Framers

Mental models bring order. They let us focus on essential things and ignore others—just as, at a cocktail party, we can hear the conversation that we’re in while tuning out the chatter around us. We craft a simulation of reality in our minds to anticipate how situations will play out.

Around the eleventh century, an innovation emerged. Books started to be produced with spaces between the words and rudimentary punctuation. It made reading easier in general, but especially silent reading—one could read a book on one’s own, without guidance.

Normally we learn when we receive information: when a teacher instructs, a book describes, an apprentice tinkers. But in the case of causal explanations, the person who imparts information, who does the explaining, actually learns as well.

Thomas Edison in the early 1900s believed motion pictures would replace classrooms—a vision only realized a century later when Zoom became the new schoolhouse.

The minimal-change principle pushes us in a particular direction when picking counterfactuals: we tend to omit rather than add. It is easier for us to imagine a world without some features of reality than to introduce ones that do not yet exist. If you are asked to imagine a color you haven’t seen before, you likely will fail.

At the core of any frame lies a trade-off. The fewer constraints, the more counterfactuals a frame can generate. This gives a decision-maker more options, but it also means that many impractical ones have to be weeded out. The more constraints, the fewer options a frame elicits. This helps keep the decision-maker focused, but runs the risk of missi

The Minimal-Change Principle When selecting which constraints to loosen or tighten, we should aim for the fewest, not the most, modifications. We should aspire to minimal change.

The frames we employ affect the options we see, the decisions we make, and the results we attain. By being better at framing, we get better outcomes.

Each year, more than 700,000 people around the world die from infections that antibiotics once cured but no longer do. The bacteria have developed resistance. The number of deaths is rising fast. Unless a solution is found, it is on track to hit ten million a year, or one person every three seconds.