
Mental Models to Make You a Worldly Wise Person - TechWriterTom
https://medium.com/swlh/100-mental-models-to-make-you-a-worldly-wise-person-19b9ca9d034c
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Barrin92
not a fan of this at all and I've seen this 'model based' arguing more and
more recently.

The blatant problem with it is that just like the appeal to fallacy stuff that
is very popular among certain groups of people it's not really intellect or
'wisdom' as much as a badly integrated bag full of tools that are too broad
and easily misapplied and used as crutches.

It's a little bit like people who think if they read 20% more books they're
20% more wise but that's not really how it works because genuine generalised
'wisdom' or intellectual feat isn't just a lose connection of piecemeal ideas.
The real intellectual effort is in the synthesis and the production of new
ideas which by definition aren't on a top 100 list.

~~~
oriel
I would add to this that making lists like this is akin to reading an
encyclopedic textbook front to back; theres no continuity or hydrating
component that clarifies the deeper meanings implied. In fact, these lists are
the scientific equivalent of motivational quotes people print on posters and
then never look at again.

Mental models as I've always seen them are icebergs, unique to every person,
closer in semantics (shape) for people who were trained similarly (via
academia or apprenticeship), and wildly different for those who came to a
model in a discipline from a completely different direction.

Used in lists like the one linked, we only see the tip of the iceberg, the
written anchor that can be used by someone else who has a similar model.
Otherwise we might as well hand this to a teacher in k-12 education and have
them be as well off as rote-memorizing formula in place of learning what a
subject is actually all about.

Mental models IMO should be formulated holistically, derived from examples,
allowed to be explored so the value of the wisdom becomes apparent to the
learner over multiple visitations. In this way we transfer and evolve the key
insights across a large number of contexts rather than hand someone a page of
ideas. The most common response to being handed a page like that is to say
"cool, thanks", save it to the HDD, and never look at it more than once.

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melling
At the library last week, I saw this book on mental models:

[https://www.amazon.com/Super-Thinking-Book-Mental-
Models/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Super-Thinking-Book-Mental-
Models/dp/0525533583/)

~~~
TechWriterTom
You might like his Medium post that preceded his book. The author is the guy
that started DuckDuckGo. [https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-
repeatedly-use...](https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-
useful-936f1cc405d)

