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The Great Mental Models - Vol. 1

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A very cool book about mental models that can pump your thinking. This book is part of the project.The Great Mental Models ProjectThere are three volumes, and the first is devoted to the basic concepts of thinking. (general thinking concepts)Among which the authors highlight the following

  • The map is not the Territory The concept that the map is not a territory is correct. Each card has a purpose of drawing up, and for the sake of this purpose, unnecessary details are reclined and an abstraction remains, which should be useful to achieve the goal. A standard example of a metro map that doesn’t match on a map, but it just helps to build a route between different stations.
  • Circle of competence The concept of circles of competence, when we need to understand what we are competent and what we are not quite and act with appropriate confidence depending on whether the domain falls into our area of competence.
  • First Principle Thinking An approach where decisions can be made from the very foundations. Sometimes it is useful for solving a complex problem.
  • Thought Experiment Thinking experiments that scientists love to use:) For example, a story with Einstein’s special theory of relativity is usually demonstrated through thought experiments. Or Schrödinger's famous cat from his thought experiment on quantum physics and the superposition of living and dead:)
  • Second-Order Thinking An approach that takes into account not only the direct consequences, but also the consequences. In IT, you can give an example of thinking about the day. 2 operations, when people think about creating a product, and what will happen when it is ready and shipped to users
  • Probabalistic Thinking I recommend reading the book “Thinking in Bets” on this subject. (here survey book)
  • Inversion An inversion approach where we go from the final result to the current state. Amazon has a cool book, "Working backwards," about this approach, plus it's sometimes called backcasting and I talked about it in a talk for individual contributors.What to do if you are a Senior Software Engineer"
  • Occam's Razor An approach where we choose the simplest explanation as more likely if there is a more complex explanation.
  • Hanlon's Razor The main message here is not to assume the worst. As a result, if something didn’t go according to plan, it wasn’t usually someone who did it on purpose to hurt you, but rather it was a manifestation of ignorance, stupidity or laziness:) This approach saves you from the paranoia in which you see malice everywhere.

Additional concepts that the authors highlight the following

  • Falsifability A story about the fact that hypotheses and theories make sense and are scientific only if in practice there are options to show that they are not fulfilled. Otherwise, it looks more like a dogma than a scientific theory.
  • Necessity and Sufficiency The concept of necessity and sufficiency. It's different.) And if the necessary conditions for an event are met, it is not a fact that it will definitely happen:)
  • Causation vs Correlation A standard history of causation and correlation statistics. The bottom line is that we cannot automatically deduce causality from the connexion of two phenomena – we still need to experiment with dependent and independent variables:)

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