, over time competitors have also developed counterinsurgency strategies. Recently and famously, General David Petraeus of the United States led the development of counterinsurgency plans that involved no additional force but substantial additional gains. Tit-for-tat warfare or competition will often lead to a feedback loop that demands insurgency and counterinsurgency.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

All complex systems are subject to positive and negative feedback loops whereby A causes B, which in turn influences A (and C), and so on – with higher-order effects frequently resulting from continual movement of the loop. In a homeostatic system, a change in A is often brought back into line by an opposite change in B to maintain the balance of the system, as with the temperature of the human body or the behavior of an organizational culture. Automatic feedback loops maintain a “static” environment unless and until an outside force changes the loop. A “runaway feedback loop” describes a situation in which the output of a reaction becomes its own catalyst (auto-catalysis).

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline.” (related: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — “An episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science; Planck’s principle — “the view that scientific change does not occur because individual scientists change their mind, but rather that successive generations of scientists have different views.”; punctuated equilibrium)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Backward chaining (or backward reasoning) is an inference method that can be described colloquially as working backward from the goal(s). It is used in automated theorem provers, inference engines, proof assistants and other artificial intelligence applications. In game theory, its application to (simpler) subgames in order to find a solution to the game is called backward induction. In chess, it is called retrograde analysis, and it is used to generate tablebases for chess endgames for computer chess. Backward chaining is implemented in logic programming by SLD resolution. Both rules are based on the modus ponens inference rule. It is one of the two most commonly used methods of reasoning with inference rules and logical implications – the other is forward chaining. Backward chaining systems usually employ a depth-first search strategy, e.g. Prolog"

James Clear Mental Models Overview

Australian philosopher Frank Jackson’s thought experiment about Mary the color scientist, often called “the Knowledge Argument,” has been pumping philosophers’ intuitions with remarkable vigor since it first appeared in 1982: Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like “red”, “blue”, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence “The sky is blue”. What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism [i.e., materialism, the denial of dualism] is false. [Jackson, 1982, p. 130] Jackson’s intuition pump excellently exposes to the light a lot of naïve thinking about the nature of color experience and the brain that no doubt serves people well most of the time, so we might grant that he nicely draws out some of the implications of folk theory. But his aim was to refute a hypothesis about the capacity of the physical sciences to account for all color phenomena. Of course in any real-world situation, somebody in Mary’s imagined position would learn something new because however much she knew about color, there would be lots of facts about physical effects of color she didn’t know.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“Economic platforms having two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"In the diffusion model, everybody just gets it. There's no, you know, sort of getting cured. So this thing of this is diffusion of information through a system or disease that everybody's just gonna get. Alright? So the diffusion method sorta works as follows. "- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"Linear models describe a continuous response variable as a function of one or more predictor variables. They can help you understand and predict the behavior of complex systems or analyze experimental, financial, and biological data. Linear regression is a statistical method used to create a linear model." - MathWorks

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Competition tends to describe most biological systems, but cooperation at various levels is just as important a dynamic. In fact, the cooperation of a bacterium and a simple cell probably created the first complex cell and all of the life we see around us. Without cooperation, no group survives, and the cooperation of groups gives rise to even more complex versions of organization. Cooperation and competition tend to coexist at multiple levels.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"At the heart of social choice theory is the analysis of preference aggregation, understood as the aggregation of several individuals' preference rankings of two or more social alternatives into a single, collective preference ranking (or choice) over these alternatives." - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“When two alternative states are presented as the only possibilities, when in fact more possibilities exist.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"We said that one thing that people often equate with path dependence is increasing returns and we've shown that although maybe empirically the case that a lot of path dependence does come from increasing returns, logically they're completely separate. You can have path dependence without increasing returns, you can have increasing returns and not get path dependence. We also talked about how one big cause of path dependence may be externalities. Inner dependencies between choices, especially big choices like public projects, and those externalities, whether they're positive or negative. Can create that dependence. But the negative [inaudible] may have a larger effect. "- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Brains are energetically very expensive organs, and if they can’t do the important job of destinguish the words meaning, they aren’t earning their keep. Brains, in other words, are supposed to be semantic engines. What brains are made of is kazillions of molecular pieces that interact according to the strict laws of chemistry and physics, responding to shapes and forces; brains, in other words, are in fact only syntactic engines. A genuine semantic engine, responding directly to meanings, is like a perpetual motion machine—physically impossible. So how can brains accomplish their appointed task? By being syntactic engines that track or mimic the competence of the impossible semantic engine. But is this even possible? Some philosophers have argued that if the micro-causal story of how a brain works is complete (without any mysterious gaps), there is simply no room for meaning to make a difference

