Gurwinder's Giant Collection of Mental Models
Mental Models are a quick & easy way to improve one's self-awareness & worldview!
Mar 2023
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Here are 25 of my favourite mental models from the collection:
Signaling
Our social behaviors are calibrated to demonstrate our genetic fitness to other humans, primarily to the opposite sex so we can fulfill our biological imperative of procreation.
Essentially, each of us is just a marketing campaign for our DNA.Mismatch Theory
Moths evolved to navigate by the moon, a good strategy until the invention of electric lamps, which now lead them astray. Equally, humans evolved to be tribal, a good strategy until the Digital Age, where it now leads us to act like polarized goons online.Fredkin's Paradox
The more similar two choices seem, the less the decision should matter, yet the harder it is to choose between them. As a result, we often spend the most time on the decisions that matter least.Social Proof
When unsure how to act, people copy others, outsourcing their decisions. When Sylvan Goldman invented shopping trolleys, people didn’t want to use them because they seemed silly. So Goldman paid actors to use trolleys in his stores, and everyone quickly followed.Expectation Effect
What you see is influenced by what you expect to see. In one example, researchers Peter & Susanne Brugger showed people this picture. In October, most people saw a duck. During Easter, most people saw a bunny.
Guerrilla Information War
Conquerors once expanded territory by seizing land, but with the Digital Age it became more efficient to expand virtually by seizing minds. World War III is already happening, but it's being fought not for land but for clout.Causal Reductionism
Things rarely happen for just 1 reason. Usually, outcomes result from many causes conspiring together. But our minds cannot process such a complex arrangement, so we tend to ascribe outcomes to single causes, reducing the web of causality to a mere thread.
Emergence
When many simple objects interact with each other, they can form a system that has qualities that the objects themselves don’t.
Cultural Parasitism
An ideology parasitizes the mind, changing the host’s behavior so they spread it to other people. Therefore, a successful ideology (the only kind we hear about) is not configured to be true; it is configured only to be easily transmitted and easily believed.
Belief Bias
Arguments we'd normally reject for being idiotic suddenly seem perfectly logical if they lead to conclusions we approve of. In other words, we judge an argument’s strength not by how strongly it supports the conclusion but by how strongly *we* support the conclusion.
Subselves
We use different mental processes in different situations, so each of us is not a single character but a collection of different characters, who take turns to commandeer the body depending on the situation. There is an office “you”, a lover “you”, an online “you”, etc.
Flow States
You're in flow when you're so engrossed in a task that the world vanishes and the work seems to do itself. Flow is automatic, and it makes work much easier than you imagined. All you have to do is overcome the initial hurdle of beginning a task; flow does the rest.
We all get our answers from whatever tops the search results, so these results come to dominate a topic, muscling out unluckier viewpoints. Google has trapped us in an orgy of intellectual incest where everyone is drawing from the same tiny meme-pool.
We often attach value to things simply because they're hard to get. People will be more attracted to a painting if it costs $3 million than if it costs $3. The price becomes a feature of the product in that it allows the buyer to signal affluence to others.
Alice has 100kg of potatoes, which are 99% water. She lets them dry till they are 98% water. What is their new weight?
50kg.
Sound crazy? A reminder that the truth is often counterintuitive.
[Let x be the new total mass of the potatoes (dry + water).
Let d be the dry mass of the potatoes and w, the mass of water within the potatoes.
Recall w is 98% of the total mass, that is, w = 0.98x.
Therefore, x = d + w = d + 0.98x, i.e., x = d / 0.02 = 50 kg]
If a talent comes naturally to someone, they assume it’s nothing special, and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them. Therefore, people often specialize in things they're bad at.
Deferred Happiness Syndrome
The common feeling that your life hasn't begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future.
Presentism
We judge history by modern standards. We regard slave-owners as evil, but slavery was so common & familiar to our forebears that they were blind to its iniquities, as we are to the industrial slaughter of animals (for which we too will eventually be called evil.)
Arrival Fallacy
We didn't evolve to be happy, but to believe we'll be happy if we just accomplish the latest goal. So we seldom taste true joy, but we often pick up its scent—just enough to keep us in pursuit. Paradise is not a destination, or even a journey, but a horizon.
Licensing Effect
Believing you’re good can make you behave bad. Those who consider themselves virtuous worry less about their own behavior, making them more susceptible to ethical lapses. A big cause of immorality is self-righteous morality.
The greatest evils come not from people seeking to do evil, but people seeking to do good and believing the ends justify the means. Everyone who was on the wrong side of history believed they were on the right side.
When a source makes an unproven claim, is then cited as proof by another, which is cited by another, and so on, until the chain of citations looks like evidence. Common because, while many writers check their sources, few check their sources’ sources.
Groups are meant to be better decision-makers than individuals, because they combine many perspectives. But in practice, a group doesn't base its decisions on the info specific to each member, but only on the info common to them all. This casts doubt on the idea that “two heads are better than one”, and helps explain why, despite popular wisdom, diversity generally does not make teams better.
Most of your beliefs were formed earlier in your life, when you were naiver. You continue to believe them only because you’ve never reconsidered them. When you’re about to offer an opinion, consider when you formed it, and ask: is it really your belief, or your younger self’s?
Gurwinder’s Theory of Bespoke Bullshit
Many don’t have an opinion until they’re asked for it, at which point they cobble together a viewpoint from whim & half-remembered hearsay, before deciding that this 2-minute-old makeshift opinion will be their new hill to die on.