The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts

Successfully thinking in shades of probability means roughly identifying what matters, coming up with a sense of the odds, doing a check on our assumptions, and then making a decision. We can act with a higher level of certainty in complex, unpredictable situations. We can never know the future with exact precision. Probabilistic thinking is an ext

This inversion approach became a staple of Bernays’s work. He used the descriptor “appeals of indirection”, and each time when “hired to sell a product or service, he instead sold whole new ways of behaving, which appeared obscure but over time reaped huge rewards for his clients and redefined the very texture of American life.”8

Bernays didn’t focus on how to sell more cigarettes to women within the existing social structure. Sales would have undoubtedly been a lot more limited. Instead he thought about what the world would look like if women smoked often and anywhere, and then set about trying to make that world a reality.

Instead, we can try inverting the goal. It becomes, not getting rich, but avoiding being poor. Instead of trying to divine the decisions that will bring wealth, we first try to eliminate those behaviors that are guaranteed to erode

By starting with the logical outcome of his assumptions and seeking to validate those, he advances his case with significantly more efficiency and accuracy than if he had searched first for proof of the assumptions themselves.

Why are more complicated explanations less likely to be true? Let’s work it out mathematically. Take two competing explanations, each of which seem to equally explain a given phenomenon. If one of them requires the interaction of three variables and the other the interaction of thirty variables, all of which must have occurred to arrive at the stat

This is a common human tendency, and it serves us well in some situations, such as creating art. However, complexity takes work to unravel, manage, and understand. Occam’s Razor is a great tool for avoiding unnecessary complexity by helping you identify and commit to the simplest explanation possible.

I joke with my kids that if you want to suck up someone’s brain, you should simply read a book. All the great wisdom of humanity is written down somewhere. When we were talking about mental models one day the kids asked if we had the mental models book. This made me pause, and I was struck with the realization that such a book didn’t exist. I didn’

We also tend to undervalue the elementary

Specifically, in his own words:2 1. A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory. The London underground map is super useful to travelers. The train drivers don’t use it at all! Maps describe a territory in a useful way, but with a specific purpose. They cannot be everything to everyone. 2. Two similar structur