The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts

We don’t make decisions in a vacuum and we can’t get something for nothing. When making choices, considering consequences can help us avoid future problems. We must ask ourselves the critical question: And then what?

two areas where second-order thinking can be used to great benefit: Prioritizing long-term interests over immediate gains Constructing effective arguments

Warren Buffett used a very apt metaphor once to describe how the second-order problem is best described by a crowd at a parade: Once a few people decide to stand on their tip-toes, everyone has to stand on their tip-toes. No one can see any better, but they’re all worse off.

«When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.»

Things are not produced and consumed in a vacuum.

In 1963, the UC Santa Barbara ecologist and economist Garrett Hardin proposed his First Law of Ecology: “You can never merely do one thing.”3 We operate in a world of multiple, overlapping connections, like a web, with many significant, yet obscure and unpredictable, relationships.

Second-order thinking is thinking farther ahead and thinking holistically. It requires us to not only consider our actions and their immediate consequences, but the subsequent effects of those actions as well.

Reduce the Role of Chance

a thought experiment allows us to verify if our natural intuition is correct by running experiments in our deliberate, conscious minds that make a point clear.