/awesome-mental-models

Curated list of awesome mental models / heuristics / intuition pumps / atomic habits / tools for thought

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Awesome Mental Models Awesome

Synonyms: heuristics, intuition pumps, design patterns, atomic habits, tools for thought

Contents

Books

Articles

Talks

Channels:

Websites

Study

Communities

Mental models list

Economics

  • Supply and Demand
  • Fear of Missing Out (FOMO): A pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.
  • Preferred Stock vs Common Stock: Preferred stock is a type of stock which may have any combination of features not possessed by common stock including properties of both an equity and a debt instrument, and is generally considered a hybrid instrument.
  • Margin of Safety: The difference between the intrinsic value of a stock and its market price.
  • Investing vs Speculation: Typically, high-risk trades that are almost akin to gambling fall under the umbrella of speculation, whereas lower-risk investments based on fundamentals and analysis fall into the category of investing.
  • Compound Interest: Interest on interest. It is the result of reinvesting interest, rather than paying it out, so that interest in the next period is then earned on the principal sum plus previously-accumulated interest.

Psychology

  • Cialdini's 6 principles of influence:
    • Commitment (“If people commit…they are more likely to honor that commitment.”)
    • Liking (“People are easily persuaded by other people they like.”)
    • Authority (“People will tend to obey authority figures.”)
    • Scarcity(“Perceived scarcity will generate demand”).
    • Social Proof (“People will do things they see other people are doing.”)
    • Reciprocity (“People tend to return a favor.”)
  • Survivorship Bias
  • Bandwagon: Appealing to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation.
  • The Socratic method: getting a "yes, yes" response. He kept on asking questions until finally, almost without realizing it, his opponents found themselves embracing a conclusion they would have bitterly denied a few minutes previously.
  • Pygmalion Effect: The phenomenon whereby higher expectations lead to an increase in performance. (opposite to the Golem effect).
  • Introversion vs Extroversion: Extroversion tends to be manifested in outgoing, talkative, energetic behavior, whereas introversion is manifested in more reserved and solitary behavior
  • 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.

Thinking

  • The Scientific Method
  • Inversion
  • Working Backward
  • 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.
  • Hindsight Bias: The inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it.

Biology

  • Evolution by Natural Selection

Chemistry

  • Activation Energy

Physics

  • Critical Mass: The smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction.
  • Relativity
  • Velocity
  • Activation Energy: The minimum energy which must be available to a chemical system with potential reactants to result in a chemical reaction.
  • Catalyst: A substance which increases the rate of a chemical reaction.
  • Leverage: The force amplification achieved by using a tool, mechanical device or machine system
  • Inertia: the resistance of any physical object to any change in its state of motion; this includes changes to its speed, direction or state of rest. It is the tendency of objects to keep moving in a straight line at constant velocity.
  • Half-life: the time required for a quantity to reduce to half its initial value. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo, or how long stable atoms survive, radioactive decay.
  • Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: A fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, known as complementary variables, such as position x and momentum p, can be known.

Work

  • Work isn't work: What seems like work to other people that doesn’t seem like work to you? (What doesn't seem like work?)
  • Hacking Tests: When evaluating a line of work, ask yourself: "To what extent do you win at this kind of work by hacking bad tests?" (The lesson to unlearn)

Engineering

  • Leverage

Mathematics

  • Normal Distribution (Bell Curve)
  • Permutations and Combinations
  • Power Laws

Managing

  • Weekly 1–1s: “1–1’s can add a whole new level of speed and agility to your company.”
  • Forcing Function — “A forcing function is any task, activity or event that forces you to take action and produce a result.”
  • DRI (Directly Responsible Individual): good things come if someone is explicitly responsible for something. (solution to "diffusion of responsibility" effect)
  • Virtual Team: A group of individuals who work across time, space and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technology
  • Organizational Debt: All the people/culture compromises made to ‘just get it done’ in the early stages of a startup.
  • Generalist vs Specialist: A generalist is a person with a wide array of knowledge, the opposite of which is a specialist.” (related: hedgehog vs fox — “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.

Mental models groups

Picked from the various books & articles listed above

  • Avoid present bias: Use commitment and the default effect.
  • Approaching systems:
    1. Local/Global: start by identifying the highest-leverage level to optimize at: Ask whether you’re optimizing the machine or a cog within it
    2. Theory of Constraints
    3. First Principles
  • Making decisions
    1. Long-term decisions: Regret Minimization
    2. Medium-term decisions: Pareto's Principle, GIST
    3. Short-term decisions: ICE
    4. Day-to-day decisions: Eisenhower Matrix

Logical fallacies