This is a great example of bad writing. I think you have an inkling of a premise, but spread it weakly across three paragraphs while muddling through your feelings and misunderstandings about models. You never actually define or defend a position. Couple times you've come close to contradicting yourself, but the premise is so weak I can't say for sure.
I do think you successfully communicate that you struggle with some of the concepts you're trying to refute.
Just looking at your highlighted statements:
> The most valuable mental models do not survive codification. They cannot be expressed through words alone.
Close to stating a premise but you've gone and blown away the the subject of models. I think you're trying to say farnam street is selling snake oil, but you're now arguing experience can't be taught, which is tangential and generally uninteresting
> When Warren Buffett studies a company, he doesn’t see a checklist of mental models he has to apply.
1) You don't know that and 2) "warren buffet studies a company by running through a checklist of mental models" is a claim you've just come up with to refute (strawmen seem to make up the majority of this post)
> How do you know if a computer program is badly designed? You don’t go through a mental checklist; instead, you feel disgust, coloured by your experience.
No. You've indicated you don't understand design, and again that a model = mental checklist, which is your own assertion
Author here. You're right, this was an initial attempt at criticism. Shane Parrish of Farnam Street reached out to me a few weeks after I published this, and then I spent the next year as a member of Farnam Street's learning community, executing a research program around this criticism so as to make it more constructive. A crisp version of that series may be found here: https://commoncog.com/blog/the-mental-model-faq/
The core of this series stems from the observation that all expertise is tacit. Polanyi and Papert has the best articulated expression of these ideas, and they match up to my experience in actually pursuing expertise.
I find quite funny the irony in the situation. You’ve come to the interesting realization (your tacit knowledge / mental model) that most useful knowledge is tacit. You’ve written an article on this, but that is very much like communicating a mental model — and readers are having a hard time making sense of it, and are therefore denying the message ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You might find interesting the concept of “legibility” as discussed on the Ribbonfarm blog.
Who says my goal is to convince those who deny the message?
As per Papert, you're either ready to learn something or you aren't. The more people who do not get this, the larger the competitive advantage for those of us who do.
The article is
clever. By claiming it's impossible to explain good ideas, it preenutively dodges your criticism that the idea is poorly explained ;-)
In fact, simple online searches give ample references to Buffett and Munger writing at length about their models, going all the way back to Graham C's original Intelligent Investor.
Yeah this is a fairly weak article - calling something a _fallacy_ is exceptionally bold, as if it's logically inconsistent in some kind of provable way, and it's only barely backed up by the rest of the content. Sure, I guess taking people's word on a subject that they don't have personal experience themselves isn't the wisest decision. It would be hard to prove that there's _nothing_ to offer from listening to them like the article suggests.
> When Warren Buffett studies a company, he doesn’t see a checklist of mental models he has to apply
He's probably trying to explain the guidance from Farnam Street. The most popular answer on their internal forum on how to use/apply mental models was to treat mental models as checklist. I was a Farnam Street member until last year.
> When Warren Buffett studies a company, he doesn’t see a checklist of mental models he has to apply.
This is really a very poor and missguided assertion. It's as if the only person worth learning from with regards to how to invest is Warren Buffer, because all those poor miserable bastards who are 1% as successful as Warren Buffet, with their pathetically underperforming $1.2 billion fortunes, certainly can't teach you nothing that will help you improve yourself as an investor. No, no. Either you learn from the guy with a $120B fortune or you are better off doing something else like sitting on your ass browsing Instagram or reading drivel posted on a blog.
It's also COMPLETELY WRONG. Charlie Munger has said several times that the NUMBER ONE thing you should do to solve complicated problems is HAVE A CHECKLIST OF MENTAL MODELS AND USE IT WITHOUT EXCEPTION. So this guy is obviously making crap up. Buffet's business partner is the guy who wrote the fucking book on making investments and problem solving this way.
I have bought and read nearly every book about Charlie Munger. My conclusion is that 'have a checklist of mental models' is how he says he does what he does. He reasons a lot by analogy to things he's seen or read before, or to ideas in other fields. This does not mean it is the core of his expertise.
The second nuance is that checklisting works better in 'wicked' fields of expertise (I'm using the definition from Hogarth et all, 2015 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721415591878). Stockpicking is one of those. If you are attempting to gain expertise in a field that isn't wicked, well ... good luck improving by having a checklist of mental models.
That wasn't the point. The response isn't pro-model model or anti-model. The point is the author is saying things that are factually, obviously incorrect. If they'd done even a marginal amount of homework, they wouldn't be claiming "Buffet does this or Buffet does that" when all public information and statements about this exact topic point to the contrary. It signals intellectual laziness at best and willful lying at worst.
I've read multiple biographies of Buffett, I've read criticisms of his approach, and I've read Hagstrom's book on Focused Portfolios (which Munger said was the most representative of what they were doing).
I have attempted to emulate Buffett in the past. It is difficult. Hagstrom failed as well, rather publicly, with his mutual funds.
I've begun to see Buffett not as a stock picker, as he hasn't really done such plays over the past decade or so. Rather, he is a capital allocator in the true sense of the word: he buys companies with high FCF, and reinvests the FCF in either stock if he finds an underpriced opportunity, or ownership of private companies if he does not. In the previous decade, he has mostly done the latter, as it has become more and more difficult to generate alpha in the former. He has also been willing to enter into advantageous contracts (warrants, etc) in times of economic turmoil.
I have demonstrated some understanding of the topic.
Now my question to you is this: are you as well read on this as I am? If so, point me to a chapter in one of the biographies and I will self correct.
That's all very interesting and does show that you're well familiar with the topic at hand. Which only makes me more skeptical of the fact that you have said nothing to back up your original assertion.
I do think you successfully communicate that you struggle with some of the concepts you're trying to refute.
Just looking at your highlighted statements:
> The most valuable mental models do not survive codification. They cannot be expressed through words alone.
Close to stating a premise but you've gone and blown away the the subject of models. I think you're trying to say farnam street is selling snake oil, but you're now arguing experience can't be taught, which is tangential and generally uninteresting
> When Warren Buffett studies a company, he doesn’t see a checklist of mental models he has to apply.
1) You don't know that and 2) "warren buffet studies a company by running through a checklist of mental models" is a claim you've just come up with to refute (strawmen seem to make up the majority of this post)
> How do you know if a computer program is badly designed? You don’t go through a mental checklist; instead, you feel disgust, coloured by your experience.
No. You've indicated you don't understand design, and again that a model = mental checklist, which is your own assertion