The Best Mental Models
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.
Neil Kakkar • Vocabulary as a Meta Mental Model
A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”
First principles thinking is a fancy way of saying “think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like, What are we... See more
First principles thinking is a fancy way of saying “think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like, What are we... See more
jamesclear.com • First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself
The map is not the territory is a mental model that reminds us not to confuse a model of a situation with the situation itself.
Your Innovator’s Toolkit: The map is not the territory
A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.
Farnam Street • Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained)
Rather than focusing on having a brilliant day, why not consider what a crap day would look like and avoid that? It will likely be easier and will achieve similar results. Or, as Charles Munger pointed out: "It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very... See more
Inversion
People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.
Henry L. Roediger III • Make It Stick
It’s crucial for us to understand as many mental models as possible. As the adage goes, a little knowledge can be dangerous and creates more problems than total ignorance. No single model is universally applicable – we find exceptions for nearly everything. Even hardcore physics has not been totally solved.