The Great Mental Models Vol. 1: General Thinking Concepts - By Shane Parrish & Rhiannon Beaubien
Date read: 2025-01-07How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
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Mental models act as cognitive frameworks to help understand, interpret, and navigate the world around them. Book one of a four volume series goes through the general thinking concepts and how to apply them in your thinking. A fantastic book on thinking better and for making better decisions.
Contents:
- THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY
- CIRCLE OF COMPETENCE
- FIRST PRINCIPLES THINKING
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- SECOND-ORDER THINKING
- PROBABILISTIC THINKING
- INVERSION
- OCCAM'S RAZOR
- HANLON'S RAZOR
My Notes
The further we are from the feedback on our decisions, the easier it is to convince ourselves that we are right and avoid the challenge, the pain, of updating our views.
Even the best maps are imperfect. That's because maps are reductions of what they represent. If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be a reduction and thus would no longer be useful to us.
A great example is the financial statements of a company, which are meant to distill the complexity of thousands of transactions into something manageable. Yet they tell us nothing about whether the product is good for the customer or what's really going on in the company.
A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory. The London Underground map is super useful to travelers. The train drivers don't use it at all! Maps describe the territory in a useful way, but with a specific purpose in mind. They cannot be everything to everyone.
When we mistake the map for the territory, we start to think we have all the answers. We create static rules or policies that deal with the map but forget that we exist in a constantly changing world. When we close off or ignore feedback loops, we don't see that the terrain has changed and we dramatically reduce our ability to adapt to a changing environment.
Models (aka Maps) are tools for exploration, not doctrines to force conformity. They are guidebooks, not laws.
Consider the cartographer: Maps are not purely objective creations. They reflect the values, standards, and limitations of their creators.
Our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. The best we can do is to choose our mapmakers wisely, to seek out those who are rigorous, transparent, and open to revision.
We all have a circle of competence - an area in which we have a lot of knowledge. The size of that circle is not as important as knowing when you are approaching its perimeter.
If you don't have at least a few years and a few failures under your belt, you cannot consider yourself competent in a circle.
Journals allow you to step out of your automatic thinking and ask yourself: What went wrong? How could I do better? Monitoring your own performance allows you to see patterns that you simply couldn't see before.
There are three practices necessary to successfully operating outside a circle of competence:
Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis. This is a disciplined questioning process used to establish truths, reveal underlying assumptions, and separate knowledge from ignorance.
Socratic questioning generally follows this process:
Thought experiments are powerful because they help us learn from our mistakes and avoid future ones. They let us evaluate the potential consequences of our actions, take on the impossible, and reexamine history to make better decisions. They can help us figure out both what we really want and the best way to get there.
Much like the scientific method, a thought experiment generally has the following steps:
Ask yourself: "If money were not object" or "if you had all the time in the world."
A thought experiment allows us to verify whether our natural intuition is correct by running experiments in our deliberate, conscious minds that make a point clear.
An example of this is the famous "veil of ignorance" proposed by philosopher John Rawls in his influential book A Theory of Justice. To figure out the most fair and equitable way to structure society, he proposed that the designers of said society operate behind a veil of ignorance. This meant that they could not know who they would be in a society they were creating. If they designed the society without knowing their economic status, their ethnic background, their talents and interests, or even their gender, they would have to put in place a structure that was as fair as possible in order to guarantee the best possible outcome for themselves.
Second-order thinking avoids problems before they happen by asking, "And then what?"
Warren Buffett used a very apt metaphor once to describe the second-order problem, likening it to a crowd at a parade: Once a few people decide to stand on their tiptoes to see better, everyone has to stand on their tiptoes. No one can see any better, but they're all worse off.
Second-order thinking needs to evaluate the most likely consequences, checking our understanding of what the typical results of our actions will be. If we worried about all possible effects of the effects of our actions, we would likely never do anything, and we'd be wrong. How you balance the need for higher-order thinking with practical, limiting judgment must be taken on a case-by case basis.
Probabilistic thinking is essentially trying to estimate, using some math and logic, the likelihood of any specific outcome occurring. It is one of the best tools we have to improve the accuracy of our decisions.
Bayesian Thinking: Given that we have limited but useful information about the world, and are constantly encountering new information, we should consider what already know - as much of it as possible - when we learn something new. Bayesian thinking allows us to use all relevant prior information in making decisions. For example, look at past trends or base rates when analyzing a new statistic.
When making uncertain decisions, it's nearly always a mistake not to ask: What are the relevant priors? What might I already know that I can use to better understand the reality of the situation?
Most of us tend to think one way about a problem: forward. Inversion allows us to flip the problem around and think backward. Sometimes it's good to start at the beginning, but it can be more useful to start at the end.
Start by assuming that what you're trying to prove is either true or false, then show what else would have to be true to make that so.
Instead of aiming directly for your goal, think deeply about what to avoid and then see what options are left over.
Force Field Analysis:
Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones.
This is one way to understand simplicity: an explanation can be simplified only to the extent that it can still provide an accurate understanding.
We should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity.