
Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful (2016) - febin
https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d
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jonahx
Two similar lists:

Kent Beck's: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/a-searching-and-
fea...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/a-searching-and-fearless-
intellectual-inventory/1179765038723025)

Another one:
[https://www.defmacro.org/2016/12/22/models.html](https://www.defmacro.org/2016/12/22/models.html)

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cm2012
I would add one: 90% of the time someone acts irrationally (and they're not
mentally ill) it's due to insecurity of some sort.

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disishhsha
I’d expand this a lot. When someone tells you something about his or herself,
there’s a good chance they are trying to convince themselves of it.

I don’t mean that people are dishonest. It’s more that we mostly learn about
one another’s internal mental lives by telling each other about them. And our
ability to maintain a consistent theory of mind is limited. We walk around
worrying about this or that, and then we expose our mental states to one
another with a snippet of a stream of consciousness. So it’s only natural we
are constantly exposing our personal fears to one another.

~~~
sizzle
This is so true that you have to really develop an intuition for identifying
sociopaths that will manipulate this natural human trait for their gain. I've
had the displeasure of staying with a sociopathic lawyer one summer in my
younger years that was a pro at feigning mutual interest/mirroring your
insecurities to get on your good side and then gaslighting you to get you to
do them favors. In the end it was only minor things they got from me but the
lessons learned have been huge for me in the corporate world where I work with
these types of people, most often seen in senior management roles.

After having experienced it I'll never let someone use mw in that manner ever
again as I've learned how to call them out and use their own logic and tactics
against them and I've built some solid internal heuristics for spotting the
methods sociopaths employ to deceive people. Pretty fascinating subject, can
anyone relate to my experiences/expand on the topic?

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TomMarius
Could you please share an example so I could better imagine what you mean?
Thank you.

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nazgulnarsil
Don't miss out on two of the biggest benefits: mapping your own rather than
trying to learn someone else's list, and then refactoring the list you wind up
with for more compact representation. The easy way to do this was I just noted
down any time I noticed myself using a mental model for about 2 weeks. Once
new entries started tapering off I did the compression by trying to spot ways
I could organize the list into categories or relations. This significantly
improved the clarity of my thinking.

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r4um
Farnam Street curation is also good [https://fs.blog/mental-
models/](https://fs.blog/mental-models/)

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sikhnerd
(2016)

Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12040707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12040707)

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kelvin0
Trying to remember the items in the list of enumerated mental models described
is a feat in itself. This does not seem like a very practical approach for an
MM 'n00b' ...

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febin
There were some people here in HN trying to solve this problem. Have a look at
this one [https://github.com/marcelinollano/mental-
models](https://github.com/marcelinollano/mental-models)

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Rainymood
I like Polya's method as well:

1\. Understand the problem

2\. Devise a plan

3\. Execute said plan

4\. Review and reflect

This is a nice framework to attack any problem with. It won't necessarily give
you a solution but it provides a nice springboard.

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bradezone
He finds 189 different models to be "repeatedly useful"? Hmmmm...

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hkon
If I were to pick one of these. BATNA has been the most profitable one for me.
It's truly amazing what this unlocks in negotiations if you have actively
considered it.

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trevyn
Also, it gets super weird when your BATNA is not measured in dollars.

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abnry
This looks very nice. If you have an excellent grasp of each item in this
list, you should be able to interact well well with any kind of thinking
person.

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yogrish
[https://fs.blog/mental-models/](https://fs.blog/mental-models/)

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aisofteng
I don’t understand the point of this list. It’s just a list of concepts on
various degrees of commonality. What’s the motivation of making a list like
this? What’s the benefit?

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mattnewport
I've seen Charlie Munger's talk mentioned in the article in the past too and
my main takeaway is that apparently people think in very different ways
because I have the same reaction as you and don't understand the value or
purpose of a list like this.

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LukeShu
This was originally submitted with a title something like "Mental Models the
DuckDuckGo founder finds useful", and the mods have apparently changed it to
the title on Medium.

I think that in instances like this, who "I" is is important context to HN
readers scrolling through the front page. Perhaps it would be better to do the
brackets thing editors do when clarifying something in a quote:

"Mental Models I [the founder of DuckDuckGo] Find Repeatedly Useful"

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dang
We reverted the title back to the original since it wasn't misleading or
clickbait. That's in the guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

On HN, the first person in a title refers to the author of the article, not
the submitting account. That seems simple and sufficient. It isn't necessary,
nor possible, nor even desirable for an 80-char title to explain everything.
It's good for HN readers to have to work a little.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20%22work%20a%20little...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20%22work%20a%20little%22&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0).

