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Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions

94 points by MurizS 6y ago

MichaelZuo 6y ago
Definitely useful in my experience. Mental models provide a flexible framework for so many types of thinking that it becomes an extension of your mind that sublimates into the background.
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  What’s an example, cause they seem awesome on paper but I wonder if they change the decision in real life because of the emotional or I like this aspect
  - MichaelZuo 6y ago
    A clear example would be the mental model of an animal cell’s functions. In reality it’s such a sophisticated construct that no one could actually understand everything about it in entirety, there has to be a reduction, an abstraction so to speak, somewhere along the way. And voila, turns out mental models are the best way of doing this. The best areas for applying this in general are the areas simply too complex without reduction.
hirundo 6y ago
Fallacies are mental models too.
madballster 6y ago
So why are "mental models" the best way to make intelligent decisions? What other ways to make intelligent decisions exist? The blog post failed to explain that, it largely appears to be marketing material.
- santiagobasulto 6y ago
  I guess the reciprocal is “no mental models”, which would involve making decisions without the power of these “general thinking patterns”.
- atoav 6y ago
  I think most people use mental models to geht to decisions. It is just that these mental models are usually implicit — so if you would ask somebody what their mental model behind a specific decision was they might not be able to tell you. These mental models are explicit, this is good because it moves a process that was subconscious into the light of day. And why is this good? Because we all encounter situations in which our existing ways of thinking and deciding will fail. Isn't it good to then be able to shape the direction of your own thoughts in such a situation? Of course this takes a little practise: especially in stress situations most people wouldn't think about the way they are thinking even for a moment, because it is maybe a bit too meta and needs to be thought on purpose. In my experience this is the best thing you can do in stress situations (unless it is a matter of life and death) is to give yourself a moment, observe yourself from the outside and actively decide which way you are going to think about the solution. So mental models can be a way to break up your own thinking and avoid doing something out of reflex or because you always do it that way. Of course blindly following mental models and applying them to everything can also be a bad thing, like every tool could if you just use it wrong enough.
  - Retric 6y ago
    The overhead of explicit mental models means their terrible for any complex decision making process. Try an apply them to an extremely well studied problem like say chess and you still get stomped by people with even basic skills. Less obviously all real world problems you need to actually consider end up being complex with a huge number of subtle interactions. What’s actually useful 99.9% of the time is either external models that can run on computers, or implicit models developed by synthesis of knowledge and practice. PS: Mental models can be useful in extremely stressful situations where there is no need to act quickly or come up with complex solutions. There is a hurricane forecasted to hit this area in 5 days doesn’t need a great solution just a set of reasonable choices.
tilt_error 6y ago
These are not what I would call mental models. These are strategies (in various forms) and, as such, relatively vague strategies for assembling mental models. Mental models live on a continuum ranging from directly incorrect to accurate. You always have them, mostly the incorrect ones early on in your career. With wisdom comes the accurate mental models and I would kill (not literally of course) for obtaining the good ones :)
Infiltrator 6y ago
I'd like to take a moment to thank the author of this blog post for some of the most engaging content I've read in a long time. Thank you!
mihirchronicles 6y ago
I am working on wisecharlie.com and mental models are really valuable.
jvanderbot 6y ago
It is true that mental models are a natural way to think about the world. I think it's so natural that it doesn't need to be called out. It's better to focus on honing your models than it is to look at the meta-process surrounding the existence of models, I think. I mean, for example, why worry about filling a perceived gap in your mental models (e.g., ponder the existence of the Overton Window as a model of group decision making and political discourse), when just learning about the Overton Window (without all this mental model meta-tagging) is already a useful thing to think about when making decisions. I'm glad that the "General thinking concepts" are not being cast as "mental models", that would be a meta-classification error. (Aphorisms != Models the same way as Information!=Data or Knowledge!=wisdom). But seriously, this is just a book marketing page that keeps getting re-written and re-posted over and over.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Barrin92 6y ago
mental models are terrible. This entire farnam street /rationalist culture is terrible, fallacy screaming falls into the same category. The reason why it's terrible is because mental models are like a sort of jumbled set of tools, copied over from somewhere else. Deep and genuine knowledge is tacit, integrated, incorporates experience and is organic. It's acquired through training and expertise and often can't be verbalised or formalised. Relying on mental models is a sort of crutch. Maybe a good comparison is chess playing. If you're a new chess player you learn that pieces are worth X points, and that such and such squares are important, and that's basically like these sorts of models. Really good chess players don't consciously think like that, at least not in a sort of pronounced way. They've incorporated knowledge and play by intuition. They can make 'good moves' in a second or two. I don't know why these 'fallacies' and 'mental model' things have taken off so much within certain circles, I feel like it's because people do nothing else other than reading these blogs. Real expertise or knowledge isn't gained by sitting around and 'thinking through stuff', it's by coming into interaction with the real world and immersing yourself in what you want to get better at.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  If you’re not an expert, you can quickly improve your thinking using some of these concepts. For a variety of reasons, it’s not possible for most people to only do things they have mastered.
