The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology

animals. We move in the direction of rewards and will easily take steps to avoid punishment. Humans, when we are thoughtful about incentives, will change our behavior to attain a perceived benefit. We will go through the same behavioral hoops to detour around perceived disadvantages.

But traveling to new places far outside our normal experiences can jolt us into remembering our train, seeing it in a new light, understanding better its size and shape, and remind us that not everyone is on it.

In chemistry, activation energy is the energy that must be delivered to a chemical system in order to initiate a reaction, breaking bonds so that new ones can form.

Medicine is one field where the concept of alloying comes in to play. Sometimes, a combination of two or more drugs can have a greater benefit than each drug individually. For

The drug companies regularly paid doctors for their endorsement, even going so far as to draft their lab articles.11 This created more incentives. The first financial incentive was payment, but then, once your name is linked with endorsement of a drug, you have an incentive in

activation energy is the energy that must be delivered to a chemical system in order to initiate a reaction, breaking bonds so that new ones can form.

One of the drawbacks of hierarchies is the lack of perceived value of those who are at the bottom. “An efficient new gathering strategy devised by a low-ranking chimpanzee, for example, might not get replicated just because of her status in society.”3 Hierarchies in the human world act as information filters causing us to potentially miss opportuni

Our behavior changes based on both actual reward and punishment and our perceptions of it.

You need three things for replication to occur: A code that represents what you wish to replicate, A means of copying this code, And a place to process the code and construct the replication.