Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

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Highlights

Hanlon’s Razor — “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.” (related: fundamental attribution error — “ the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics of the agent (character or intention), rather than external factors, in explaining another person’s behavior in a given situation.”) (via) ^rwhi816035092

Occam’s Razor — “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” (related: conjunction fallacy, overfitting, “when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras.”) (via) ^rwhi816035211

Cognitive Biases — “Tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgments.” (See list of cognitive biases) (via) ^rwhi816035212

Arguing from First Principles — “A first principle is a basic, foundational, self-evident proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.” (related: dimensionality reduction; orthogonality; “Reasonable minds can disagree” if underlying premises differ.) (via) ^rwhi816035213

Systems Thinking — “By taking the overall system as well as its parts into account systems thinking is designed to avoid potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences.” (related: causal loop diagrams; stock and flow; Le Chatelier’s principle, hysteresis — “the time-based dependence of a system’s output on present and past inputs.”; “Can’t see the forest for the trees.”) (via) ^rwhi816035214

Power-law — “A functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one quantity varies as a power of another.” (related: Pareto distribution; Pareto principle — “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”, diminishing returns, premature optimization, heavy-tailed distribution, fat-tailed distribution; long tail — “the portion of the distribution having a large number of occurrences far from the “head” or central part of the distribution.”; black swan theory — “a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.”) (via) ^rwhi816035219

Pareto Efficiency — “A state of allocation of resources in which it is impossible to make any one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off…A Pareto improvement is defined to be a change to a different allocation that makes at least one individual better off without making any other individual worse off, given a certain initial allocation of goods among a set of individuals.” (via) ^rwhi816035226

Divergent Thinking vs Convergent Thinking — “Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. It is often used in conjunction with its cognitive opposite, convergent thinking, which follows a particular set of logical steps to arrive at one solution, which in some cases is a ‘correct’ solution.” (related: groupthink; Maslow’s hammer — “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”) (via) ^rwhi816035243

Introversion vs Extraversion — “Extraversion tends to be manifested in outgoing, talkative, energetic behavior, whereas introversion is manifested in more reserved and solitary behavior. Virtually all comprehensive models of personality include these concepts in various forms.” (via) ^rwhi816035306

IQ vs EQ — “IQ is a total score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess human intelligence.” “EQ is the capacity of individuals to recognize their own, and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different feelings and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior.” (via) ^rwhi816035328

Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset — “Those with a ‘fixed mindset’ believe that abilities are mostly innate and interpret failure as the lack of necessary basic abilities, while those with a ‘growth mindset’ believe that they can acquire any given ability provided they invest effort or study.” (via) ^rwhi816035343

Consequence vs Conviction — “Where there is low consequence and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate. And delegate completely, let people make mistakes and learn. On the other side, obviously where the consequences are dramatic and you have extremely high conviction that you are right, you actually can’t let your junior colleague make a mistake.” (via) ^rwhi816035553

High-context vs Low-context Culture — “In a higher-context culture, many things are left unsaid, letting the culture explain. Words and word choice become very important in higher-context communication, since a few words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group (but less effectively outside that group), while in a low-context culture, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important.” (via) ^rwhi816035566

Peter Principle — “The selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate’s performance in their current role, rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and ‘managers rise to the level of their incompetence.’” (via) ^rwhi816035583

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — “Maslow used the terms ‘physiological’, ‘safety’, ‘belongingness’ and ‘love’, ‘esteem’, ‘self-actualization’, and ‘self-transcendence’ to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through… [though there is] little evidence for the ranking of needs that Maslow described or for the existence of a definite hierarchy at all.” (via) ^rwhi816035599

Loyalists vs Mercenaries — “There are highly loyal teams that can withstand almost anything and remain steadfastly behind their leader. And there are teams that are entirely mercenary and will walk out without thinking twice about it.” (via) ^rwhi816035607

Strategy vs Tactics — Sun Tzu: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” (via) ^rwhi816035662

Unknown Unknowns — “Known unknowns refers to ‘risks you are aware of, such as cancelled flights….’ Unknown unknowns are risks that ‘come from situations that are so out of this world that they never occur to you.’ (related: Cynefin framework) (via) ^rwhi816035674

Containment — “A military strategy to stop the expansion of an enemy. It is best known as the Cold War policy of the United States and its allies to prevent the spread of communism abroad.” (via) ^rwhi816035731

Dunning-Kruger Effect — “Relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is…[and] highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.” (related: overconfidence effect) (via) ^rwhi816035768

Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong, will.” (related: Hofstadter’s Law, “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”) (via) ^rwhi816035800

Parkinson’s Law — “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” (via) ^rwhi816035789

Gate’s Law — “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” (via) ^rwhi816035796

Nature vs Nurture — “the relative importance of an individual’s innate qualities as compared to an individual’s personal experiences in causing individual differences, especially in behavioral traits.” (via) ^rwhi816035817

Natural Selection — “The differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in heritable traits of a population over time.” (via) ^rwhi816035823

Butterfly Effect — “The concept that small causes can have large effects.” (related: bullwhip effect — “increasing swings in inventory in response to shifts in customer demand as you move further up the supply chain.”) (via) ^rwhi816035832