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions.”  — Balaji S. Srinivasan

 Balaji S. Srinivasan via "13 Mental Models Every Founder Should Know"

“A generalist is a person with a wide array of knowledge, the opposite of which is a specialist.” (related: hedgehog vs fox — “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Justice runs deep in our veins. In another illustration of our relative sense of well-being, we are careful arbiters of what is fair. Violations of fairness can be considered grounds for reciprocal action, or at least distrust. Yet fairness itself seems to be a moving target. What is seen as fair and just in one time and place may not be in another. Consider that slavery has been seen as perfectly natural and perfectly unnatural in alternating phases of human existence.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"For example, in the case of the alert and bored students. People are moving from alert to bored. But if I think in terms of probabilities, that probability is staying fixed. That probability is staying fixed at 5/9. People are moving around, but the probability's staying fixed. That's why this is sometimes called a statistical equilibrium, 'cause the statistic p, the probability of someone being alert, is the thing that doesn't change. Okay, pretty involved, right? What we did is, we wrote down the Markov transition matrix. And we showed how using that matrix, we could solve for an equilibrium. And we saw, at least in the simple example of alert and bored students, that the process went to an equilibrium, and it was fairly straightforward to solve for. What we want to do next is we want to do [a] slightly more sophisticated model that involves multiple states instead of just two, involves three states, and we'll see how that process also converges to an equilibrium. " - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” (related: Greenspun’s tenth rule — “any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

What do all death threats have in common? Only their meaning, it seems. And meaning is not like radioactivity or acidity, a property readily discriminated by a well-tuned detector. The closest we have come yet to creating a generalpurpose meaning-detector is IBM’s Watson, which is much better at sorting by meanings than any earlier artificial intelligence system, but notice that it is not at all simple, and would still (probably) misidentify some candidates for death threats that a child would readily get. Even small children recognize that when one laughing kid yells to another, “So help me, I’ll kill you if you do that again!” this is not really a death threat. The sheer size and sophistication of Watson are at least indirect measures of how elusive the familiar property of meaning is.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

"The central limit theorem (CLT) is a statistical theory that states that given a sufficiently large sample size from a population with a finite level of variance, the mean of all samples from the same population will be approximately equal to the mean of the population. Furthermore, all of the samples will follow an approximate normal distribution pattern, with all variances being approximately equal to the variance of the population divided by each sample's size." - Investopedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Somewhat paradoxically, the stronger two opponents become, the less likely they may be to destroy one another. This process of mutually assured destruction occurs not just in warfare, as with the development of global nuclear warheads, but also in business, as with the avoidance of destructive price wars between competitors. However, in a fat-tailed world, it is also possible that mutually assured destruction scenarios simply make destruction more severe in the event of a mistake (pushing destruction into the “tails” of the distribution). - Shane Parrish “In which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents.” (related: Mexican standoff, Zugzwang) - Gabriel Weinberg

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d

" The network structure's gonna be something that emerges through these micro-level interactions.The first one's gonna be random connections, where each node and randomly decided to connect to other nodes. The second one is gonna be a small worlds model. And the is, is gonna work as follows. Each person is gonna have some friends that are, sort of, belong to a clique. They're sort of nearby. And then some friends that are random, that they randomly connect to. So we're gonna start out by having people connected to just people near them. And then assume that they sort of rewire, in a way, and randomly connect to some people who are further away in social space. ?Cause this is what a lot of social networks look like. And the last thing we're gonna do is we're gonna look at something called a preferential attachment network. And this has been used to describe the internet. And the world wide web. And the idea here is the following. It's that you're more likely to connect to nodes that are more connected. So, that's true certainly in the world wide web." - Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“A diplomatic policy of making political or material concessions to an enemy power in order to avoid conflict.” (related: Danegeld, extortion)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“The use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited messages (spam), especially advertising, as well as sending messages repeatedly on the same site.” (related: phishing — “the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.”, clickjacking, social engineering)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

