# 💡 MENTAL MODELS A mental model is an internal representation of external reality; simplifies complex ideas into manageable concepts aka how something works. Mental models, heuristics, intuition pumps, atomic habits, tools for thought, etc. ## Reminders * “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” - George Box * Mental models aren’t trivia to rote memorize but tools * You don’t need 100+ mental models — just a personal working set of 10-20 mental models; “Latticework” weaves the models together to reduce blind spots, increase accuracy and avoid stupidity * Rule of 3 models — Psychology (models) drives outcomes, math (models) keeps you honest, systems (models) explain why things break * It’s about avoiding stupidity not chasing brilliance ### References * [Curated list of awesome mental models](https://github.com/AdrienLemaire/awesome-mental-models) * [Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger](https://www.mymentalmodels.info/a/amazon-poor-charlies-almanack "Amazon: Poor Charlie's Almanack") by Peter Kaufman * [Hacker Laws: Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns that developers will find useful.](https://hacker-laws.com/) * [Charlie Munger Mental Models (Full 129 List + Latticework Guide)](https://sourcesofinsight.com/charlie-munger-mental-models/) * [Charlie Munger: Psychology of Human Misjudgment (Full Speech) - YouTube](https://youtu.be/b6ZJnk2i2lM?si=DvD8OmGsTuikjfKi) Orientating - Start with the problem, not the list (what kind of problem is it? keep it grounded and practical) - Avoid present bias: Use commitment and the default effect - Latticework / meta mental modeling - Approaching systems: - Local/Global: start by identifying the highest-leverage level to optimize at: Ask whether you're optimizing the machine or a cog within it - Theory of Constraints - First Principles - Making decisions: * Long-term decisions: Regret Minimization * Medium-term decisions: Pareto's Principle, GIST - Short-term decisions: ICE (impact, confidence, ease) - Day-to-day decisions: Eisenhower Matrix (urgent/important) **Latticework of mental models** aka Munger’s “Multiple Mental Models” approach to business analysis and assessment, popularized by Charles Munger, framework of interconnected key ideas from multiple disciples used to understand complex realities. Rather than relying on one speciality (or mental model) which is brittle, you make a “lattice”, weaving many diverse models together which allow you to analyze problems from multiple perspectives, avoiding blind spots and improving decision making. **First principles thinking** is a problem-solving approach that deconstructs complex situations into their most fundamental, foundational truths-or axioms-and reasons upward from there, rather than reasoning by analogy **Orangutan Effect** is a mental model coined by Charlie Munger, advising that to truly understand or master a complex topic, you should explain it to someone else (or a puzzled primate). Teaching forces you to structure ideas clearly, filling knowledge gaps and overcoming the "curse of knowledge" to solidify your own understanding **The Feynman Technique** is a four-step mental model for learning or reviewing any topic by simplifying it, designed to identify knowledge gaps and enhance understanding. Developed by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, it involves choosing a concept, teaching it simply loften to a child), reviewing gaps, and using analogies. Step 1 - Study; Step 2 - Teach a child; Step 3 - Identify gaps; Step 4 - Fill gaps & simplify. Teaching a young person forces us to break concepts to their most basic parts. We must eliminate jargon. We look for analogies and stories to illustrate our points. **Invert, Always Invert** -Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, 19th century mathematician, using the phrase to describe how he thought many problems in math could be solved by looking at the inverse. **Disraeli Compromise** - Benjamin Disraeli (UK Prime Minister), to avoid holding onto resentment, would write the names of people who had wronged him on a piece of paper and put them in a drawer. Disraeli would later review these names and take pleasure in seeing how the world had taken down his enemies without his direct involvement. **Erik Dietrch's Defining The Corporate Hierarchy** - It cynically divides corporate workers into sociopaths at the top who step on other people to get where they are, idealists in the middle who don't realize they're being stepped on and think they'll eventually get to the top through hard work, and then pragmatists at the bottom who come in in the morning, do their work, and find meaning in their lives elsewhere, like family or hobbies. **Labrador technique** - Just assume there’s a positive person in there somewhere, deep, deep down, and you can coax them out with your own enthusiasm. **Janis's symptoms of defective decision making** * Gross omissions in surveying