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An Astronaut’s Guide to Mental Models
- GaryNumanVevo 7y agoI've just discovered "Mental Models". It's really weird putting a name to the mechanisms I've used to explain and reason for as long as I can remember.
- newprint 7y agoSmell BS ? It is a new Buzz word. Just wait, it will pass.
- kempbellt 7y agoNot everyone has such a verbose vocabulary to describe the intricacies of the human mind and the mechanisms it uses to map and navigate the world. For a child "I pictured it in my head" is equivalent to an adult saying "I have a mental model of it"
- oh_sigh 7y agoThe term was coined in the 1940s so it is not likely a buzz word.
- andrewflnr 7y agoThe recent usage of "mental model" is. The fact that the term had a more useful meaning before makes its buzzwordification all the more irritating. Before a mental model was just a way you thought of something. Now they're Named Things to be shoehorned all over the place. Imagine if "design pattern" had been a casually but widely used term before Design Patterns came out (maybe it was, I wasn't around then).
- james_s_tayler 7y agoSo... What would you call them instead?
- andrewflnr 7y agoI would probably try to find a more specific term for the specific idea I'm talking about rather than try to use one term for all of them. That said, "heuristic" is a good term for a lot of them. "Framework" is another one that came up in this thread.
- james_s_tayler 7y agoThe entire reason to call them "Mental Models" is to aid in their communication and discovery. There are many hueristics that are not mental models. There are many things that are frameworks that are not mental models. Labelling something a "mental model" as used in this context serves the purpose to communicate "here is an abstraction with unusually good power-to-weight ratio that you can leverage to aide your thinking/reasoning about situations that meet a given set of criteria". It's actually a very specific thing.
- Dayjagupta 7y agoPromoting diverse and inclusive ways of thinking is a buzzword now?
- GaryNumanVevo 7y agoLess BS, it's just vocabulary that isn't widely circulated. Possibly due to a "rationalism" fad. I'm looking at you CFAR.
- morley 7y agoI've heard the word "heuristics" more recently, but I think I learned (and later forgot) both terms when I was a kid. One interesting thing about heuristics is that it's important to learn when they _don't_ apply. If a heuristic is true 80% of the time, it's also untrue 20% of the time. And the obverse to that thought is that you shouldn't let that 20% fail rate discourage you from using the heuristic the other 80% of times.
- dvt 7y agoThe "mental models" stuff just seems like gobbledygook. Hadfield is giving regular kind of advice you read everywhere from Sun Tzu to John Wooden: - Don't be selfish - Learn from your mistakes - Expect the unexpected - Etc. Doesn't really seem like Earth-shattering stuff.
- mathgladiator 7y agoIt's not so much earth shattering stuff so much as confirmation. These are not easy lessons for many people due to various psychological factors and history. It helps push people in the right direction when the message is given by someone that they respect. An interesting part of leadership can be repetition, so this feels reasonable.
- baddox 7y agoIs this confirmation useful? Or stated another way, would you feel less confident about aphorisms like "don't be selfish" and "learn from your mistakes" if a famous astronaut said they were bad ideas?
- mathgladiator 7y agoIt all depends on the person, who they look up to, their history, their biases. A selfish person that values space travel may ignore all other sources of information, but the astronaut saying it may cause a moment of reflection. Now, is this ideal? No, we are a strange-strange species.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoI might be more confident of them if a famous billionaire said they were bad ideas...
- themodelplumber 7y agoThere is a qualitative difference from model to model. I have a collection of hundreds of my own models, some of which are short and elegant, while others would print out into books easily (if edited down). It is rare indeed to find a non-obvious, useful mental model that can be boiled down to 5-10 words without losing significant leverage. However the _reason_ why they are boiled down to anything at all is due to a communications burden, such as that confronted while compiling mental models for publishing. That the author offers links to find out more is, I think, a reasonable effort at dealing with that problem. Let's say your friend asks you to summarize the value of _Jane Austen's_ works while you drive them home from the bookstore. You have been asked by your friend to build a mental model. How much reduction of your experience with the books is reasonable, and where does it lose leverage as a result of the reduction? Yet you have an opportunity to help someone make a great new discovery. This process can be very frustrating for the builder of the model. So while I appreciate a high-quality critique of a bad example of something, I have to say it seems like those examples are a bit reductionist and possibly unfair given the sheer number of mental models out there for examination, and the reasons for, or conditions under which they were selected for publishing or communication.
- harry8 7y agoI saw a BBC documentary where they interviewed every astronaut who had walked on the moon who would speak to them about life. Most were total and utter cranks! Strangest thing I've ever seen. You can understand why once you've seen it. Peaking at a young age, the incredible stress of being a test pilot and watching so many colleagues die through no fault of their own. The adulation for surviving, which really wasn't up to you. Etc. I have huge sympathy for all the Astronuats - not that they'd want it and good for them. But I'm not taking an astronauts advice on literally anything because they are or were an astronaut. Doing that ends up in the realms of spoon bending. If an astronaut has an idea it stands or falls on the merit of the idea. If you want a heuristic, most astronaut's ideas aren't worth your time. It's a sad conclusion to come to and I'm sure it's unpopular because we love having glamorous heroes but there it is.