This idea, that we can divide and conquer the daunting problem of imagining how a person could be composed of (nothing but) mindless molecules, can be looked at bottom-up, or top-down, starting with the whole person and asking what smallish collection of very smart homunculi could conspire to do all the jobs that have to be done to keep a person going. Plato pioneered the topdown approach. His analysis of the soul into three agent-like parts, analogized to the Guardians, the Auxiliaries, and the Workers, or the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive, was not a very good start, for reasons well analyzed over the last two millennia. Freud’s id, ego, and superego of the last century was something of an improvement, but the enterprise of breaking down a whole mind into sub-minds really began to take shape with the invention of the computer and the birth of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which at the outset had the explicit goal of analyzing the cognitive competences of a whole (adult, conscious, language-using) person into a vast network of sub-personal specialists, such as the goal-generator, the memory-searcher, the plan-evaluator, the perception-analyzer, the sentenceparser, and so on.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"Using the linear models, you can draw a line through data and use that line to explain some of the variation in the data. Now typically the world isn't gonna be perfectly linear. There's going to be lots of extra variation left over, but there's a question of how much of that variation did the line explain. In addition to explaining the variation, the line tells us something about the relationship between our independent variable, x and our dependent variable, y. In particular, we learn the sine on x, like does y increase in x or decrease in x, and we also learn something about the magnitude, so how much does. Each one unit increase of x increased the value of y. So what this linear model can do is help us understand something about data we see in the real world."- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“A systematic approach to estimating the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives that satisfy transactions, activities or functional requirements for a business.” (related: net present value — “a measurement of the profitability of an undertaking that is calculated by subtracting the present values of cash outflows (including initial cost) from the present values of cash inflows over a period of time.”, discount rate)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“Five capital allocation choices CEOs have: 1) invest in existing operations; 2) acquire other businesses; 3) issue dividends; 4) pay down debt; 5) repurchase stock. Along with this, they have three means of generating capital: 1) internal/operational cash flow; 2) debt issuance; 3) equity issuance.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"The big coefficient: If we have a simple linear regression model, we have some equation like Y = a1 x1 + a2 x2 + b, right? And x1 and x2 are called the independent variables, and y's the dependant variable. So, for example, Y might be sales of a product. And x1 might be advertising in magazines and x2 might be advertising in television. Now we can look at these two coefficients, a1 and a2 and figure out which one's bigger. And what that's telling us is we get sort of more bang for the buck from advertising on magazines or from advertising on television. If it's television, if a2 is bigger than a1, then that's where we spend our money. So the idea is you put your assets, you put your resources on the variables that have the bigger coefficients. So this big coefficient thinking has led to something that people like to call Evidence Based blank. So there's Evidence Based Medicine. What you do is you look at all sorts of different treatments that have been tried on patients..."- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

The genomes that exist today are connected by threads of descent to the genomes of their parents and grandparents and so on, back to the beginning of life on Earth.The Tree of Life, shows how every person is relatively closely related to every other person—sharing common human ancestors within the last hundred thousand years, and sharing ancestors with every dog and whale within the last two hundred million years, and every daisy and redwood tree within the last two billion years.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

One of the most important principles of systems is that they are sensitive to scale. Properties (or behaviors) tend to change when you scale them up or down. In studying complex systems, we must always be roughly quantifying – in orders of magnitude, at least – the scale at which we are observing, analyzing, or predicting the system.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“1–1’s can add a whole new level of speed and agility to your company.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

The manifest image is the world as it seems to us in everyday life, full of solid objects, colors and smells and tastes, voices and shadows, plants and animals, and people and all their stuff: not only tables and chairs, bridges and churches, dollars and contracts, but also such intangible things as songs, poems, opportunities, and free will. Think of all the puzzling questions that arise when we try to line up all those things with the things in the scientific image: molecules, atoms, electrons, and quarks and their ilk. Is anything really solid? Most of our manifest image is not genetically inherited; it is somehow inculcated in our early childhood experience. Words are a very important category of thing for us, and are the medium through which much of our manifest image is transmitted, but the capacity to categorize some events in the world as words, and our desire to speak, may well be at least partly a genetically inherited talent —like the bird’s capacity to make out individual flying insects, or a wasp’s desire to dig a nest. Terms can structure and flavor our minds, enriching our personal manifest images with things—loose cannons and lip service and feedback—that are otherwise almost invisible.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

Structural factors that allow a firm to outcompete its rivals for many years.

