Mental Models - How to Think

I have been observing for couple of years now that most of the folks have stopped thinking of their own. Initially I was thinking that It is too hard for them to have a independent thought or an opinion on anything and hence they generally follow the group. One big reason of group thinking is the prevalence of social media apps where you either belong to one group or you are an outcast.

This could be because of the ubiquitous social media apps which promote group thinking but when I dig into it I feel most people lack the tools to develop their own thinking and are too happy to follow what is the conventional thinking or group thinking or coming from your boss or expert.

Two of my recent interactions and both didn't go well .

One was on the post which was on how AI can help medicine and when I commented on it that AI is being sold by snake oil salesman , the reaction was pretty cold.

Other was on how men and women respond to strength training and how the impact is better for women than men. My reaction was, if this helps women more, why don't we see faster race times from women than men. The answer which I got was not satisfactory. I was told about multiple medical research articles which are being referenced for the same but still it doesn't answer a simple basic question. I am not even going into the research being referred which is coming from the best journals around the world. The world class research doesn't make any assertion true if it fails the simple smell test.

What I see common in both and many other such conversations is most people assume a default thinking and are not ready to think from a different perspective. They might come from position of authority or degree but lack common sense thinking.

One thing which we need to learn early on is how to think and this is not taught in schools or colleges and most folks who come from prestigious colleges and have fancy degrees don't know how to think.

When I started looking around this what I found very helpful is mental models.

What is a mental model

Mental Model is a explanation of how things work. It is also a worldview of what we carry in our mind, It is an overarching term which covers framework, concept and helps us understand as how things work in our day to day lives.

For example , Supply and Demand is a mental model that helps us understand how economy works. Game theory is a mental model that helps us understand how relationships work.

They help us understand how things work and provides us a with a thinking approach as we go about living our daily lives by helping us in making decisions and solving problems. They are imperfect but useful. There is no single model which explains how this universe works but they help us to make better choices and actions.

When you have a certain worldview, it also limits your thinking and this is also true for mental models. If you are using few mental models. your thinking is limited . Every individual mental model is just one view or a perspective. The trick is not to rely on just few mental models but think broadly as most of the time one single perception would color our judgement , choice and action .

Mental models are the big ideas from disciplines like biology, chemistry, physics, economics, mathematics, psychology, philosophy. Each field has a few mental models that are fundamental to each of this disciplines. There are over 1000 mental models but we need to be using less than dozen models to get the most of it.

Following are few mental models and they are grouped based on the subject they come from

Economics

Supply and Demand

Game Theory

Diversification

Comparative Knowledge

Psychology

Tribalism

Maslow's Hierarchy of Need

Anchoring

Illusion of Control

Loss Aversion

Mathematics

Normal Distribution

Permutation and Combination

Physics

Velocity

Relativity

Critical Mass

Chemistry

Catalyst

Entropy

Atomic Theory

Thinking

Working backward

Inversion

Scientific Method

Engineering

Redundancy

Margin of Safety

Leverage

As I understand this better and implement, I will keep expanding this list and also add details on it in my subsequent post.