- troughway 6y ago
  Because they get clicks by calling you ignorant and telling you that you don’t know anything and they have all the answers. The amount of tech blogs talking down to their audience is staggering.
- olipi 6y ago
  I agree with what you said, but I don't think it invalidates the usefulness of "mental model" thinking. I like that you used the word "tacit," because I think that's exactly what somebody like Charlie Munger would point out: when dealing with complex issues, people often rely on their tacit knowledge and, because of their own limitations and biases, miss some of the most fundamental and obvious aspects of their problem. An example he uses is the introduction of New Coke: Munger describes a number of extremely basic biological and psychological concepts that could have predicted the failure of New Coke, things that are part of every 100-level course in those subjects, and yet the executives at Coke still managed to completely fail to integrate that knowledge into their decision-making. I'm not all on the hype train, but I do think the idea of applying a broad set of concepts to complex problems can be really, really useful, and sometimes will produce better results than relying on your tacit knowledge. There are of course problems where this is not true, and knowing the difference is important. Mental model thinking will probably not generate the next big breakthrough in some highly technical field like math or physics, for example. But that doesn't mean it has no value.
auggierose 6y ago
If mental models are so great, why is most software refusing to give us one for how it works?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
haltingproblem 6y ago
I posted this comment in an earlier thread on Mental Models but here it goes again. Remember when someone is pushing something ask yourself - what is their agenda? Farnam Street's Shane Parrish is the newsletter and subscription business, just like CNBC is in the financial infotainment business not in the investment or wealth creation business. They want you think of them as the authority by peddling ideas from an place of authority without actually providing a track record of success. CNBC's Jim Cramer's stock recommendations on evaluation had a worse than S&P record and subsequently pulled from his site. Mental model are quite interesting to read but applying them is another matter. It like asking Tiger Woods for golf lessons. I have been reading mental models for a couple decades now. I decided to pick one model and focus on applying it - invert always invert. This one simple rule has been really hard to apply. One, it is really really hard to remember to apply in the heat of decision making. Two, you cannot just apply it. That requires practice with an expert practitioner like an apprenticeship (guilds), extended internship (law/finance) or residency (medicine). You cannot just pick it up by reading a damn article or book. Let me give an analogy of trying to reason about physical properties from first principles which is another "mental model". This is another popular exhortation - think from first principles just like Feynman or Fermi. Apparently, Fermi figured out the yield from the first test nuclear blast by tossing paper confetti over his head and calculating the yield from the scatter from the blast wave. I can think from first principles in one extremely narrow field where I happen to have half a decade of education and 20 years of experience. To reason from first principles like Fermi or Feynman in a broad domain like physics requires a world class mind, a world class education and a world of experience. Seriously, WTF. Most mental model writing is akin to consuming youtube fitness porn. It looks easy to do, you look cool doing it and the end results are just spectacular. However, like Arnold or David Goggins it requires an inhuman dedication, purpose, ability to withstand pain, bounce back from trauma and just keep sacrificing attitude for a couple of decades with a healthy dose of failure. Most of the time the only person benefiting is the video creator from the ad-roll. I appreciate the posts but I now believe these mental models are incredibly hard to do and like most of the self-improvement/growth hacking genre is just good for entertainment and commerce 99.99% of the time.
jlj 6y ago
This book talks about in mental models in depth, "Deep Survival" by Lawrence Gonzales [1]. Mental models can contribute to death in survival situations because they are biased by past experience. Being adaptable and practicing resilience is a much better survival strategy. A dark sense of humor helps too. It's a really great read on how the brain works. It helped me understand some of my own fears about the COVID pandemic. It also helps me understand (but not agree with) why some people are so resistant to wearing masks when it might keep their loved ones alive. The book gives examples of mountaineering accidents. The mental model says that the group is roped in together. Symbolically, everyone is a team, in it together. But guess how much physical force is generated by gravity when 150+ pounds of person and gear when a fall reached the end of a 50ft rope? More than what physical strength and crampons can support. That one mental model comes up a lot in mountaineering accident reports. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0393326152 https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0393326152
tjbiddle 6y ago
I very much enjoy mental models. A close friend and myself have a weekly mastermind where we go over what's happening for us on both a personal and professional level. It keeps us both in check and allows us to come to conclusions more effectively. For the past couple months we've introduced going over a mental model every week as well. We'll summarize it in our own words, discuss examples of how we can use it - or when it makes sense to avoid it. They're not end-all-be-all, but they're a great thing to use as a starting point.

