What is a mind?
How does a three-pound lump of ordinary matter, the brain,
give rise to feeling, thought, purpose, and awareness?
Mental Models
Mental models are how we understand the world. They shape
Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason. 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.
- what we think
- how we understand
- which connections and opportunities we see in our environment
Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason. 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.
Everyone Has a Model
The quality of our thinking is proportional to the model in our head and its usefulness in the situation at hand.
The more models you have, the more likely you are to have the right models to see reality--
A typical engineer will think in systems.
A psychologist will think in terms of incentives and motivations.
A biologist will think in terms of an organism's acquired and inherited traits.
When a botanist looks at a forest they may focus on the ecosystem, an environmentalist sees the impact of climate change, a forestry engineer the state of the tree growth, a business person the value of the land. None are wrong, but neither are any of them able to describe the full scope of the forest. Sharing knowledge, or learning the basics of the other disciplines, would lead to a more well-rounded understanding that would allow for better initial decisions about managing the forest.
In a famous speech in the 1990s, Charlie Munger summed up the approach to practical wisdom through understanding mental models:
“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models.”
The more models you have, the more likely you are to have the right models to see reality--
A typical engineer will think in systems.
A psychologist will think in terms of incentives and motivations.
A biologist will think in terms of an organism's acquired and inherited traits.
When a botanist looks at a forest they may focus on the ecosystem, an environmentalist sees the impact of climate change, a forestry engineer the state of the tree growth, a business person the value of the land. None are wrong, but neither are any of them able to describe the full scope of the forest. Sharing knowledge, or learning the basics of the other disciplines, would lead to a more well-rounded understanding that would allow for better initial decisions about managing the forest.
In a famous speech in the 1990s, Charlie Munger summed up the approach to practical wisdom through understanding mental models:
“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models.”