Does anybody know of something similar, but written in a more elaborate book-like fashion?
It's not about format, of course, it's just that all these model-zoo's are only half of the story — not useless, but rather incomplete. That is, if you learn a lot of them, one day you might remember something and find it useful — or you might not. This is a bit abstract, but I want to say you rarely ever need any special tools of thinking (or maybe even tools in general) — you want a technology. That is, a relatively broad (but precisely defined) instruction of how to identify and approach a set of problems in some domain. I.e., it is more about when to use a tool or technique, rather than being a exhibition of such tools. I mean, there is important difference — that's kinda the difference between going to college and going to a museum.
For example, GTD is a technology (doesn't matter good or bad). It tells you when to use tools/techniques suggested (and a better book would have more showcases and exercises to internalize the idea, IMO). This site or coursera's famous "Models Thinking" course — aren't.
I like your question. I don't have much of a concrete answer, but systems theory paired with queuing theory has been broadly useful for me in assessing situations and making back-of-the-napkin consequence estimations of various decisions.
Of course, I don't know of any book that teaches systems theory "as a technology" -- it's something I've learned by reading a lot of books on different things and picking up the threads they have in common.
Systems theory relies, really, on a complete map of the causal network of a situation. We're not at a point where we can give a step-by-step instruction for inferring the causal network behind situations. We have some ideas on how to statistically do this in a limited fashion (see Judea Perl) but the general problem is still one of creativity, intuition, fact-checking, Bayesian probability, and so on. You get good at it by doing it a lot in various situations and reflecting on your performance -- the way you get good at most mental skills.
I may have ended up answering a different question to the one you asked, but these were my thoughts.
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I guess with all my rambling I'm trying to say that ultimately, "better thinking" boils down to "a more complete understanding of situations" and the best way to get there in my experience has been the scientific method, democracy (in the true sense of the word), and curiosity. These are very complex technologies that are not easy to teach.
I occasionally review the actual facts as flashcards. But having the notes already in flashcard format has been my secret weapon for seeming intelligent for years.
This is something I also did in the past. I would “ankify” the books I read, hoping to maximize my retention of the material.
However soon I ran into some problems, turns out I couldn’t remember the cues. The same way you can’t remember the capital of a country if you don’t remember the country itself first!
This led me to question the actual value I was getting from this whole ordeal.
I find this happening over the long term (3-5 years after adding) too, but I think of it as more of a feature than a bug. Anki significantly extends the amount of time concepts stay in my brain, but it's unrealisting for me to expect it to do so over a decade or more without my interacting with the source material outside of simply flashcard review.
Anki supports Cloze Deletions, so you could have a card e.g. The capital of {{Burkina Paso}} is {{Uagadugu}}. Anki would then automatically present you with two questions:
The capital of Burkina Paso is ____.
The capital of ____ is Uagadugu.
(You might be able to find an older version for free)
Disclaimer: I've been participating in a Systems Engineering master program @ university a while back which was based on both Haberfellner (and is finally available in English also) and Incose.
Interesting. Just searched HN and it seems you’re right, it didn’t get much traction with developers, perhaps because it was billed as a facilitation toolkit and not about how to generate or validate better startup ideas, like Design Sprints.
There was a point in time where it seemed like I was seeing it everywhere. At conferences, meetings, university classes, hackathons and any number of presentations, etc.
It’s true that once Google Venture’s Design Sprints book took off, it became a bit of a benchmark in the space of collaborative idea workshops etc.
But before Design Sprints, there was Gamestorming. https://vimeo.com/18880751 It might seem a bit overblown. I’d call it a brand name that happens to reflect a style of work popular before Agile and Scrum made everything cookie-cutter from a backlog.
Many people mentioned the Farnam Street newsletter, but Shane Parrish has also published a book in 3 volumes: The Great Mental Models, see https://fs.blog/books/
Not a book, But if you'd like an occasional(non-regular) but high quality newsletter serving the same purpose then checkout - https://www.clearerthinking.org/blog .