94 points by MurizS 6y ago

Definitely useful in my experience. Mental models provide a flexible framework for so many types of thinking that it becomes an extension of your mind that sublimates into the background.

zaphirplane 6y ago
What’s an example, cause they seem awesome on paper but I wonder if they change the decision in real life because of the emotional or I like this aspect
- MichaelZuo 6y ago
  A clear example would be the mental model of an animal cell’s functions. In reality it’s such a sophisticated construct that no one could actually understand everything about it in entirety, there has to be a reduction, an abstraction so to speak, somewhere along the way. And voila, turns out mental models are the best way of doing this. The best areas for applying this in general are the areas simply too complex without reduction.

hirundo 6y ago

Fallacies are mental models too.

madballster 6y ago

So why are "mental models" the best way to make intelligent decisions? What other ways to make intelligent decisions exist? The blog post failed to explain that, it largely appears to be marketing material.

santiagobasulto 6y ago
I guess the reciprocal is “no mental models”, which would involve making decisions without the power of these “general thinking patterns”.
atoav 6y ago
I think most people use mental models to geht to decisions. It is just that these mental models are usually implicit — so if you would ask somebody what their mental model behind a specific decision was they might not be able to tell you. These mental models are explicit, this is good because it moves a process that was subconscious into the light of day. And why is this good? Because we all encounter situations in which our existing ways of thinking and deciding will fail. Isn't it good to then be able to shape the direction of your own thoughts in such a situation? Of course this takes a little practise: especially in stress situations most people wouldn't think about the way they are thinking even for a moment, because it is maybe a bit too meta and needs to be thought on purpose. In my experience this is the best thing you can do in stress situations (unless it is a matter of life and death) is to give yourself a moment, observe yourself from the outside and actively decide which way you are going to think about the solution. So mental models can be a way to break up your own thinking and avoid doing something out of reflex or because you always do it that way. Of course blindly following mental models and applying them to everything can also be a bad thing, like every tool could if you just use it wrong enough.
- Retric 6y ago
  The overhead of explicit mental models means their terrible for any complex decision making process. Try an apply them to an extremely well studied problem like say chess and you still get stomped by people with even basic skills. Less obviously all real world problems you need to actually consider end up being complex with a huge number of subtle interactions. What’s actually useful 99.9% of the time is either external models that can run on computers, or implicit models developed by synthesis of knowledge and practice. PS: Mental models can be useful in extremely stressful situations where there is no need to act quickly or come up with complex solutions. There is a hurricane forecasted to hit this area in 5 days doesn’t need a great solution just a set of reasonable choices.

tilt_error 6y ago

These are not what I would call mental models. These are strategies (in various forms) and, as such, relatively vague strategies for assembling mental models. Mental models live on a continuum ranging from directly incorrect to accurate. You always have them, mostly the incorrect ones early on in your career. With wisdom comes the accurate mental models and I would kill (not literally of course) for obtaining the good ones :)

Infiltrator 6y ago

I'd like to take a moment to thank the author of this blog post for some of the most engaging content I've read in a long time. Thank you!

mihirchronicles 6y ago

I am working on wisecharlie.com and mental models are really valuable.

jvanderbot 6y ago

It is true that mental models are a natural way to think about the world. I think it's so natural that it doesn't need to be called out. It's better to focus on honing your models than it is to look at the meta-process surrounding the existence of models, I think. I mean, for example, why worry about filling a perceived gap in your mental models (e.g., ponder the existence of the Overton Window as a model of group decision making and political discourse), when just learning about the Overton Window (without all this mental model meta-tagging) is already a useful thing to think about when making decisions. I'm glad that the "General thinking concepts" are not being cast as "mental models", that would be a meta-classification error. (Aphorisms != Models the same way as Information!=Data or Knowledge!=wisdom). But seriously, this is just a book marketing page that keeps getting re-written and re-posted over and over.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Barrin92 6y ago

mental models are terrible. This entire farnam street /rationalist culture is terrible, fallacy screaming falls into the same category. The reason why it's terrible is because mental models are like a sort of jumbled set of tools, copied over from somewhere else. Deep and genuine knowledge is tacit, integrated, incorporates experience and is organic. It's acquired through training and expertise and often can't be verbalised or formalised. Relying on mental models is a sort of crutch. Maybe a good comparison is chess playing. If you're a new chess player you learn that pieces are worth X points, and that such and such squares are important, and that's basically like these sorts of models. Really good chess players don't consciously think like that, at least not in a sort of pronounced way. They've incorporated knowledge and play by intuition. They can make 'good moves' in a second or two. I don't know why these 'fallacies' and 'mental model' things have taken off so much within certain circles, I feel like it's because people do nothing else other than reading these blogs. Real expertise or knowledge isn't gained by sitting around and 'thinking through stuff', it's by coming into interaction with the real world and immersing yourself in what you want to get better at.

