Speaking of books: The great Mental Models — General thinking concepts
For a long time now, I have dismissed the concept of using mental models as a limiting one and something only nerds talked about to sound cool and assert dominance over their peers at weekend parties (did I forget that I'm a nerd too?). When I stumbled upon some free Audible credits, I had nothing to lose by trying out this highly rated book 'The great mental models: General thinking concepts by Shane Parish'. Halfway through this book, I realized something very profound that unfortunately Shane hasn't articulated in the book, Mental Models are innate to us. Literally, every one of us uses mental models to make sense of reality. Some we gain from experience, while the rest are hardcoded in the form of genetic proclivities. We rather use synonyms like 'worldview', 'judgment', or 'thought process’, but it's all about how we choose to interpret events in our lives using our intellectual capacities (aka mental models). There have been so many instances in my life where I've involuntarily used one of these models without having read about them in a book, except when I tell my friends about those instances, I use sentences like 'I luckily had this idea!' or ‘I'm so glad it turned out that way!'. Similarly, there have been a lot of instances where my judgment was simply bad owing to bad mental models and I messed stuff up. When I talk about those instances, I use words like 'bad luck' and ‘how unfortunate that was!'. Reminds me of a very profound quote...
"If we fail to bring the unconscious into the conscious, we'll let it control us and call it fate".
What this quote tells us is that we humans (well even dogs, but it's much easier to teach them to behave) exhibit very complex behaviour based on so many parameters (including our mood...which remains an unsolved mystery) and circumstances. It is our duty (to ourselves) to consciously analyse this behaviour and inculcate the best parts of it into our conscious thought process while just as actively suppressing the unhealthy ones. It is our job not to become a victim of everything that we do not control and eventually just call it luck.
In essence, It's not a question of whether or not to study these models, the real question is 'which mental models should one use?' or rather, 'Are your mental models up to date with the times and the modern realities?'. At the same time, it's also important to understand that no model is perfect, as Elon Musk famously said "If we could model the world with 100% accuracy, it's just as possible that we're living in the Matrix".
So it's implicit that one should be open to new information that contradicts their current understanding of the world. Things will go wrong when you confuse a model of reality with reality itself.
Think about it, every time you encounter that annoying relative who believes that climate change is just a hoax by the communists to attack the rich and powerful, it's pretty clear that he has succumbed to a thinking fallacy. You don't want to be that guy. So effectively, along with learning to apply new mental models, it is important that one learns which model fits where and when it is time to update one’s models.
Book Review:
If this is the first time you're reading about mental models, this book can be of great value for you. Shane does a great job of keeping each lesson short and based on a different mental model while only giving an intriguing introduction to each one. It's a great way to kindle interest in the lifelong journey of evaluating mental models. But for someone who's already into this concept, the book adds little value. If you're a reader of the Farnham Street blog for instance, the returns from this book are going to be pretty marginal.
What could have been better though, was if the author delved into the strategies that one can use to apply these models actively and effectively. I've been reading celebrated books like 'Predictably Irrational', 'Freakonomics', 'Thinking Fast and Slow' for years now, but I quickly realized the challenge that it is to apply the ideas presented in these books in the form of interesting social and psychological experiments, to my daily life. Although 'The great Mental Models' helps me in this regard by presenting these ideas in a more general format, I would have appreciated more content directed towards application as opposed to instruction.
Some Spoilers:
Notes to myself about what stood out for me in the book.
> The inversion principle - "Avoiding stupidity is far easier than seeking brilliance"
I first heard this in the context of Tennis. The difference between amateur tennis and professional tennis is that in amateur tennis, the one who makes the most mistakes loses, whereas in professional tennis, the one who takes the best shots and demonstrates the greatest sport wins. So the useful advice for any amateur tennis player would be to avoid making mistakes instead of trying hard to take the best shots if she wishes to make the fastest progress.
The author very nicely connected this thought to the 'Inversion Principle'. It is the idea that we can make a lot of progress, not just by trying to solve a problem but also by figuring out what things would prevent us from solving the problem at hand and making sure those things never happen.
This is most commonly encountered in the form of habit-forming advice. Are you a chronic procrastinator who struggles to focus for long periods of time and is constantly distracted by that notification on your smartphone? Guess what, it's much easier to just put the damn phone in another room instead of relying on extreme willpower that you think you've gained after watching the latest Gary Vaynerchuk video. It's the inversion principle at play.
> Second-order thinking: "Wisdom is knowing the long term consequences of your actions"- Naval Ravikant
The ability to think and reason clearly about the long-term consequences of present-day actions, or to put it in a better way 'effects of effects of current actions', is what separates the forward thinkers and visionaries from the rest. Too many people are stuck in short-term cycles and instant gratification traps that they fail to see the bigger picture.
I like a story that I came across a while ago, that really shows this principle in action. It's that of the professor who failed the entire class of students who believed that socialism works. It went viral during the recent US election, it's probably only a story, but despite disagreement about whether or not it presents a good model for socialism, it definitely forms an excellent hypothesis for testing the effects of second-order thinking or the lack thereof.
Let's say the professor decides to award each student a grade that is equal to the average grade of the entire class, this would ensure every student passed with a decent score irrespective of their individual intellectual capacities and preparedness for the test. Everyone's happy with the reduction in inequality in the class. Soon, the students who never worked hard and would've scored low in the test anyway completely stopped studying because now they got much better results despite not working hard, and the more studious kids who usually slayed the tests couldn't bear to see how they no longer got any value for the work they put in, they wanted a free ride too!