alternatives. * Gross omissions in surveying objectives. * Failure to examine major costs and risks of the preferred choice. * Poor information search. * Selective bias in processing information at hand. * Failure to reconsider originally rejected alternatives. * Failure to work out detailed implementation, monitoring, and contingency plans. **Cognitive dissonance theory** the resolution of this conflict can take one of two routes: bring one's behaviors into alignment with one's moral ideals, or one can bring one's beliefs and attitudes in line with one's behavior through various psychological maneuvers **Rationalization** involves providing reasonable justifications for one's behavior when it comes under scrutiny or criticism. Rationalizing potentially morally troublesome behaviors has both social and personal benefits. Providing defensible reasons and arguments for one's actions when one's actions are called into question is therefore an essential part of human sociality. **motivated reasoning process** people will often seek out arguments that support their own viewpoint, while overlooking or dismissing arguments that challenge it **myside bias??** people overestimate the amount of evidence that favors their position **Cone of Plausibility** is a visual and analytical tool for strategic planning and decision making to represent the range of possible futures based on current trends and uncertainties; narrow base to widening cone represents uncertainty reflects growing range of possible outcomes as more variables, assumptions and disruptions come into play * probable - most likely given current trend * Plausible - reasonably possible - could occur under certain assumptions * Possible - could happen but highly unlikely * Wildcard/extreme - unlikely but not impossible * Preferred - what we want to come true **“It is the strong swimmers who drown”**— paradox that most skilled and most confident are more likely to take risks that lead to danger; Strong swimmers take greater risks, they underestimate situations including hazards; that act on instinct rather than safety protocols and logic —overconfidence and optimism bias kills them **The Four Questions of Sustainability** * Sustain what? * Sustain it for whom? * Sustain it for how long? and * Sustain it at what cost? **Three Lenses of Opportunity Cost** 1. Compared with what? 2. And then what? 3. At the expense of what? **Humpty Dumpty theory of language** - arbitrary nature of language; the person who uses the word decides its meaning; which is to be master; Vs Cratylus theory (that words have fixed, natural meaning; true name) **Terrain matters** In a fight between a bear and an alligator, it is the terrain which determines who wins. The outcome of any biological, social, and economic processes is fundamentally shaped by the surrounding environment, which acts as a key determinant of success. **Local-Global Principle** was discovered in the 1920s by Helmut Hasse used to describe a common experience in mathematics that phenomena ("problems") are usefully decomposed into a "local" and a "global" aspect of rather different nature. **Theory of Constraints** (TOC) is a management philosophy focused on identifying and elevating the single bottleneck (constraint) that limits a system's output. Developed by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, it posits that any system is limited by its weakest link, and improving this constraint is the fastest way to increase profitability, throughput, and efficiency identify the constraint exploit the constraint subordinate everything elevate the constraint repeat the process **Do/Say Something Syndrome** - confuse activity for results; sometimes the best thing to do or say in the face of a problem, question, or situation, is nothing at all **Tearing down a factory...** - If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. It highlights that changing physical structures or systems is ineffective if the underlying, outdated mental models or ways of thinking remain **Tilting** - a poker term for a state of mental or emotional confusion or frustration in which a player adopts a less than optimal strategy, usually resulting in the player becoming over aggressive. Tilting usually occurs when you get an outcome you didn’t want or expect. Lose repeatedly to a fish (bad player) **GIST Framework** (Goals, Ideas, Step-Projects, and Tasks), is an all-in-one approach to product planning, prioritization, and execution. It consists of four key components. * Goals - Big-picture objectives that the product team aims to achieve. These goals are aligned with the company strategy and are often derived from business goals. * Ideas - Potential opportunities or solutions that can help achieve these goals. Ideas can come from various sources such as product managers, the sales team, or even customers. * Step-Projects - Tangible projects or initiatives that are meant to turn promising ideas into