Vocabulary as a Meta Mental Model

This is what mental models are: ideas from diverse fields that can aid your life. In this sense, improving vocabulary is a meta mental model. It’s a way of finding and organising new mental models.

Names are excellent for creating larger chunks, since when done right, they pack lots of information into a single sentence.

Mastering these categories and where they apply will take time and experience. However, knowing the contradictions in each category helps master the category better. We’re using inversion to define the limits of the category.

If you have more categories, you can categorise things better. I think building these categories is worthwhile. Having a common name for a situation is a chunk you can unpack when needed. That’s what all adages, aphorisms, and proverbs are.

The better your vocabulary, the more aware you become about possible categorization errors.

Sometimes, knowing the name is good enough. Most cognitive biases work that way. Once you find out what availability bias is, you can figure out where you’ve fallen for it. Noticing availability bias without knowing it is much harder. It’s the same for emotions, ideas, design patterns, and specific situations in life. Having a name helps you notice... See more

Don’t learn a new language. You’ve covered what regular people talk about.5 Instead, dive deep into fields you know nothing about. Economics, Psychology, Philosophy, Physics, or applied rationality.

The collection of names is a dictionary. It helps you map different experiences to the same name. Not knowing which name to pin an experience with is a sign of confusion - you’re missing a category. If lots of different names fit, it’s a sign of nuance and complexity. Perhaps, it’s a lollapaloza effect.

The better your vocabulary, the more things you can name, the richer your base of raw materials to hang new ideas and experiences on.

Knowing the name of this idea gives you a scaffolding to hang your mind on. The name triggers the example in your mind.