Collect Mental Models

We have well established at this point that decision making is everything, and we are now optimsing to becoming better decision makers.

To begin, we need to accept that we are shit at making decsions.

Human brains are memory prediction machines. We usualy make decisions with the follow rational;

‘X happened in the past, therefore X will happen in the future’.

This is not a good way to make decisions, its too based on specifc circumstances.

A better way to make decisions is to filter them through principles or mental models.

Farnham Street defines mental models as:

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.

An example of a common mental model is ‘The Sunk Cost Fallacy’.

When we look for examples of people that use or have used mental models to make decisions, we find some of the greatest minds such as Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb and Benjamin Franklin.

There is one cavet with mental models, which is if you don’t have the underlying experiences to validate or support the mental models. Then they just become a collection of quotes. This does not mean they are usless, it just means that to learn and iternalise them you have to relate them to your own life.

Mental models are just compact ways to recall your own knowledge.

There are so many resources out there full of mental models, especially on Farnham Street, however the surest way to encounter new mental models is to read, a lot.