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Mental Models
Power Laws
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Inductive reasoning | ideas applied based on pattern recognition |
| Delusions of grandeur | a false impression of ones importance |
| Occam's razor | simplest theory is better |
| Cobra effect | short term goals, lead to worse long terms goals |
| Red herring | something introduced to divert attention from original idea |
| Parkinson’s law | work expands to fill the time available |
| Social Proof Bias | conform to what the 5 people around you do the most |
| Hawthorn effect | behavior changes once they know they are being studied |
| Equifinality | end state can be reached by multiple means |
| Dunning Kruger effect | cognitive bias showing we are more capable than we are |
| Matthew effect / Compound Effect | accumulative advantage compounded (money, knowledge, etc.) |
| Isolation effect | an individual who stands out will be remembered regardless of good/bad |
| Kanters Law | the middle part is the most difficult and it begins to improve |
| Lemming Theory | rodents will jump off a cliff (can affect large segments of society) |
| Illusory truth | tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. |
| Conjunction fallacy | Linda fallacy: The more detail the less likely |
| Bayesian thinking | always take into account the base rate when encountering new information |
| Fat tailed curve | larger variations from data points |
| Second order thinking | analyzing second and third consequences |
| Margin of safety | factor of safety (strength of the material divided by the anticipated stress) minus one |
| Dunbar Rule | capacity to know/trust 100 -250 people at any given time |
| Black Swan effect | unexpected event that has a major effect |
| The map is not the territory | A map can also be a snapshot of a point in time, representing something that no longer exists. |
| Circle of competence | Know what you understand and where your blind spots are |
| First Principles Thinking | Identify the key principles to understand complex things. |
| Thought Experiment | Use imagination to understand/investigate nature of things |
| Inversion | flip the problem around and think backward. |
| Occam’s Razor | Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones. |
| Hanlon’s Razor | we should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity. |
| Randomness | much of the world is composed of random, non-sequential, non-ordered events. |
| Stochastic Processes (Poisson, Markov, Random Walk) | helps us describe systems of variables through probabilities without necessarily being able to determine the position of any individual variable over time. |
| Compounding | exponential effect. ideas and relationships do as well. |
| Multiplying by Zero | a failure in one area can negate great effort in all other areas. |
| Churn | certain number of customers are lost and must be replaced. |
| Red Queen Effect | Standing still is the equivalent of losing |
| Law of Large Numbers | a sample size grows, its mean gets closer to the average of the whole population |
| Bell Curve/Normal Distribution | meaningful central “average” and increasingly rare standard deviations from that average when correctly sampled. |
| Power Laws | not defined by normal distribution/ greater distribution |
| Regression to the Mean | long deviations from the average will tend to return to that average with an increasing number of observations: |
| Order of Magnitude | get within range; help escape useless precision i.e) exact miles to another galaxy |
| Law of diminishing returns | related to scale, additional inputs do not improve but actually decrease returns |
| Pareto Principle | 80/20 rule. Small amount controls large amount. |
| Feedback Loops/Homeostasis | Balanced systems (i.e human body) |
| Chaos Dynamics/Butterfly Effect | systems are fundementally unpredictable |
| Preferential Attachment/Cumulative Advantage | leader is given more of the reward than the laggards |
| Emergence | Higher-level behavior produced from low order components |
| Irreducibility | Limit by which something can be reduced |
| Tragedy of the Commons | common resource shared -> no individual responsibility -> deplete over time |
| Gresham’s Law | bad behavior driving out good behavior in a crumbling moral system. regulation and oversight are required. |
| Algorithms | automated set of rules or a “blueprint” |
| Fragility – Robustness – Antifragility | responsiveness of a system to incremental negative variability. |
| Backup Systems/Redundancy | engineer never assumes the perfect reliability of the components of the system. Built in to mitigate this risk. |
| Criticality | System becomes critical when it is about to jump discretely from one phase to another. |
| Network Effects | Network tends to become more valuable as nodes are added to the network |
| Via Negativa – Omission/Removal/Avoidance of Harm | Removing bad elements rather than of adding good elements. |
| The Lindy Effect | non-perishables lengthen their life expectancy as they continually survive. A classic text is a prime example: if humanity has been reading Shakespeare’s plays for 500 years, it will be expected to read them for another 500. |
| Complex Adaptive Systems | system which understands itself and change based on that understanding. |
| Laws of Thermodynamics | energy in a closed system. useful energy is constantly being lost, and energy cannot be created or destroyed. |
| Reciprocity | Pay back what we receive from others |
| Catalysts | Either kick-starts or maintains a chemical reaction, but isn’t itself a reactant. |
| Incentives | Constant incentives will tend to cause a biological entity to have constant behavior, |
| Cooperation (Including Symbiosis and Prisoner’s Dilemma) | Without cooperation, no group survives, and the cooperation of groups gives rise to even more complex versions of organization. |
| Tendency to Minimize Energy Output | physical world governed by thermodynamics and competition for limited energy and resources, any biological organism that was wasteful with energy would be at a severe disadvantage for survival. |
| The Red Queen Effect (Co-evolutionary Arms Race) | When one species evolves an advantageous adaptation, a competing species must respond in kind or fail as a species. Standing still can mean falling behind. |
| Hierarchical and Other Organizing Instincts | We tend to look to the leader for guidance on behavior, especially in situations of stress or uncertainty. |