No points for guessing how the story ends. By the end of the third test, everyone failed the test because nobody in the class had any interest in working hard. They no longer had ownership of their hard work and someone else was probably studying anyway.
A first-order thinker always misses the bigger picture like this one and only focuses on the immediate rewards.
You see arguments like these in the typical 'capitalism vs communism' and Universal Basic Income debates where some people believe that wealth has a reset switch that can be used to solve all of humanity's problems. It is a clear case of the First-order thinking fallacy.
> First-principles thinking: "If you can't explain it to a 5-year-old, you don't understand it well enough"
This has to be the single most important ability a 'clear thinker' has over someone who likes to use big words and appeal to complex ideas without understanding the fundamentals of how something works. First-principles thinking is the ability to understand how the pieces are moving without getting bogged down by the details. As Elon says "The goal is to boil things down to the fundamental truths and reason up from there."
One other thing to keep in mind is to identify 'False First-principles'. Let's take the following statement that an average Joe would conveniently make-
Average Joe: The earth revolves around the sun.
This statement would not be particularly wrong per se, but stay with me, what is the first principle here?
First Principle: I have been shown beyond doubt that the earth revolves around the sun and it is also clearly evident from other observations like the photos from space.
But here's the thing, is this statement good enough for a high school student learning about Newtonian Mechanics? Not Quite. He would prefer to say something like ...
High-School Physics Student: The earth and the Sun both revolve around the Centre of Mass of the Earth-Sun system, which happens to be pretttty close to the center of the sun because it's so much heavier than the earth.
Hmm, shit just got real. Let's see what the first principle of that statement would be.
First-Principle: Objects governed by the laws of Newtonian Mechanics and under the impact of each other gravity and the absence of any external force, with a certain amount of initial momentum acquire positions relative to the center of mass of the system in a way that satisfies the law of conservation of momentum. Since the earth-sun system satisfies this criterion, both revolve around their common center of mass.
That was quite a leap from what is casually considered to be a universal truth! This student would comfortably solve some hard problems in Newtonian mechanics that the average Joe would never be able to because he had just assumed a much more abstract and convenient first principle. Except, If this high school student ever met a planetary physicist, although there's nothing wrong with what the kid is saying, it would definitely make her a bit uncomfortable. She would go on to say something like this...
Planetary Physicist: Well the earth and the sun are not the only objects in the system and they both happen to be revolving around the milky way galaxy and then there are gravitational waves and other stuff that governs space-time. For example, if the sun were to disappear all of a sudden it would take about 8 minutes for the effect to show up on earth and for the earth to exit the circular path and move off in the tangential direction.
First Principles: Inertial reference frames, Gravitational waves, General relativity, Space-time, and other stuff that you and I wouldn't get even if we tried.
The above exercise explains quite well how each person's first principle about the same topic can be widely different and yet cause no problems whatsoever in our daily lives, this should open up our eyes to how much we can take for granted and yet we can lead our lives being completely ignorant about it. Trouble arises when our first principle breaks down and is no longer good enough, which is why it's worth spending enough time in your early years learning the basics of how the world works.
Some double-edged swords:
> Occam's razor - Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones.
Let's see two situations of this principle being applied:
- It is very highly unlikely that COVID'19 is a criminal conspiracy hatched by Bill Gates with the help of tiny chips inside people that respond to 5G Waves, because for that to happen, multiple high profile people and large organizations have had to covertly work together, to carry out the delicate task of inserting state-of-the-art nanochips inside unsuspecting strangers and control them with 5G technology which is currently struggling to stream YouTube videos when a tree comes in the way. All this without getting caught at any point along the way. What is much more likely though is that one idiot in china ate a poorly cooked bat and everything else followed its natural course of action.
- The earth is flat because all I can see are endless stretches of flat land. You're telling me that this is a circular system going in rounds like crazy in a system of more such spheres which are all around a star? Dude, you should see a doctor!
The first example is an excellent example of Occam's razor being applied to debunk a conspiracy theory by appealing to the line of reasoning that shows how too many things have to be true and too many independent entities have to work in tandem for the theory to be true, while the other alternative involves far fewer moving parts and far fewer carefully executed sequence of actions. Basic probability dictates that the second explanation is far likelier than the first one.
The second example though is also the result of the innate need for simple and easily digestible answers that humans have exhibited in so many ways from times immemorial. This need for easy explanations to inexplicable observations is the birthplace of everything from superstitions to entire religions. It is easier and much more convenient to believe that an intelligent creator hand-made humans rather than believing in the theory of evolution that states how we emerged as a result of super complex and random interactions over the last couple of million years.
Oversimplifying a complex reality into a simple cause-effect loop is quite common among humans. This is why I find it hard to use it as a guiding model in life. Occam's razor is useful in dealing with stupidity but will do more harm than good if used for important life decisions.
> Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
This thinking pattern can be of great help, especially in human relationships where it is so easy to attribute malice and agenda to even the simplest acts of laziness or misjudgement.
At the same time, the ability to detect instances of malice and intentional fraud covered up in the form of accidental mistakes and laziness by a bad actor is what sets apart the meticulous and cautious from the rest, this is especially true if you belong to a profession like law enforcement that involves detecting such behaviour.
This also beautifully highlights how different mental models can be suitable and beneficial for different kinds of people, based on their work and environment, thus adding another layer of complexity to the pursuit of better thinking.
Applying these models to our daily thinking process is surprisingly harder than I had imagined. It takes conscious effort and the mere knowledge of these methods isn't going to bring a major shift in your worldview. There are entire books full of biases and models that you could benefit from, but the first step is to spend that extra ounce of energy to apply this idea each time you evaluate an event in your daily life.
