Mental models

General thinking

• Many models, not one

  Carry many models from many fields and use them together; with only one, every problem looks like a nail for your hammer.
  • Facts that do not hang together on a latticework of theory are not held in a usable form Charlie Munger
  • Seeking out and applying mental models across a wide array of disciplines is powerful. Gabriel Weinberg

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• Inversion

  Work a problem backward: ask what would guarantee failure, then avoid it.
  • Many hard problems are best solved by addressing them backward, studying how to create non-X in order to create X Charlie Munger
  • A difficult problem is better thought through both forwards and backward than in one direction only. Shane Parrish

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• Circle of competence

  Know the edge of what you really understand, and act inside it.
  • Everyone has a circle of competence, and it is very hard to advance Charlie Munger
  • The size of a person's circle of competence matters less than knowing when they are approaching its perimeter. Shane Parrish

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• Second-order thinking

  Ask "and then what?": follow a decision past its first effect to the ones that come after.
  • Second-order thinking is more deliberate than first-order thinking: it considers interactions and time, and asks "And then what?" Shane Parrish
  • Optimising a single metric is a trap, because the second-order consequences of the change only surface much later. Bill Gurley

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• First principles

  Reason up from what is known to be true, not from what is usually done or said.
  • Physics teaches reasoning from first principles rather than by analogy. Elon Musk
  • Reasoning from first principles means gathering only what one knows to be true and building a conclusion from it. Tim Urban

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• The map is not the territory

  Every model, word or plan is a simplified map of reality; useful when its structure matches, misleading when mistaken for the thing itself.
  • A map is not the territory it represents, but if it is correct it shares the territory's structure, which is what makes it useful. Alfred Korzybski
  • The territory never gets onto the map: representation always filters it out, so the mental world is only maps of maps. Gregory Bateson

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• Occam's razor

  Prefer the simplest explanation that fits the facts, and still make it prove itself.
  • Occam's razor holds that the simplest explanation is preferable to a more complex one, because simple theories are easier to verify and simple solutions easier to execute. Shane Parrish
  • Occam's razor works best for making initial conclusions before the full scope of information can be obtained. Shane Parrish

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• Hanlon's razor

  Do not assume malice where carelessness, ignorance or neglect explain what happened; they usually do.
  • Genuine malice exists, but in most interactions stupidity is a far more common explanation than malevolence. Shane Parrish
  • Failures are more often explained by time pressure than by stupidity or malice. Fabien Sanglard

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• Thought experiments

  Test an idea in your head first, by imagining the case that would break it.
  • A thought experiment serves to encourage speculation and logical thinking and to change paradigms. Shane Parrish
  • Thought experiments expose gaps in knowledge and help recognise the limits of what can be known. Shane Parrish

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Judgment and risk

• Probabilistic thinking

  Think in odds, not certainties, and bet heavily only when the odds are clearly yours.
  • Without the elementary mathematics of probability in one’s repertoire, one gives everybody else a huge advantage Charlie Munger
  • Probabilistic thinking, estimating the likelihood of outcomes, is one of the best tools for improving the accuracy of decisions. Shane Parrish

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• Margin of safety

  Leave room for being wrong, because sometimes you will be.
  • A margin of safety means paying a discount deep enough that being wrong about what a company is worth still leaves you whole. Bill Ackman
  • Bold risk-taking and conservative paranoia can work together, as when Gates pursued an audacious vision while wanting a year of payroll in cash, combining getting rich with staying rich. Morgan Housel

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• Incentives

  Look at what people are rewarded for; it explains more behaviour than what they say, your own included.
  • One should never think about something else when one should be thinking about the power of incentives Charlie Munger
  • When a system's incentives produce bad behaviour, the blame belongs entirely to whoever created the incentives. Marc Andreessen

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• Your own biases

  Your mind jumps to conclusions and defends them; look for the evidence against you and use checklists.
  • The psychology of misjudgment is terribly important to learn, and terribly smart people make bonkers mistakes by failing to heed it Charlie Munger
  • Forming an impression very quickly leads to spending the time confirming it rather than collecting evidence, so a wrong first impression is unlikely to be corrected. Daniel Kahneman