- ken 7y agoI agree with your criticism of hero worship, and the personal issues with the early pilots / astronauts, but modern space flight is nothing like that. It's still dangerous, but our success rate with rockets is far, far better than it was in the 1960's. Complex systems, as Hadfield notes, succeed because of diligence and cooperation, not luck and cowboyism. Most astronauts in the 21st century don't have 1-in-4 of their colleagues killed on the job.
- harry8 7y agoAstronauts are still the monkeys in a can. The success or failure now as it always was is in the engineering team, not the warm body who (to paraphrase Carl Sagan) is /still/ really only present for PR purposes rather than to optimise the advancement of technology and science. Head of space flight engineering or whatever at NASA - yeah? Heuristic would be listen to them, they might know something. Monkey in the can on top of the fire-cracker? If they do know something it's more coincidence with their usefulness in PR than anything else. Sad but true. If NASA abandoned human flight tomorrow they'd probably get a lot more bang for buck - other than in PR because we love us a person to fuel our imagination and I am no different there. How flippin' cool is it ride the fireball into space?!?
- andrewflnr 7y agoI'm conflicted about the whole "Mental Model" thing that has sprung up in the last couple years. In principle, naming and sharing useful patterns of thought is useful. In practice, every time I see them like this they make my skin crawl. Mental models are supposed to just be models, but, like, in your mind. People are building a pyramid on a mole hill instead of just noticing the hill... Ah, just realized the applicable Mental Model according to TFA. They're blurring the distinction between the map (mental models) and territory (actual thinking). Ed: first paragraph was largely superfluous. Ed2: "building a pyramid on a mole hill" describes so many things. Did I just invent a Mental Model? I think I did.
- yayitswei 7y agoFwiw, I found the linked article on "The Map Is Not The Territory" an interesting read. https://fs.blog/2015/11/map-and-territory/ https://fs.blog/2015/11/map-and-territory/
- avindroth 7y agoThe origin of that idea is in this sequence of blog posts, written in roughly 2009: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory
- barrkel 7y agoThe origin of that phrase is actually Alfred Korzybski - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation ; also see Magritte's The Treachery of Images etc., the idea is not recent.
- themodelplumber 7y agoIt'd be nice if we could move the conversation about Mental Models into "how to evaluate such a model for quality" as soon as possible. Otherwise the novelty of the most recent proliferation of the term is pushing critics to decide "good or bad" regarding _mental models in general_, which is, to be frank, pretty dumb. Certainly such a dichotomy is much worse by itself than a broad field in which some poor models, applied poorly, are mixed in with a lot of really great examples. And I guess this doesn't even get into the value proposition of a task like cataloging mental models and/or quantifying them via simple lists...mental models are a core aspect of human psychology and there's really an impressive amount of depth to the topic. Ramming a bunch of them together for quantity seems like a good way to make readers feel either over-confident or overwhelmed.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y agoI did some work with a Design Anthropologist a while ago, in that field a Mental Model was used to describe how particular people think, and that was used to help solve their problems. That seems like a good use of the term. The way the term is used in the article, I would rather call a thinking style, or simply a way to think. I think there is value in them, but often they are pretty bloody obvious and not in anyway new. Circle of Competence is just playing to your strengths. Second Order Thinking is just imagining consequences. Generally they can be boiled down to a few question we can ask about a situation. What about this problem am I uncertain about? What assumptions am I making? How might I increase confidence in my solution? Anyway...they are here for a while.
- _jal 7y agoThe astronaut angle is just stupid clickbait. If you want to learn habits from people who make on-the-fly life-or-death decisions, there are much bigger pools of people who do that, who have experience much more relevant to what ever it is you're doing, than people who managed to survive in a space-can[1]. More applicably, the most common life-or-death decision made by people reading this is how much attention they pay while driving. Modeling that in a way that makes you better at it would likely provide substantially more, er, lack of bang for your buck than worrying how Armstrong made particular choices. [1] I don't mean to belittle astronauts - they're clearly exceptional in their own way. I'm questioning how relevant their unique experience is to others' lives, and what other relevant experience they far have that bigger pools of other people don't.
- zeroxfe 7y ago> The astronaut angle is just stupid clickbait. It's not an "angle" and it's definitely not clickbait -- they're excerpts from a book written by an astronaut. > the most common life-or-death decision made by people reading this is how much attention they pay while driving. Yes, sure, they should pay attention while driving, but why can't they also learn lessons from astronauts? > managed to survive in a space-can[1] > [1] I don't mean to belittle astronauts Sorry, it feels like you are. There's a lot of interesting and useful lessons in the article and the book, and you're kinda dismissing it just because it's from an astronaut.
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- jaunkst 7y agoWhen I hear mental model I am thinking more.of the lines of perception. The value of a mental model is understanding it. To the extent of replicating or teaching it. It is a model. A model is defining a set of relatable understanding to another. Finding a commen sense set of abstractions.