Re:Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions...
by kqr on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @03:18AM
(#17124245)
I'm not sure I understand what the question means. I never specifically determined that "I shall henceforth follow the mental model way of thinking", but if I know a general principle that may apply in a concrete context, then yes, I will apply it to see what comes out the other side. Given that, I also didn't sit down and learned these. It's just stuff I picked up along the way:
At some point in elementary school, a teacher said that 90% of the energy is lost at each level in the food chain, meaning that if a type of bear would start eating whatever the fish eats instead of the fish itself, that type of bear would suddenly have 10× more food available. For some reason that stuck with me, and it can be applied in all sorts of systems where there are frictions with each layer further away from the source.
Similarly, I have throughout life noticed that things that have been around for a long time tend to stick around, and things that explode in popularity are likely to die off just as suddenly within a short period of time. I mentally internalised this rule of thumb as "I won't predict the demise of any technology sooner in the future than the time it has already existed for." I learned from this list that I'm not alone in this observation – it's called the Lindy effect!
The one labeled Via Negativa in the submission I learned through the lyrics of a song, which went something along the lines of, "You can't take the kid from the fight, so take the fight from the kid." At first I just thought that was a funny play with words, but then I encountered a situation where someone threatened to expose one of my actions which I knew would have been received negatively at the time; I realised there was no way I could prevent them from doing so, but I could work preemptively and shape the situation in which they would do so such that they would not have been believed. In the end, that preemptive work disincentivised them to the point where my action was not exposed. (It sounds like I murdered someone but nothing like that. I made a judgment call and I believe if I could round up the affected people today and tell them, they would be grateful for it. It's just at that point there was insufficient information and I couldn't explain my reasoning leading to the decision.)
Multiple models can be combined with success too. My fiancée was worried about her older relatives who have – fortunately – been spared many of the ailments that come with age. She reasoned that, "They have been doing so well that one of them is bound to become really ill any time now." I tried to argue that she would be right – if we knew the stochastic variable that represents their rate of illness. But we don't. And this time they're doing well? It's evidence that their rate of illness is higher than we expected, nothing else. (Not to mention that they're not independent draws – since they're relatives they either share genetic material or chose to spend the rest of their lives together. They probably have more in common than we think, and that may very well include a great resistance to illness.)
If you are observant and always, at all times, constantly, try to figure out the fundamental rules that underlie a phenomenon, you'll just learn these models as you go along.
I don't have time to dive deeply into the full list right now, but just based on a smaller sample (n=43) I have multiple times observed and acknowledged about 95% of them in existing systems, and I routinely apply 80% of them.
At some point in elementary school, a teacher said that 90% of the energy is lost at each level in the food chain, meaning that if a type of bear would start eating whatever the fish eats instead of the fish itself, that type of bear would suddenly have 10× more food available. For some reason that stuck with me, and it can be applied in all sorts of systems where there are frictions with each layer further away from the source.
Similarly, I have throughout life noticed that things that have been around for a long time tend to stick around, and things that explode in popularity are likely to die off just as suddenly within a short period of time. I mentally internalised this rule of thumb as "I won't predict the demise of any technology sooner in the future than the time it has already existed for." I learned from this list that I'm not alone in this observation – it's called the Lindy effect!
The one labeled Via Negativa in the submission I learned through the lyrics of a song, which went something along the lines of, "You can't take the kid from the fight, so take the fight from the kid." At first I just thought that was a funny play with words, but then I encountered a situation where someone threatened to expose one of my actions which I knew would have been received negatively at the time; I realised there was no way I could prevent them from doing so, but I could work preemptively and shape the situation in which they would do so such that they would not have been believed. In the end, that preemptive work disincentivised them to the point where my action was not exposed. (It sounds like I murdered someone but nothing like that. I made a judgment call and I believe if I could round up the affected people today and tell them, they would be grateful for it. It's just at that point there was insufficient information and I couldn't explain my reasoning leading to the decision.)
Multiple models can be combined with success too. My fiancée was worried about her older relatives who have – fortunately – been spared many of the ailments that come with age. She reasoned that, "They have been doing so well that one of them is bound to become really ill any time now." I tried to argue that she would be right – if we knew the stochastic variable that represents their rate of illness. But we don't. And this time they're doing well? It's evidence that their rate of illness is higher than we expected, nothing else. (Not to mention that they're not independent draws – since they're relatives they either share genetic material or chose to spend the rest of their lives together. They probably have more in common than we think, and that may very well include a great resistance to illness.)
If you are observant and always, at all times, constantly, try to figure out the fundamental rules that underlie a phenomenon, you'll just learn these models as you go along.
I don't have time to dive deeply into the full list right now, but just based on a smaller sample (n=43) I have multiple times observed and acknowledged about 95% of them in existing systems, and I routinely apply 80% of them.