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“Systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” (related: reproducibility) - Gabriel Weinberg "The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.The Oxford Dictionaries Online defines the scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses". Experiments need to be designed to test hypotheses. Experiments are an important tool of the scientific method." - Wikipedia (James Clear)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models

The asymmetry model leads to an application in warfare whereby one side seemingly “plays by different rules” than the other side due to circumstance. Generally, this model is applied by an insurgency with limited resources. Unable to out-muscle their opponents, asymmetric fighters use other tactics, as with terrorism creating fear that's disproportionate to their actual destructive ability.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Sun Tzu: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Another Scottish economist, Adam Smith, highlighted the advantages gained in a free-market system by specialization. Rather than having a group of workers each producing an entire item from start to finish, Smith explained that it’s usually far more productive to have each of them specialize in one aspect of production. He also cautioned, however, that each worker might not enjoy such a life; this is a trade-off of the specialization model.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“Presuming that a real or perceived relationship between things means that one is the cause of the other.” (related: correlation does not imply causation, or in xkcd form)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

In chess, the winning strategy is usually to seize control of the middle of the board, so as to maximize the potential moves that can be made and control the movement of the maximal number of pieces. The same strategy works profitably in business, as can be demonstrated by John D. Rockefeller’s control of the refinery business in the early days of the oil trade and Microsoft’s control of the operating system in the early days of the software trade.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"Velocity is not equivalent to speed; the two are sometimes confused. Velocity is speed plus vector: how fast something gets somewhere. An object that moves two steps forward and then two steps back has moved at a certain speed but shows no velocity. The addition of the vector, that critical distinction, is what we should consider in practical life." - Shane Parrish "The velocity of an object is the rate of change of its position with respect to a frame of reference, and is a function of time. Velocity is equivalent to a specification of its speed and direction of motion (e.g. 60 km/h to the north). Velocity is an important concept in kinematics, the branch of classical mechanics that describes the motion of bodies. Velocity is a physical vector quantity; both magnitude and direction are needed to define it." - Wikipedia (James Clear)

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- James Clear Mental Models Overview https://jamesclear.com/mental-models

The laws of thermodynamics describe energy in a closed system. The laws cannot be escaped and underlie the physical world. They describe a world in which useful energy is constantly being lost, and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Applying their lessons to the social world can be a profitable enterprise.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

AARRR or ( Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue ) is a framework for customer lifecycle.

Dave McClure via "13 Mental Models Every Founder Should Know"

It’s important for human beings to generalize; we need not see every instance to understand the general rule, and this works to our advantage. With generalizing, however, comes a subset of errors when we forget about the Law of Large Numbers and act as if it does not exist. We take a small number of instances and create a general category, even if we have no statistically sound basis for the conclusion.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

“A term used in music primarily to designated a passage that brings a piece to an end.” (related: CTA.) People psychologically expect codas, and so they can be used for influence.

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

You didn’t have to have a semantic or intentional interpretation of the boxes to see it: a caused red, and b caused green—an obvious pattern in need of explanation. In each instance of button-pressing, the scientists understood exactly how each step in the computing and transmitting process worked, but they couldn’t explain the generalization. You do need a semantic interpretation to explain why the regularity exists. In other words, the “macro-causal” level at which the explanation is expressed does not “reduce” to the “micro-causal” level.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

Introduced by the biologist Steven Jay Gould, an exaptation refers to a trait developed for one purpose that is later used for another purpose. This is one way to explain the development of complex biological features like an eyeball; in a more primitive form, it may have been used for something else. Once it was there, and once it developed further, 3D sight became possible.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

In a world such as ours, governed by chaos dynamics, small changes (perturbations) in initial conditions have massive downstream effects as near-infinite feedback loops occur; this phenomenon is also called the butterfly effect. This means that some aspects of physical systems (like the weather more than a few days from now) as well as social systems (the behavior of a group of human beings over a long period) are fundamentally unpredictable.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"When building a product, don’t bank on a second version ever shipping. Make sure the first version is a complete product because it may be out there forever. When software was sold on shelves, teams had to live with version 1 forever. How it’s useful When you’re defining the first version of your product, you will accumulate all sorts of amazing features that you dream of adding on later in future versions. Recognize that these may never ship, because you never know what can happen: company strategy changes, your lead engineer quits, or the whole team gets reallocated to other projects. To hedge against these scenarios, make sure that whatever you ship is a “complete product” which, if it was never improved again, would still be useful to customers for the foreseeable future. Don’t ship a feature that relies on future improvements in order to actually solve the problem well." — Brandon Chu