1123581321 6y ago
If you’re not an expert, you can quickly improve your thinking using some of these concepts. For a variety of reasons, it’s not possible for most people to only do things they have mastered.
troughway 6y ago
Because they get clicks by calling you ignorant and telling you that you don’t know anything and they have all the answers. The amount of tech blogs talking down to their audience is staggering.
olipi 6y ago
I agree with what you said, but I don't think it invalidates the usefulness of "mental model" thinking. I like that you used the word "tacit," because I think that's exactly what somebody like Charlie Munger would point out: when dealing with complex issues, people often rely on their tacit knowledge and, because of their own limitations and biases, miss some of the most fundamental and obvious aspects of their problem. An example he uses is the introduction of New Coke: Munger describes a number of extremely basic biological and psychological concepts that could have predicted the failure of New Coke, things that are part of every 100-level course in those subjects, and yet the executives at Coke still managed to completely fail to integrate that knowledge into their decision-making. I'm not all on the hype train, but I do think the idea of applying a broad set of concepts to complex problems can be really, really useful, and sometimes will produce better results than relying on your tacit knowledge. There are of course problems where this is not true, and knowing the difference is important. Mental model thinking will probably not generate the next big breakthrough in some highly technical field like math or physics, for example. But that doesn't mean it has no value.

auggierose 6y ago

If mental models are so great, why is most software refusing to give us one for how it works?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

haltingproblem 6y ago

I posted this comment in an earlier thread on Mental Models but here it goes again. Remember when someone is pushing something ask yourself - what is their agenda? Farnam Street's Shane Parrish is the newsletter and subscription business, just like CNBC is in the financial infotainment business not in the investment or wealth creation business. They want you think of them as the authority by peddling ideas from an place of authority without actually providing a track record of success. CNBC's Jim Cramer's stock recommendations on evaluation had a worse than S&P record and subsequently pulled from his site. Mental model are quite interesting to read but applying them is another matter. It like asking Tiger Woods for golf lessons. I have been reading mental models for a couple decades now. I decided to pick one model and focus on applying it - invert always invert. This one simple rule has been really hard to apply. One, it is really really hard to remember to apply in the heat of decision making. Two, you cannot just apply it. That requires practice with an expert practitioner like an apprenticeship (guilds), extended internship (law/finance) or residency (medicine). You cannot just pick it up by reading a damn article or book. Let me give an analogy of trying to reason about physical properties from first principles which is another "mental model". This is another popular exhortation - think from first principles just like Feynman or Fermi. Apparently, Fermi figured out the yield from the first test nuclear blast by tossing paper confetti over his head and calculating the yield from the scatter from the blast wave. I can think from first principles in one extremely narrow field where I happen to have half a decade of education and 20 years of experience. To reason from first principles like Fermi or Feynman in a broad domain like physics requires a world class mind, a world class education and a world of experience. Seriously, WTF. Most mental model writing is akin to consuming youtube fitness porn. It looks easy to do, you look cool doing it and the end results are just spectacular. However, like Arnold or David Goggins it requires an inhuman dedication, purpose, ability to withstand pain, bounce back from trauma and just keep sacrificing attitude for a couple of decades with a healthy dose of failure. Most of the time the only person benefiting is the video creator from the ad-roll. I appreciate the posts but I now believe these mental models are incredibly hard to do and like most of the self-improvement/growth hacking genre is just good for entertainment and commerce 99.99% of the time.

jlj 6y ago

This book talks about in mental models in depth, "Deep Survival" by Lawrence Gonzales [1]. Mental models can contribute to death in survival situations because they are biased by past experience. Being adaptable and practicing resilience is a much better survival strategy. A dark sense of humor helps too. It's a really great read on how the brain works. It helped me understand some of my own fears about the COVID pandemic. It also helps me understand (but not agree with) why some people are so resistant to wearing masks when it might keep their loved ones alive. The book gives examples of mountaineering accidents. The mental model says that the group is roped in together. Symbolically, everyone is a team, in it together. But guess how much physical force is generated by gravity when 150+ pounds of person and gear when a fall reached the end of a 50ft rope? More than what physical strength and crampons can support. That one mental model comes up a lot in mountaineering accident reports. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0393326152 https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0393326152

tjbiddle 6y ago

I very much enjoy mental models. A close friend and myself have a weekly mastermind where we go over what's happening for us on both a personal and professional level. It keeps us both in check and allows us to come to conclusions more effectively. For the past couple months we've introduced going over a mental model every week as well. We'll summarize it in our own words, discuss examples of how we can use it - or when it makes sense to avoid it. They're not end-all-be-all, but they're a great thing to use as a starting point.