The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has spoken often of the need, when faced with multidimensional problems, to take a “crude look at the whole”—a process he has even given an acronym, CLAW.

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.