Tag: mental-models
All the articles with the tag "mental-models".
Why even wrong ideas are worth keeping
Hasok Chang's Is Water H2O? shows chemistry moving forward by combining right hypotheses with wrong ones. That habit has a name, pluralism, and it's the same idea behind mental models and Charlie Munger's latticework thinking.
Why the best explanation isn't the most accurate one
An explanation is judged by whether the other person understood it, and buying that understanding usually costs you some precision.
Why don't we have flying cars yet?
Aswath Damodaran sorts ideas into possible, plausible, and probable. Only the last one comes with a number, and that's the test most ideas fail.
How to steal an expert's gut feel
Gary Klein's Recognition-Primed Decision model explains how experts read a messy situation in seconds, and how you can train the same habit.
Unknown unknowns and last week's lottery numbers
Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns and Bezos's 70% rule. Some decisions are worth slowing down for, and the rest lose their value while you wait.
Unrestricted Warfare: how a startup beats a giant
Qiao Liang's Unrestricted Warfare, Gramsci's war of position, and what Charlie Munger's latticework says about a small company taking on a large one.
You can't draw a doorknob
Try sketching a doorknob from memory and you'll see how thin your model of the world is, and why forecasts keep missing.
The patterns hiding in a piano, winter, and the lottery - 2
The last three of the seven relationships that explain the world: oscillation, trend, and independence, and what each one is good for.
What a phone, a macaron, and the universe have in common - 1
The first four of seven quantitative relationships that run through everyday life, and the lesson each one hands you.
Write the rules before your resolve wavers
A three step method for building decision rules that hold when your own judgment wobbles: settle the plan before you act, state its intent, and name the assumptions that would break it.