| Exaptation | refers to a trait developed for one purpose that is later used for another purpose. (eyeball) |
| Bias from Incentives | a salesman truly believing that his product will improve the lives of its users. |
| Pavlovian Association | can feel positive and negative emotion towards intangible objects, with the emotion coming from past associations rather than direct effects. |
| Tendency to Feel Envy & Jealousy | tendency to feel envious of those receiving more than they are, and a desire “get what is theirs” in due course. |
| Tendency to Distort Due to Liking/Loving or Disliking/Hating | humans have a tendency to distort their thinking in favor of people or things that they like and against people or things they dislike. |
| Denial | Denying reality can be a coping mechanism, a survival mechanism, or a purposeful tactic. |
| Availability Heuristic | We tend to most easily recall what is salient, important, frequent, and recent. Having a truly comprehensive memory would be debilitating. |
| Representativeness Heuristic | Failure to Account for Base Rates, Tendency to Stereotype (energy saving for brain), Failure to See False Conjunctions (linda test) |
| Social Proof (Safety in Numbers) | look for social guidance of our behavior. |
| Narrative Instinct | Instinct to construct and seek meaning in narrative. |
| Curiosity Instinct | leads to unique human behavior and forms of organization like the scientific enterprise. |
| First-Conclusion Bias | the first idea gets in and then the mind shuts (energy saving for mind) |
| Relative Satisfaction/Misery Tendencies | related to the state of the person relative to either their past or their peers, |
| Commitment & Consistency Bias | humans are subject to a bias towards keeping their prior commitments and staying consistent with our prior selves when possible. Humans are creatures of habits for better or worse. |
| Hindsight Bias | keep a journal of important decisions for an unaltered record and to re-examine our beliefs when we convince ourselves that we knew it all along. |
| Sensitivity to Fairness | Violations of fairness can be considered grounds for reciprocal action, or at least distrust. Yet fairness itself seems to be a moving target. |
| Tendency to Overestimate Consistency of Behavior | We tend to over-ascribe the behavior of others to their innate traits rather than to situational factors. |
| Influence of Stress (Including Breaking Points) | Stress causes both mental and physiological responses and tends to amplify the other biases. You will not rise to the level of your expectations, but fall to the level of your training.” |
| Survivorship Bias | History written by the victors. We do not see the casualties along the way. |
| Tendency to Want to Do Something (Fight/Flight, Intervention, Demonstration of Value, etc.) | Most humans have the tendency to need to act, even when their actions are not needed. |
| Falsification / Confirmation Bias | What we believe is what we choose to see. |
| Opportunity Costs | “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Doing one thing means not being able to do another. |
| Creative Destruction | Never-ending game of creative one-upmanship, in the process destroying old ideas and replacing them with newer technology. Beware getting left behind. |
| Comparative Advantage | the ability of an individual or group to carry out a particular economic activity (such as making a specific product) more efficiently than another activity. |
| Seizing the Middle | As in chess or microsoft with operating system. |
| Double-Entry Bookkeeping | every entry, such as income, also be entered into another corresponding account. |
| Bottlenecks | a bottleneck in production of any good or service can be small but have a disproportionate impact if it is in the critical path. |
| Seeing the Front | “personally seeing the front” before making decisions – not always relying on advisors, maps, and reports. |
| Asymmetric Warfare | “plays by different rules” than the other side due to circumstance. |
| Two-Front War | Divide and conquer |
| Counterinsurgency | no additional force but substantial additional gains. |
| Mutually Assured Destruction | the stronger two opponents become, the less likely they may be to destroy one another |
| 5 Chimp Theory | Tell the decisions the chimp will make by the 5 they hangout with |
| Thematic thinking | taking a lesson from one thing and applying it somewhere else |
| Spotlight effect | nobody cares or is watching you |
| Novelty & Heresy | New ideas can be dead zones of existing ideas. New ideas will be attacked by believers of existing idea. |
| Bus Ticket Theory | To do great work you need both natural ability, determination disinterested obsession in something that is useful. Avoid slowing down as you get older. |
| Hamming's famous double-barrelled question: | what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren't you working on one of them? |
| The Lollapalooza effects | multiple different tendencies and mental models combine to act in the same direction |
| Batesian Mimicry (Copy cats) | Copycats are successful because they copy what works. snakes copying skin of venomous snake. |
| Thematic thinking | taking a lesson from one thing and applying it somewhere else |
| Spotlight effect | nobody cares or is watching you |
| Type A | goal oriented, competitive, self critical, short tempered |
| Type B | outgoing, calm, social, creative |
| Idiosyncrasy credit | Ability to deviate from group expectations once you show your loyalty to the group |
| Baumol's cost disease | wages in low-productivity sectors (like healthcare and education) often rise in line with those in high-productivity sectors, but without a corresponding increase in output or efficiency. Healthcare and education jobs are harder to automate |
| Illusion of certainty (Waggle Dance) | We all try to avoid uncertainty, even if it means being wrong. We take comfort in certainty, and we demand it of others, even when we know it’s impossible. |
| Bikeshed effect / Law of triviality | strange tendency we have to spend excessive time on trivial matters |
| Cognitive Entrenchment | harder to be creative in a field the longer you’re in it -> need to take a step back |
| Theory of maximum taste | exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. |
| Diffuse conflict | clarify and hear out what is bothering people |
| Paradox of thrift | lower savings ->decreases consumption -> low demand |
| Soft power | influence behavior through an attractive proposition |
Created by:
Jginez15