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Mental models

Mental models are a way of thinking based on a concept and a field of knowledge. It allows the exploration of one idea with some pre-formed methods/lists that can be re-used to asses one problem. By having many mental models one can challenge a single problem in many ways and end up finding alternative solutions for it.

Charlie Munger makes the point that having many mental models and internalizing them as intuition, end up building worldly wisdom. People that use only one or two models to solve problems try to use the same models for everything, and by using them this way they end like a hammer, for a hammer everything is a nail.

So to think better is nice to have a latticework of mental models.

List of mental models

Here I list the mental models that I have studied until now. One can have as reference the following website to learn more: Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions

  • The map is not the territory - So we can easily understand the world we make abstractions and by doing this we relate the major contexts that we expect to encounter, but as a map, sometimes this abstractions are incomplete and we must check, what underneath beliefs are being broken.
  • How this can break - As an engineer I am constantly asking myself how one theory or one project can fall a part, I have noticed that this can be a mental model, and we can free ourselves to think otherwise as well. How can this work?
  • First principles thinking - When thinking about a hard subject sometimes we need to let beliefs and assumptions go before starting to analyse the problem. For that we can use two tools Five Whys or Socratic questioning [[202103180740-GreatMentalModelsVol1]].
    • Socratic questioning process
      • Question the rationality of you thinking, why do I think like this?
      • Invert assumptions, what if questions?
      • Find supporting evidence, what numbers hold my idea?
      • Find alternative ways of thinking, what others think?
      • Risc analysis, what can go wrong?
      • Reframe original questions
    • Five whys
      • Ask why until you end up on what or how. This way you can discard underlining assumptions.
  • When communicating remember to use the "who was going to do what, where, when, and why"

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