Latticework of Mental Models

“You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life.

You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head. What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you've got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you're using, the nature of human psychology is such that you'll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you'll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.”

Charles. T. Munger

What Are Mental Models?

“Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.” Farnam Street

This page contains all the mental models that I have written about so far and I intend to write this as a personal project as well. These mental models will give you exposure to a lot of disciplines and at the same time improve your thinking and reduce your errors, and hopefully reduce the amount of impact of biases.

Note: I succumb to the biases that I write about regularly.


Core thinking concepts


  1. Incentives

  2. Circle of Competence

  3. Margin of safety

  4. The map is not the territory

  5. Occam’s Razor

  6. Hanlon’s Razor

  7. Anti Fragility

  8. Lollapalooza effect

  9. First principles thinking

  10. The Lindy effect

  11. Cloning

  12. Second Order Thinking

  13. Game theory

  14. Chaos theory

  15. Domain dependence


Psychology


  1. Commitment Bias

  2. Mimetic Desire

  3. Deprival Super reaction tendency

  4. Loss Aversion

  5. Herd Mentality

  6. Consistency Tendency

  7. First Conclusion Bias

  8. Envy

  9. Social Proof

  10. Sensitivity to fairness

  11. Survivorship Bias

  12. Do something bias

  13. Incentive bias

  14. Gambler’s fallacy

  15. Authority Bias

  16. Zeigarnik Effect

  17. Pavlovian Mere association

  18. Hindsight Bias

  19. Decision Making fatigue

  20. Falsification

  21. Variable Reinforcement theory

  22. Scarcity

  23. Availability bias

  24. Liking bias


Science


  1. Redundancy

  2. Critical Mass

  3. The idea of a Backup System: Very similar to the idea of redundancy.

  4. Principle of least action

  5. The idea of breakpoints

  6. Galilean relativity: Similar to relativity.

  7. Relativity

  8. Thermodynamics

  9. Inertia

  10. Reciprocity

  11. Friction and Viscosity

  12. Physics Envy

  13. Leverage

  14. Velocity

  15. Convergence

  16. Autocatlaysis


Mathematics


  1. Compounding 

  2. Probabilistic thinking

  3. Permutations and Combinations

  4. Mean Reversion

  5. Inversion

  6. Law of small numbers

  7. Law of large numbers

  8. Mutliplicative systems: Multiplying by Zero


Sport


Playing to the merit


Systems


  1. Feedback Loops

  2. Pari-Mutuel system

  3. Complex adaptive systems


Military/Politics


Mutually assured destruction


Other


  1. Northern Pike model

  2. DCF model

  3. Storytelling

  4. Gresham’s Law

  5. IEI test

  6. Chauffeur Knowledge

  7. Red Queen Effect

  8. Matthew effect

  9. Framing effect

  10. Process versus Outcome

  11. Power Law


Economics


  1. Opportunity Cost

  2. Mr Market

  3. Goodhart’s law

  4. Supply and Demand

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