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

Given two markets selling an identical good, an arbitrage exists if the good can profitably be bought in one market and sold at a profit in the other. This model is simple on its face, but can present itself in disguised forms: The only gas station in a 50-mile radius is also an arbitrage as it can buy gasoline and sell it at the desired profit (temporarily) without interference. Nearly all arbitrage situations eventually disappear as they are discovered and exploited.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

It showed that the frog’s visual system is sensitive to small moving dark spots on the retina, tiny shadows cast in almost all natural circumstances by flies flying in the vicinity. This “fly-detector” mechanism is appropriately wired to the hair trigger in the frog’s tongue, which handily explains how frogs feed themselves in a cruel world and thereby help propagate their kind. Now what does the frog’s eye tell the frog’s brain? Unless there were “meaningless” or “indeterminate” variation in the triggering conditions of the various frogs’ eyes, there could be no raw material (blind variation) for selection for a new purpose to act upon. The indeterminacy that Fodor (and others) see as a flaw in Darwinian accounts of the evolution of meaning is actually a precondition for any such evolution. The idea that there must be something determinate that the frog’s eye really means—some possibly unknowable proposition in froggish that expresses exactly what the frog’s eye is telling the frog’s brain—is just essentialism applied to meaning (or function). Meaning, like function, on which it so directly depends, is not something determinate at its birth. It arises not by saltation—huge leaps in Design Space—or special creation, but by a (typically gradual) shift of circumstances.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“Consumers usually don’t go about their shopping by conforming to particular segments. Rather, they take life as it comes. And when faced with a job that needs doing, they essentially ‘hire’ a product to do that job.” - Gabriel Weinberg If you understand the job, how to improve the product becomes just obvious. — Clayton Christensen

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d ---  Clayton Christensen via 13 Mental Models Every Founder Should Know https://medium.com/the-mission/13-mental-models-every-founder-should-know-c4d44afdcdd

1. Communications aimed at getting the best answer should involve the most relevant people. 2. Communication aimed at educating or boosting cohesion should involve a broader set of people than would be needed if the aim were just getting the best answer. 3. Recognize that you don’t need to make judgments about everything.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"what Axelrod's model gives us, which is really sort of fascinating, is, he makes this assumption that says: We've all got these traits. We look to our neighbors. If they're like us, we tend to interact with them. If they're not like us, we tend not to. And what he ends up getting is these distinct cultures with thick boundaries. And these thick boundaries means vast differences between the cultures. Now the thick boundaries emerge because of the fact that if there weren't a thick boundary, then what would happen is, I would interact with that person and would become more similar, and the boundary would disappear. So Axelrod's model shows how in a social space, we can get distinct cultures on multi dimensions, and those boundaries can be self-reinforcing. People don't interact across the boundaries, and the cultures remain disparate. "- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“Every one of today’s most famous and familiar ideas was once unknown and unsuspected…There are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“The measurement of how responsive an economic variable is to a change in another. It gives answers to questions such as ‘If I lower the price of a product, how much more will sell?’” (related: Giffen good — “a product that people consume more of as the price rises and vice versa.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“Solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

No amount of clever engineering could endow a robot with qualia—but this is an empty victory, since there is no reason to believe such intrinsic properties exist. To see this, compare the qualia of experience to the value of money. Some naïve Americans seem to think that dollars, unlike euros and yen, have intrinsic value. The tourist in the cartoon asks, “How much is that in real money?” meaning how much is that in dollars. Every dollar, they declare, has something logically independent of the functional exchange powers it shares with all other currencies in circulation. A dollar has a certain je ne sais quoi. When you contemplate it, you can detect that it has an aura of value—less than in the olden days, perhaps, but still discernible: let’s call it the dollar’s vim (from the Latin, vis, meaning power). Officially, then, vim is the non-relational, non-dispositional, intrinsic economic value of a dollar. Pounds sterling and euros and the like have no intrinsic value—they are just symbolic stand-ins; they are redeemable for dollars, and hence have derived economic value, but they don’t have vim! Vim is quite obviously a figment of the imagination, an artifact of the heartfelt hunches of those naïve Americans, and we can explain the artifact without honoring it. Vitalism—the insistence that there is some big, mysterious extra ingredient in all living things, dubbed élan vital—turns out to have been a failure of imagination. How do they distinguish their conviction from the mistake of the naïve Americans? (Or are the Americans right? Dollars do have vim, as anybody can just intuit!)