P.S. Not affiliated to them in any way, Just a subscriber.
I think it is telling that most of the tools on this website (and in similar collections I have seen) are diagrammatic in nature. Diagrams might have been the most important “tools for thought” since our ancestors invented lists, tables, calendars and maps, long before recent note-taking app startups used this expression for their marketing purposes (which is absolutely fair and I am always happy to see when thinking tools become more popular outside of business/science contexts).
I think it has something to do with how intertwined structure is with diagrammatic representation. Models as well as systems are all about structure, which is why you often see them represented in diagrams (and if you don’t, you may still think about them in diagrammatic terms). And yet, historically diagrams have often been neglected in science until very recently.
I believe digital tools are still missing a lot of their potential as thinking tools because of how text-centric they are. I don’t suggest that it could have been different, given technical constraints and demands, but maybe computers would aid our thinking much more if they would actually allow us to more freely and intelligently draw diagrams. Ivan Sutherlands Sketchpad was a great step in that direction (I am sure most of you have seen it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad) and more recently the work of Bret Victor (http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/). But in many regards I believe that paper is still superior to what we have done so far.
Obsidian.md is a pillar in the modern "Tools for Thought" space (along with logseq and Roam Research). Obsidian's plugin ecosystem is enormous, and features robust, bidirectional integration with Excalidraw. Notes in your diagrams, diagrams in your notes... combining text and visual/spatial sketch and whiteboard tools is profoundly powerful.
I use miro.com because it lets me thinking visually. I can represent ideas and thoughts with sticky notes, images, tables, embedded videos, etc., and then draw conclusions or find problems, allowing me to go on to make better decisions.
I think making "cave man drawings" (diagrams, lists, etc.), as I call them, when trying to think through some things is a clever way of starting out.
I agree, Excalidraw has been a revelation to me and I use it all the time to sketch out ideas/concepts, models and designs. Most diagram tools never embraced the “thinking in action” aspect of diagramming and rather focus on production of graphical artifacts for presentations. Excalidraw gets out of my way and just lets me focus on the thinking.
Miro also has a very intuitive and well thought-out UI and I like how it is like a big desk where you can work on multiple sheets/frames, move them around, connect them, zoom in/out even in real-time collaboration. But it also (like most of these apps) seems to me very business-focussed, which is fine but I think everyone should have something like this (or like Excalidraw) as a standard app on their computer, just like every OS has some sort of Notepad.
Agreed. Amazon is notorious for their written culture. While working there, this book was listed as a recommended read for anyone interested writing clear, concise prose and I'm so glad to have picked up the (97) version of this book
Highly recommend the newsletter as well. What's smart about FS and this Untools site is these models are compact ideas you can iterate the logic of into some really sophisticated views.
Things like the Ishikawa diagram on Untools are really new worldviews. I bought Edward Tufte's data visualization books back at the turn of the century, and his objection to powerpoint reduced to how the form of a visualization conveys an underlying logic of ideas by virtue of the dimensions it displays and the number of them that were strictly meaningful ("ink to data ratio"). Viz that only displayed one data variable but added a bunch of "chartjunk," like effects and weird shapes, was not informative but essentially just bizarre totalitarian propaganda.
Some of these mental models and decision support tools are multi-variate systems for evaluating pretty much anything, which makes them almost the basis for alternate ideologies about how to evaluate a dynamic or criticize an idea. Sometimes I suspect what we think of as genius is really just a privately developed ideology based on a few evaluation principles like the ones linked on this thread.
It implies a different direction, I suppose. One of constructing a whole from parts, rather than decomposing the whole into parts.
This can be meaningful in cases where the whole changes as part of the construction process. If I wanted to deconstruct the things in soap, I would probably not have a branch for "lye", because all lye has (thankfully) reacted away from the end product. But if I constructed a fishbone chart for the same soap, then lye is one of the first ingredients I would list.
