# The Great Mental Models ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/default-book-icon-4.11327a2af05a.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[Shane Parrish]] - Full Title: The Great Mental Models - Category: #books ## Highlights - The key to better understanding the world is to build a latticework of mental models. - « You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know. » Richard Feynman1 - I believe in the discipline of mastering the best of what other people have figured out. Charlie Munger1 - the pursuit of going to bed smarter than when we woke up - The only way you’ll know the extent to which you understand reality is to put your ideas and understanding into action. - Our failures to update from interacting with reality spring primarily from three things: not having the right perspective or vantage point, ego-induced denial, and distance from the consequences of our decisions. - The second flaw is ego. Many of us tend to have too much invested in our opinions of ourselves to see the world’s feedback—the feedback we need to update our beliefs about reality. - We also tend to undervalue the elementary ideas and overvalue the complicated ones. - « Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities. »Andy Benoit6 ## New highlights added August 19, 2022 at 7:36 PM - An engineer will often think in terms of systems by default. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A business person might think in terms of opportunity cost and risk-reward. Through their disciplines, each of these people sees part of the situation, the part of the world that makes sense to them. None of them, however, see the entire situation unless they are thinking in a multidisciplinary way. - a latticework of mental models - Note: Graph models - « The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem. » Alain de Botton9 ## New highlights added August 23, 2022 at 1:51 PM - The world does not isolate itself into discrete disciplines. We only break it down that way because it makes it easier to study it. But once we learn something, we need to put it back into the complex system in which it occurs. We need to see where it connects to other bits of knowledge, to build our understanding of the whole. This is the value of putting the knowledge contained in mental models into a latticework. - Charlie Munger, “80 or 90 important models will carry about 90 percent of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.” - An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map, etc., endlessly. - The truth is, the only way we can navigate the complexity of reality is through some sort of abstraction. When we read the news, we’re consuming abstractions created by other people. - something is lost in the process. We can lose the specific and relevant details that were distilled into an abstraction. And, because we often consume these abstractions as gospel, without having done the hard mental work ourselves, it’s tricky to see when the map no longer agrees with the territory. We inadvertently forget that the map is not reality. - When ego and not competence drives what we undertake, we have blind spots. If you know what you understand, you know where you have an edge over others. When you are honest about where your knowledge is lacking you know where you are vulnerable and where you can improve. - Circle of Competence - Alexander Pope’s poem “An Essay on Criticism,” he writes: “A little learning is a dangerous thing;Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,And drinking largely sobers us again.”6 There is no shortcut to understanding. - «Ignorance more often begets confidence than knowledge.»Charles Darwin11 ## New highlights added August 28, 2022 at 4:17 PM - If you know the first principles of something, you can build the rest of your knowledge around them to produce something new. ## New highlights added September 8, 2022 at 2:39 PM - Socratic questioning generally follows this process: Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origins of your ideas. (Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?) Challenging assumptions. (How do I know this is true? What if I thought the opposite?) Looking for evidence. (How can I back this up? What are the sources?) Considering alternative perspectives. (What might others think? How do I know I am correct?) Examining consequences and implications. (What if I am wrong? What are the consequences if I am?) Questioning the original questions. (Why did I think that? Was I correct? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?) - Reasoning from first principles allows us to step outside of history and conventional wisdom and see what is possible.