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

Warren Buffett, aka the "Oracle of Omaha,“ is not only pretty wealthy, but also a master in time management, focus setting, and priority management. It is said that one day Buffett asked his pilot to draft a list with the 25 most important things he wanted to do in his life. In a next step Buffett asked him to circle the 5 most crucial ones. Buffett challenged his pilot to solely focus on those 5 to avoid being distracted. Consequently, only when you figure out your priorities and follow through with dedicated and concrete action plans you set your own agenda and will succeed.

How Smart And Successful People Think And Acts

It’s been said that Einstein called compounding a wonder of the world. He probably didn’t, but it is a wonder. Compounding is the process by which we add interest to a fixed sum, which then earns interest on the previous sum and the newly added interest, and then earns interest on that amount, and so on ad infinitum. It is an exponential effect, rather than a linear, or additive, effect. Money is not the only thing that compounds; ideas and relationships do as well. In tangible realms, compounding is always subject to physical limits and diminishing returns; intangibles can compound more freely. Compounding also leads to the time value of money, which underlies all of modern finance. - Shane Parrish “Interest on interest. It is the result of reinvesting interest, rather than paying it out, so that interest in the next period is then earned on the principal sum plus previously-accumulated interest.” - Gabriel Weinberg

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d

The Bayesian method is a method of thought (named for Thomas Bayes) whereby one takes into account all prior relevant probabilities and then incrementally updates them as newer information arrives. This method is especially productive given the fundamentally non-deterministic world we experience: We must use prior odds and new information in combination to arrive at our best decisions. This is not necessarily our intuitive decision-making engine.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

"Here's the idea. The idea is that our random walk model your value depended on every single shock. All the way through, in a finite memory random walk, your value only depends on the previous five shocks, the previous seven shocks. Let me show you. So, the value of something at time T instead of being all of the shocks, instead of starting at zero, and adding all that up to T just includes the previous five periods. So you think of there being a window like this and that window slides along over time. As time passes, you sort of just take the last five things that have occurred."- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"A network tends to become more valuable as nodes are added to the network: this is known as the network effect. An easy example is contrasting the development of the electricity system and the telephone system. If only one house has electricity, its inhabitants have gained immense value, but if only one house has a telephone, its inhabitants have gained nothing of use. Only with additional telephones does the phone network gain value. This network effect is widespread in the modern world and creates immense value for organizations and customers alike." - Shane Parrish "Network effects occur when a product or service becomes more valuable as more people use it. Network effects help you build better, faster-growing and more valuable products and businesses." -  Robert Metcalfe “The effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.” - Gabriel Weinberg

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ ---  Robert Metcalfe via 13 Mental Models Every Founder Should Know https://medium.com/the-mission/13-mental-models-every-founder-should-know-c4d44afdcdd --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d

“A false positive error, or in short false positive, commonly called a ‘false alarm’, is a result that indicates a given condition has been fulfilled, when it actually has not been fulfilled…A false negative error, or in short false negative, is where a test result indicates that a condition failed, while it actually was successful, i.e. erroneously no effect has been assumed.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“A principle which states that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system, and that ‘the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to favor multipartism.’”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

1. Assign responsibilities based on workflow design and people’s abilities, not job titles. 2. Constantly think about how to produce leverage. 3. Recognize that it is far better to find a few smart people and give them the best technology than to have a greater number of ordinary people who are less well equipped. 4. Use leveragers.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

Now what do those two triangles make together? A box. They make a box. You can’t make that shit up. — Jack Barker

 Jack Barker via "13 Mental Models Every Founder Should Know"

"An urn model is either a set of probabilities that describe events within an urn problem, or it is a probability distribution, or a family of such distributions, of random variables associated with urn problems." - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“A disinformation strategy used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics and propaganda. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system…Within the context of social networks, many, including Metcalfe himself, have proposed modified models using (n × log n) proportionality rather than n^2 proportionality.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today. My favorite example of an inert historical fact is this: A. Some of the gold in my teeth once belonged to Julius Caesar.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“a military strategy in which a belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and material.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

