When we were doing founder dating, IS prompted me with this question: “How do you arrive at your convictions? What are some key mental models you use to be creative, solve problems, or make decisions?”
I haven’t thought about this much so explicitly, but feel like I like and rely on a few mental models that I could catalog. Here are a few, grouped by broad categories of beliefs I hold.
Be wary of over-optimization
- Goodhart's law - indicators will be gamed
- McNamara Fallacy - choose meaningful metrics
- Efficiency is in tension with resilience
- The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure
- Two Watersheds - too much institutionalization
- Resilient systems need slack
Think before you act
Embrace complexity
- Parable of blind men and an elephant
- Multiple lenses are required to understand anything complex
- Chesterton's fence - understand before reforming
Think clearly about personal values
Prediction is hard
Futurists are often wrong, cf. energy predictions in Profiles of the Future by Arthur Clarke
Good things are rare
Argue honestly and think clearly
- Motte and bailey fallacy
- Whataboutism
- Overton window
- Steelmanning
- Outside view
- Active open mindedness
- Write down contradictions
Sometimes it's better together
Be unpredictable
Unsorted
Complex adaptive systems: You can’t solve -- or even understand -- major problems by looking at individual agents in isolation. Almost everything is a CAS: economies, societies, companies, climate, even us humans. Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows writes a lot about this.
The map is not the territory: Reality is far too complex and expansive for the human mind to comprehend without a bit of help, so we use representations that abstract and simplify that reality in order to orient ourselves. We can think of reality as “territory” and those representations as “maps.”
Feedback loops: In a feedback loop, even tiny increases and decreases can quickly spin up into exponential booms and busts.
#mentalmodel