Mental Model
Mental Models Explained, and to Carry Around in Your Head
Greetings! My name is Goliath Flores and I'm the creator of the unique Mariachi Mental Models deck of cards, and the founder of the musical band Mariachi Primera Costa. I'm typically an inquisitive person, and through my considerations about the world as it currently is, I deduced that many of the problems that people all over the world face can be better dealt with by being familiar with mental models. I also think that mental models are the singular intellectual tool for dealing with our current algorithm riddled media, and A.I. technology.
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All we want to do is make sense. Make sense of things around us, why we exist, our actions, and the outcomes we face.
Through evolution, the human mind has responded to this need by establishing a quick ability to view things in terms of cause and effect.
And that is pretty much how we all start out learning about the world from childhood.
Everything children know comes from what they’ve observed and experienced firsthand. How toys and candies are nice. How a hot stove isn’t. Their entire understanding of the world is based on these experiences. And therefore, they have no idea how most things work. They don’t know what they don’t know. You couldn’t walk a child through a class on biology, politics, or teach them how to tear apart a balance sheet (except for literally). Children have pretty much no concept of giant chunks of the world.
Well, that changes when growing up. That is when we realize how little of the world we understand. And when humans don’t understand something, it’s frustrating. Depressing. It’s interesting because you rarely see a depressed child.
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
Nassim Taleb
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Faced with how little we know, we cling to the initial method of cause and effect. Mental scars from bad experiences cause us to either stay completely away from certain endeavors because the past effect makes us not want to cause it again. Inversely, overconfidence from prior good experiences tends to cause us to turn overconfident in other endeavors.
Your own thoughts are not really your own thoughts. Everything you think is a product of the people you meet and the experiences you’ve had, both of which are largely outside of your control.
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The result is intuitions and hunches – or what Daniel Kahneman terms our system 1. And sometimes that is useful for certain decisions. But the result is also that we have a tendency to dismiss the impact of the millions of variables that lead to an outcome and we thus tend to focus on surface-level results – or single outcomes. It meanwhile leads to only thinking or caring about the first-order effects of a decision, and because it’s a shortcut, it occasionally results in decision-making errors – at times fatal. One would be a bit skeptical of the engineer who bragged about his ability to construct a bridge based solely on intuition and first-order thinking.
Therefore, the most important things usually require one to slow down and think. But learning how to think critically is not easy. Otherwise, everyone would do it. A world filled with huge complexity makes it impossible to carry every detail of it, and how it works, around in our heads. So we can’t know everything. But we can know the big ideas from multiple disciplines in order to face whatever we’re facing with rationality and a non-clobbered mind.
Enter mental models.
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What Are Mental Models?
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I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person’s brain because it understands the most fundamental models—ones that will do most work per unit. -Charlie Munger
Think about Munger’s quote. Every person routinely uses mental models, because essentially, they’re tools we use for explaining things. For example, when we cross a road, we mentally assess how matter moves in a particulate manner, the relationship between apparent size and distance, change in size with time and velocity, and so forth. We use these models to cross the road. But because mental models are so basic to understanding the world, people are hardly conscious of them. And so they don’t think about how to use them optimally.
However, the first part of making rational decisions is knowing the right models. Looking at a situation using the wrong models, or no model at all, is dangerous in decision making. Inversely, using the right models is a great source of competitive advantage in any endeavor.
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Man acts at all times on the models he has available... Anyone who proposes a policy, law, or course of action is doing so on the basis of the model in which he, at the time, has the greatest confidence.
- Jay Wright Forrester from the book, World Dynamics.
People’s views of the world, of themselves, of their own capabilities, and of the tasks that they are asked to perform, or topics they are asked to learn, depend heavily on the conceptualizations that they bring to the task. And so, every discipline of thought has its own set of models learned through coursework, mentorship, or first-hand experience.
Combining these models – or ideas – produces a cohesive understanding. Not combining them produces dangerous results.
Those who cultivate the broad view of ideas are well on their way to achieving worldly wisdom. But we can only get there by doing worldly studies over a long period of time, slowly building on top of the models already existing in our heads.
The following list is a rather comprehensive collection of useful mental models to understand the world, filter signal from noise, and shape connections.
That’s all well and good, but here’s the problem: Memorizing them is the easy part. Thoroughly understanding their flexibilities and limitations is the real task at hand.
As Richard Feynman once said:
No idea is true just because someone says so. Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment! If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it’s wrong!
The goal of thinking in terms of mental models is to continually refine our personal vision, to seek broadening of thought, to develop patience, and to seek objective reality.
It’s a lifelong, and very virtuous, project.
Mental Models link: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoliathWorld/comments/1ison9e/the_only_path_to_progress_and_sovereignty_for/
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Available now! - Mental Model mariachi cards.
