Mental models are useful tools for thinking because they let us identify the structure of a system quickly, they are shortcuts for thinking strategically. I have some categories below which are rough and should not limit the use of a mental model beyond that category; it’s simply the origin or a common context.
Categories
Management
Physics
- Critical Mass
- Leverage
- Inertia
- Half-life
- Activation Energy
- Escape velocity
- Tipping point
Chemistry
Economics
- Compound growth
- Marginal gains in many aspects can have a big impact
- Discounting
- Opportunity cost
- Diminishing returns
- Double debt
Politics
- Gerrymandering
- Overton window
- Pied Piper
- Veil of Ignorance
- Divide and conquer
- Once voters are engaged with one question, political operatives can turn their attention to other issues
- Cultural capital
- Shibboleth
History
Biology
Design
- The shortest or most convenient path is not always the one designed
- Hype cycle
- Lindy Effect
- Complicated systems have high maintenance costs
Psychology
- Information inoculation
- Thought-action fusion
- Bandwagon fallacy
- Confirmation bias
- Information inoculation
- Hedonistic adaptation
- Peak-end rule
- Ulysses pact
- Appeal to nature
Medicine
Explaning
- Occam’s razor
- First-principles thinking
- the five whys
- Canary in a coal mine
- Faustian Bargain
- Hanlon’s razor
- Reductionism
Modeling
- Pareto Principle
- Face validity
- Predictive validity
- Overfitting
- Baye’s Rule
- Selection bias
- Sampling
- Data spending & Data splitting / Data leakage
- Normal Distribution
- Sensitivity Analysis
- Cost-benefit Analysis
- Though Experiment
Computer science
- Sorting
- Caching
- Scheduling
- Thrashing
- Computer science problems concern tradeoffs between space, time and certainty
Decision-making
- Regret minimisation
- Eisenhower Matrix
- One Level Higher
- A-B testing
- Explore Exploit
- Optimal stopping
- The Hamming question
- The Information Action Ratio
- Preserving optionality
Putting mental models to use
When optimizing systems
When using mental models we want to optimize systems, some examples:
- A process (economic growth, maintaining a romantic relationship)
- A business (sports team, company)
- A machine (toothbrush, rocket)
- A state of being (health, happiness)
1. One level Higher
Are you optimizing at the right level?
2. Theory of Constraints
Which of the system’s inputs holds the constraint to further progress? Where is the bottleneck?
3. First principles
If you don’t get to where you want to be using the theory of constraints, re-examine the system from the ground up. Work from the foundations to create something better.
When making decisions
Long-term: Regret Minimization
Long-term fulfillment
Medium-term: Pareto Principle
Years, decades Who to spend time with, which skills to hone, which career decisions to make
Short-term: ICE
Weeks and months
- Impact if successful
- Confidence that I will succeed
- How easy is this goal to pursue
Immediate: Eisenhower Matrix
Useful for making day-to-day decisions Eisenhower Matrix