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• Positioning

  Set up your situation, rules and defaults so the good choice is the easy one, instead of relying on willpower.
  • The best aid to judgment is starting a decision from a good position, and people forget to ask whether they are acting from strength or weakness when the moment arrives. Shane Parrish
  • Defining behavioural principles that protect against the worst parts of one's own psychology can be a winning investment strategy. Chamath Palihapitiya

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• Activation energy

  Starting is the hardest part, and the bigger the change, the more energy it takes to begin.
  • The beginning of any complex or challenging endeavor is always the hardest part. Shane Parrish
  • Although activation energy is a scientific concept, it can serve as a practical mental model. Shane Parrish

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• Learning machine

  Keep learning after school, and learn from other people's mistakes as well as your own.
  • Learning only from one’s own experience, and minimizing what one learns from the good and bad experience of others, is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement Charlie Munger
  • Small changes only compound when they are oriented toward a larger outcome; otherwise they evaporate rather than accumulate. James Clear

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Design

• Less, but better

  Find the essence and cut the rest; simplicity is hard work, not the absence of effort.
  • Focus and simplicity are worth the work: simple can be harder than complex, because the thinking has to be got clean, but once there one can move mountains. Steve Jobs
  • Good design is as little design as possible: less, but better, because it concentrates on the essentials. Dieter Rams

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• Design is how it works

  Judge a design by what it does for the person using it, not only by how it looks.
  • Design is not how a product looks; it is how it works, and all builders are designers. Julie Zhuo
  • The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness, but only well-executed objects can be beautiful. Dieter Rams

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• You are not the user

  Watch real people use the real thing; your own sense of what is obvious does not count as evidence.
  • Even the worst usability test with the wrong user shows important things to improve Steve Krug
  • A static artboard makes edge cases hard to think of, so you end up designing only the happy path, because you are not testing with real data or real components. Pablo Stanley

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• Conventions (Jakob's law)

  People bring what they learned on every other product, so familiar patterns usually win over novel ones.
  • Users spend most of their time on other sites, so they prefer yours to work the same way as the sites they already know. Jakob Nielsen
  • Widely shared interface conventions amount to a form of mass education nobody enrolled in. Kenneth Reitz

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• Affordances and signifiers

  An interface should show what can be done and where, and give people a model of how it works.
  • Affordances determine what actions are possible and signifiers communicate where to act, and design needs both Don Norman
  • Graphical interfaces have superior usability because they show people what can be done rather than requiring them to articulate what they want. Jakob Nielsen

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• Conservation of complexity

  Some complexity cannot be removed, only moved; the question is who carries it, the user or the maker.
  • Every application has an irreducible amount of complexity; the only question is who has to deal with it: the user, the application developer or the platform developer. Larry Tesler
  • Good interface design uses clarity to hide complexity; good game design uses clarity to teach it. Raph Koster

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• Make it real

  Build a prototype; it settles arguments a description cannot.
  • In a product review a prototype beats a static mock, and a static mock beats a lot of words. Dylan Field
  • Mocks and docs are dying: AI-native teams prototype and prune with code-first prototypes instead of static mocks and product requirement documents. Julie Zhuo

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• Speed is a feature

  Fast software feels simple, and waiting makes everything feel complicated.
  • Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. Craig Mod
  • Savings in time feel like simplicity: when forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. John Maeda

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• Craft in the details

  Care about the parts nobody sees; quality shows in the details.
  • You are not a craftsperson unless you care about the parts of a product that other people do not see. Tobias Lütke
  • Good design is thorough down to the last detail: nothing must be arbitrary, and care in the design process shows respect towards the user. Dieter Rams

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• Taste is trained

  Taste is learned by exposing yourself to the best work and asking why it works.
  • Great work comes down to taste: exposing yourself to the best things humans have done and bringing them into your own. Steve Jobs
  • Taste is not innate; it is a loop of noticing whether you like something, asking why, and learning the canon that led to it. Dylan Field

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Questions

The same claims, read as the views people take on a question.

• Which mental models help you think better?

  23 people · 16 views

• Which mental models should a designer think with?

  37 people · 10 views

• Why is it harder to simplify than to add?

  31 people · 5 views