“With the same information being used as a base, the ‘frame’ surrounding the issue can change the reader’s perception without having to alter the actual facts.” (related: anchoring)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"If you're playing a mixed strategy, If you're playing a equilibrium strategy, then there isn't any strategic ability. We can just cross this out and it's all just going to come down to luck. So against really smart players, Blotto may end up equal numbers of troops, Blotto's probably luck. We have maybe one player who is smarter than the other, or one player with more troops than the other. Then Blotto starts becoming more skilled. But again, the interesting thing about Blotto. Anything can be beaten. You don't need all your troops, and it really comes down to, Where is that other person gonna put their troops. So, what you want to do is not be understood. You want to be confusing to the other person so you want to random off. So, it's an interesting g ame. Alright so, that's the basic Blotto. Where we're gonna go next is we're going to think a little bit more deeply about this idea of one side having an advantage and see what that means for the nature of competition. We're also gonna talk about why Blotto has become interesting again."- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

Coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter, the term “creative destruction” describes the capitalistic process at work in a functioning free-market system. Motivated by personal incentives (including but not limited to financial profit), entrepreneurs will push to best one another in a never-ending game of creative one-upmanship, in the process destroying old ideas and replacing them with newer technology. Beware getting left behind. - Shane Parrish Competing: “Process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” (related: Software is Eating the World — “in many industries, new software ideas will result in the rise of new Silicon Valley-style start-ups that invade existing industries with impunity.”) - Gabriel Weinberg

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ --- Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d

"A surfer not only is carried by the wave, but it gives an exceptional forward speed to its rider, provided the surfer can get on to the wave at the right time and not get thrown off in between. The second most important thing required to ride a wave is to recognize that the a wave is approaching. Which means 90 percent of the times you would find a surfer lying on his surfing board and paddling slowly, waiting for the right wave. So why are we talking about waves and surfers in a place reserved for discussing mental models? That’s because “surfing” isn’t just a sport. There are brilliant insights that can be used to analyse a business opportunity through the lens of a mental model with the same name i.e., Surfing. Charlie Munger used the surfing metaphor in his lecture on Elementary Worldly Wisdom to represent the idea of some large business force that developed, which a company was able to ride to grow itself much bigger." - safalniveshak

James Clear Mental Models Overview

One of my favorite ones. KISS is an acronym for "Keep it simple, stupid" as a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy. The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

How Smart And Successful People Think And Acts

“Describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or “bell curve”. The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called ‘innovators’, followed by ‘early adopters’. Next come the early majority and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called ‘laggards’.” (related: S-curve, Crossing the Chasm, Installation Period vs Deployment Period)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Rathering is a way of sliding you swiftly and gently past a false dichotomy. The general form of a rathering is “It is not the case that blahblahblah, as orthodoxy would have you believe; it is rather that suchandsuchandsuch—which is radically different.” Some ratherings are just fine; you really must choose between the two alternatives on offer; in these cases, you are not being offered a false, but rather a genuine, inescapable dichotomy. But some ratherings are little more than sleight of hand, due to the fact that the word “rather” implies—without argument—that there is an important incompatibility between the claims flanking it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“How expert one becomes at a skill has more to do with how one practices than with merely performing a skill a large number of times.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

“When a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.” (related: Shirky principle — “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”; “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"Cause and effect in products are the result of systems connected by positive and negative feedback loops. How it’s useful Feedback loops help us remember that some of the biggest drivers of growth or decline for a product may be from other parts of the system. For example, say you’re the payments team and your KPI is to grow total credit card payments processed. You have a positive feedback loop with the user acquisition team because as they grow users, you have more potential users that will pay with credit cards. However, you have a negative feedback loop with the cash payments team, who are trying to help users more easily to transact through cash. Knowing these feedback loops can help you change strategy (e.g. you may choose to work on general user acquisition as the best way to grow payment volume), or understand negative changes in your metrics (e.g. credit card payment volume is down, but it’s because the cash payments team is doing really well, not because the credit card products suck)." — Brandon Chu

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

1.Use the terms “above the line” and “below the line” to establish which level a conversation is on. 2. Remember that decisions need to be made at the appropriate level, but they should also be consistent across levels.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