Sometimes looking at the same thing from a different angle helps you realise things you otherwise wouldn't. If you find it does not, then an outline is good enough for you!
Intuitively I knew an idea like this must exist, but had no idea of how it could be formulated. If it is indeed accurate, even just to a point, it's probably one of the most important abstractions/heuristics/ideas I have ever read.
> Adjointness is only a part of the story. One often sees equations of the following form inverse(x) = adjoint(x)/norm(x). Once you have adjoint and norm, you magically get inverse.
That said, I am often spectacularly ignorant and easily seduced by simple views of complex things, but if there were name for this form or axiom, like Nemecek's axiom or something, I hope it sticks.
Do you know of a gentler introduction, for someone with less math background? Or does it only make sense after reaching a certain level of mathematical maturity?
One lovely idea I liked from the book is a recommendation, whenever in an argument / discussion, is to understand the other person's point of view and articulate it so well, that they say "I couldn't have said it better myself". Because it is starting from that point that can you can know you're not strawmanning or misunderstanding each other.
Does anyone know of programming tools for better thinking? I used to be a very good programmer, and now I run a large research organization. One would think that there would be ample opportunity to use my programming skills to better manage the organization, but there's little more than exploring business data using Excel. The closest I've come is the Thinking in Systems stuff that Donella Meadows and her colleagues have done.
Are there other Thinking Tools for programmers who want an edge in managing large groups?
Minto pyramid is really interesting to me because, although I had never heard of it before, I tend to read articles from the end for this exact effect.
I also studied math this way, trying to do the exercises, looking at the answers and throughout the materiel to complete them, then read the materiel for start to finish. Any time I tried to read first I wasn't able to grab the concepts.
I met Barbara Minto at a small dinner several years ago. She is an amazing person and had great stories from her time in consulting. I’ve used her system so many times when I’m having trouble putting a complex situation into words
Doesn't every scientific paper follow this rule? An abstract to quickly give the key ideas, an intro describing these key ideas in more depth, the gory details for those interested in methodology and repeatability.
It's a great format; I wish most non-fiction followed it.
I’m seeing a lot of good systems thinking recommendations here, and I would add “Thinking in Systems” by Donella H. Meadows.
At the moment, I am particularly interested in finding good books and resources on communication. Especially verbal, critical, collaborative communication, and receptiveness/openness. Team and interpersonal focused stuff. There are so many resources out there, but I’d like to hear about what other HN users have found useful.
I haven't tried either yet, I've just taken a look... But I'd say 'looks nice' downplays a pretty major difference. Heptabase appears to be in a completely different league of UI quality. UI quality is pretty central to the functionality of visual knowledge management. It's not a software category in which you can reasonably separate form and function into separate concerns.
Video for Cynefin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8
Cynefin argues (a) well defined problems are the realm for automation - if this then that. (b) slightly complicated problems are the realm of architects - waterfall and project plans. (c) very complex problems are the realm of experimentation - capitalism and its creative destruction, minimum viable prototypes, wisdom of the market. (d) chaos
It's not about format, of course, it's just that all these model-zoo's are only half of the story — not useless, but rather incomplete. That is, if you learn a lot of them, one day you might remember something and find it useful — or you might not. This is a bit abstract, but I want to say you rarely ever need any special tools of thinking (or maybe even tools in general) — you want a technology. That is, a relatively broad (but precisely defined) instruction of how to identify and approach a set of problems in some domain. I.e., it is more about when to use a tool or technique, rather than being a exhibition of such tools. I mean, there is important difference — that's kinda the difference between going to college and going to a museum.
For example, GTD is a technology (doesn't matter good or bad). It tells you when to use tools/techniques suggested (and a better book would have more showcases and exercises to internalize the idea, IMO). This site or coursera's famous "Models Thinking" course — aren't.