Mental models can be a great way to help understand the world. Rather than just memorizing facts, which also can be important, mental models provide a way to tie ideas together so you can quickly make sense of new situations.
Charlie Munger is perhaps the most well-known person that thrives on mental models, and he summarizes them this way:
“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. 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.”
21?
If you’re familiar with the concept of mental models, you probably noticed the “21” in the title of this post and wondered what that was about. If you do some digging into mental models, you’ll find that there is no specific “list” of them, and there are likely hundreds of them out there; I simply chose to pick 21 that I felt mattered most to start with.
As with much of this blog, I’m writing to learn. I certainly hope that you find these posts valuable, but I’m doing this exercise to force me to dig into these models and learn them a bit better.
They’ll be shared in alphabetical order, as it’d be nearly impossible to sort them by importance or anything. Here is the list, which I’ll update with links to each post as they come out over the coming weeks.
- Advantages of Scale
- Base Rates
- Checklists
- Circle of Competence
- Creative Destruction
- Division of Labor
- First Principles Thinking
- Hanlon’s Razor
- Incentives
- Inversion
- Law of Small Numbers
- Occam’s Razor
- Pareto Principle
- Probabilistic Thinking
- Reason Respecting
- Redundancy
- Second-Order Thinking
- Skill Stack
- Social Proof
- The Map is Not the Territory
- Thought Experiments
If you’ve dug into mental models before, is there one that you find to be particularly useful?
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