1. Keep in mind both the rates of change and the levels of things, and the relationships between them. 2. Be imprecise. 3. Remember the 80/20 Rule and know what the key 20 percent is. 4. Be an imperfectionist.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"In some cases you can think of outcomes as being combinations of skill and luck, and you can determine how much skill and how much luck by looking at variations in outcomes. Is there a lot of flipping, or is there sort of consistent winners? We also then got from this very simple model, a paradoxical result. And a paradoxical result is, is that when you get all high skill people competing against one another, even when it's a low luck environment, luck will play a large role because of the paradoxical skill. Alright, so that's a luck and skill model, now we're going to move on to a model of random walks. "- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

"The rational actor model is based on rational choice theory. The model adopts the state as the primary unit of analysis, and inter-state relations (or international relations) as the context for analysis." - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“Leverage should be the central, guiding metric that helps you determine where to focus your time.” (related: Eisenhower decision matrix — “what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”, law of triviality — “members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.”)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

"The behavioral approach to systems theory and control theory was initiated in the late-1970s by J. C. Willems as a result of resolving inconsistencies present in classical approaches based on state-space, transfer function, and convolution representations. This approach is also motivated by the aim of obtaining a general framework for system analysis and control that respects the underlying physics." - Wikipedia

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

“When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster.” (related: Deep Work)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

The envy tendency is probably the most obvious manifestation of the relative satisfaction tendency, but nearly all studies of human happiness show that it is related to the state of the person relative to either their past or their peers, not absolute. These relative tendencies cause us great misery or happiness in a very wide variety of objectively different situations and make us poor predictors of our own behavior and feelings.

Shane Parrish's Farnam Street Mental Model Guide

1. Don’t put the expedient ahead of the strategic. 2. Think about both the big picture and the granular details, and understand the connections between them.

Ray Dalio's Book Principles

"A tipping point was a single instance in time where, where that long, long equilibrium was gonna be suddenly changed drastically. So think about path depended. Path dependent means what happens along the way. As you move along that path, how does that effect where we're likely to end up. So each step may have a small effect, but it's the accumulation of those steps that has the difference. With tipping points, everything sort of moves along in expected ways but not getting a lot of information. "- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera

Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course

In 1980, John Searle he published “Minds, Brains and Programs,” his famous Chinese Room thought experiment purporting to show that “Strong AI” was impossible. He defined Strong AI as the claim that “the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states and that the programs thereby explain human cognition” (Searle, 1980, p. 417), and later clarified his definition: “the appropriately programmed digital computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the sense that human beings have minds” He invites us to imagine himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he produces appropriate strings of Chinese characters that fool those outside into thinking there is a Chinese speaker in the room. The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but does not produce real understanding. Hence the “Turing Test” is inadequate. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. The broader conclusion of the argument is that the theory that human minds are computer-like computational or information processing systems is refuted. The central processing unit in your laptop doesn’t know anything about chess, but when it is running a chess program, it can beat you at chess, and so forth, for all the magnificent competences of your laptop. What Searle describes as an ideology is at the very heart of computer science, and its soundness is demonstrated in every walk of life. We’ve turned the knob on Searle’s intuition pump that controls the level of description of the program being followed. There are always many levels. At the highest level, the comprehending powers of the system are not unimaginable; we even get insight into just how the system comes to understand what it does. The system’s reply no longer looks embarrassing; it looks obviously correct. That doesn’t mean that AI of the sort Searle was criticizing actually achieves a level of competence worth calling understanding, nor that those methods, extended in the ways then imagined by those AI researchers, would likely have led to such high competences, but just that Searle’s thought experiment doesn’t succeed in what it claims to accomplish: demonstrating the flatout impossibility of Strong AI.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

"When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument, a warning label about a likely boom crutch. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.) "

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps

“A strategy of keeping options open and fluid, fighting the urge to make choices too soon, before all of the uncertainties have been resolved.” (related: tyranny of small decisions — “a situation where a series of small, individually rational decisions can negatively change the context of subsequent choices, even to the point where desired alternatives are irreversibly destroyed.”; boiling frog — “an anecdote describing a frog slowly being boiled alive.”; path dependence; “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”; fog of war; OODA loop)

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

Thinking that just because something is possible means that it is likely.

Gabriel Weinberg's Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful