It would be good to include some mental models for attitude towards money. Things I have noticed about myself:<p>No problem paying for something that absolutely needs to be done. E.g. repair a leak in the roof. Replace something.<p>Don't notice money spent on regular monthly payments. E.g. mortgage.<p>Don't notice $1000 spent as 50*$20 but more frightening to spend $1000 at once.<p>Fear of loss when investing is big. It feels like such a leap of faith to invest in anything.<p>However spending the same money as the investment on a holiday is OK for some reason.<p>Easier emotionally to not earn $1000 than to earn it and spend it, even though the financial outcome is the same. Has nothing to do with working hard etc.<p>It's hard to hodl!
Kent Beck has a similarly-themed list of mental models:<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/a-searching-and-fearless-intellectual-inventory/1179765038723025" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/a-searching-and-fea...</a><p>I love the idea of cataloging your interests at this high-level of abstraction, and wish it were more common.
The founder of DuckDuckGo published a similar list of mental models a little before this one. His list is longer, but there is some overlap between it and this one:<p><a href="https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-use...</a>
A personal favorite on the subject of mental models:
A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business
Charles Munger, USC Business School, 1994<p><a href="http://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html" rel="nofollow">http://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html</a>
Great list! Two criticisms:<p>1. One mental model that I applied when reading this post on mental models (so meta!) is "audience". As I was reading I thought to myself, "Who is this guy? Why should I trust his mental models? Is he living a life that I want to duplicate?" I mean it with respect and with no malice towards him, he's probably awesome. It's also possible to pick up useful mental models from people that you may not necessarily want to emulate. All I'm pointing out is that it's been really useful for me to consider the motivations and track record of the person giving me advice, before I take that advice to heart.<p>2. It's a long list! I wonder if it'd be more fruitful to have a shorter list, but to apply each mental model rigorously, every time. Charlie Munger (the guy who popularized mental models, as far as I can tell) himself is a huge advocate of checklists. I remember him saying something along the lines of "you have to be disciplined about your mental models. You have to apply every one, every time. You can't pick and choose."
<i>Efficient market hypothesis</i><p>That's a kind of ideological way to phrase the situation. It's easier to just describe the "stable market hypothesis"; however things are organized is the way that market structures have stably gone and thus can't easily be changed (whether market are efficient or not). This includes all the points in the parent <i>plus</i> the point that you may have improved on app/gimzo X significantly over the weekend but the market probably still won't jump to your solution easily because of mind-share/network-effect/existing-investment/market-leader's-connection-to-customers/etc.
Most of these are really good, especially productivity and time estimation.<p>Some I do not agree with (although perhaps the model presented is useful depending on desired outcome).<p>-Efficient market hypothesis: Markets are not fully efficient and the state of the world is not optimal. Thus opportunities exist. It's our job as engineers (and business people/humanitarians/writers/philosophers etc.) to recognize and correct these inefficiencies. Look for them. Its not easy and thus is called work. Do it anyway.<p>-Base Rates: People are over-optimistic. They are also bad at finding similar things to compare.<p>-Emic vs Etic: Dangerous form of mental laziness. While it might be "efficient" it leads to underestimating people and phenomenon, missing out on valuable information and, as the old saying goes, judging books by their covers. Sometimes valuable lessons and opportunities can be found in strange places. And often it isn't even what is said or even "anti-lessons". Better to remain somewhat open and listen without preconception and with consideration as much as possible.<p>-Bias for Action: Unsure about this one. Looking back I'm not sure if I regret more actions I didn't take or actions I took that were mistakes. I think probably the second has had more negative impact. But I've been a fairly active person, maybe for a less active person it would different. In my case though very often doing nothing would have been the better choice.<p>-Charitable interpretations: These do make relationships go better. Especially for people who take advantage of others. I'd recommend outward charitable interpretation, inward cynicism. It's usually more accurate for prediction. But cynicism does make a person unpleasant and negative so best not to display it.<p>-Global Utility: A dangerous precedent. But sometimes yes, indeed needed. Be extremely careful of deals with the devil though and prefer principal, honer and fairness as much as possible. The long term gains are usually greater. The long term effects of short term utility can sometimes be fatal.<p>-Reasonable Person Principal: Meh "reasonable" can be whatever a group decides. It's not always good. However, no need to keep someone around who doesn't fit the agenda. Hopefully you don't see them in the 30 under 30 list in a few years though.<p>Otherwise it's a pretty good list.
I think this is great! I love to explore how I think by asking myself questions on how I do things, be it decision making or planning.<p>I created this site which I use to help me figure things out.<p><a href="https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/topics/decisions/" rel="nofollow">https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/topics/decisions/</a>
<a href="https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/topics/planning/" rel="nofollow">https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/topics/planning/</a>
Great list. Incidentally I started an Instagram and Twitter account this week, to stick to my resolution for continued learning, where I plan to post one mental model per day. Please check it out if you're interested, and I'd appreciate your feedback.<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/mental.models/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/mental.models/</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/learnmodels/" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/learnmodels/</a>
Nice. This is a good addition to "List of cognitive biases", a Wikipedia article I've liked to read from time to time ever since I discovered it, years ago.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases</a><p>As a Stoic, it's good food for thought to improve your "perception" of life and the world.
Farnam Street Blog also has their comprehensive list of mental models: <a href="https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/" rel="nofollow">https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/</a>
What does LRU (least recently used) have to do with picking the highest-priority problem?<p>But overall, pretty good overview and I appreciate the links to other sources.
<i>Front page test – an ethical standard for behavior that evaluates each action through the lens of the media/outside world.</i><p><i>Example: What would happen if HN found out we’re mining our users’s IMs?</i><p>I feel like I might be okay with it if was a university (.edu domain) and I knew it was anonymized. Not sure I'd be okay with a random blog doing that.
Wow. This is a great list. I've seen individual ideas here and there but never put together in a list. This is excellent for exploring these ideas in one shot.
"The teaching method" - I observed this myself while helping Python newbies on the internet. Pretty often when you're answering a newbie question, you gain a deeper understanding of the problem. Newbies don't ask exactly the same questions as you have in the past, so you start seeing old problems in new light. Also, you dust off your skills.<p>Moral of the story: helping people on IRC can be a fun and enlightening past-time.
The method of loci[1] is missing from this list. I am a visual/spatial learner, and find it quite useful for quick information storage and retrieval.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci</a>
Emic and Etic:<p>I observed that I very often disagree with people who use anime forum avatars. A few of them came close to getting banned (I'm not a moderator anywhere), others made really poor arguments.
Re efficient market hypothesis + five forces: new markets are inefficient and you can sit on top of a big opportunity. More, when your company has real customer leads and profits.
I appreciate the planning fallacy. I usually do this implicitly but I just changed an expected timeline on a JIRA epic from 80 hours to 160 days after reading this.
Nice, but imho the list should be accompanied by at least three real-world examples per model.<p>Otherwise, many of the models may seem contrived and practically useless.