reality. Each Step-Project has a specific planning horizon and roadmap, allowing the team to focus on high-value products. * Tasks - Smaller, bite-sized activities that are required to complete a Step-Project. These tasks are often prioritized based on their impact and feasibility. **Parto's Principle** or the 80/20 rule, states that roughly 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes. It is a, "vital few" prioritization tool focusing on high-yield efforts, often applied to business (20% of products = 80% of profits) and productivity (20% of tasks = 80% of results) **ICE framework** (impact, confidence, ease is the original scoring system for growth marketing teams for prioritization. - Impact - How much will this experiment move the needle on your target metric? Consider the potential size of the effect. A change to your pricing page has higher potential impact than tweaking a footer link - Confidence - How sure are you that this experiment will produce the expected result? Base this on data, past experience, and supporting evidence. An idea backed by user research or competitor analysis deserves a higher score than a gut feeling. - Ease - How quickly and cheaply can you run this experiment? Consider development time, design resources, third-party dependencies, and approvals needed. If you can launch it in an afternoon, that is high ease. If it needs a sprint of engineering work, that is low ease. **Eisenhower matrix**, also known as Urgent-Important Matrix, is a decision making principle and a productivity, prioritization, and time-management tool that helps prioritize tasks by categorizing them. Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th POTUS, had to make tough decisions continuously about which of the many tasks he should focus on each day. So he created the Eisenhower matrix to decide on and prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, sorting out less urgent and important tasks that he should either delegate or not do at all. He said: What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important. **Regret Minimization** is a mental model for making high-stakes decisions by projecting oneself into the future (typically age 80) to evaluate which choice minimizes long-term regret; 80 year old test "will i regret not doing this?" **Chesterton’s fence** - “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” **Weaponized incompetence**, also called strategic incompetence, is when someone knowingly or unknowingly demonstrates an inability to perform or master certain tasks, thereby leading others to take on more work. This generally occurs in two domains—in the household, between partners, and at work, between colleagues. Consistently, weaponized incompetence leads to an unequal division of labor. **Contrarian investing** - uncommon rewards are for those that do uncommon things; going against the herd correctly; status quo is a straightjacket that prevents opportunity **[The Iceberg Model](https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/systems-practice-toolkit/the-iceberg-model/)** - systems thinking tool which uses the metaphor of an iceberg to illustrate how the surface-level events we react to are underpinned by less visible patterns, structures, and beliefs. Originally developed by anthropologist Edward Hall in 1976 but applied to culture in organizations. **Charles Perrow’s Normal Accident Theory (NAT)** - argues that in complex, tightly coupled systems, major accidents are inevitable—or "normal"—due to design, not just human error. Such accidents arise from unforeseen, interactive failures within systems that leave little time for recovery. Key examples include nuclear power, chemical plants, and complex aviation or computer systems. **Resonance theory of consciousness** suggests that consciousness arises from synchronized vibrations, or resonance, in the brain and other systems, linking matter into larger, more complex conscious entities. This theory proposes that all things resonate, and when they vibrate together, they can achieve a shared resonance that may contribute to conscious experience **Cialdini's 6 principles of influence**: - Commitment/Consistency ("If people commit...they are more likely to honor that commitment.") - Liking ("People are easily persuaded by other people they like.") - Authority ("People will tend to obey authority figures.") - Scarcity ("Perceived scarcity will generate demand"). - Social Proof / Consensus ("People will do things they see other people are doing.") - Reciprocity ("People tend to return a favor.") **Hedgehog and fox** concept, introduced by philosopher Isaiah Berlin, categorizes thinkers into two types: hedgehogs, who focus on a single big idea, and foxes, who draw from a variety of experiences. Hedgehog: Relates everything to a single, all-encompassing vision or system. They are driven by one big idea that unifies their understanding of the world. Fox: Pursues many ends, often unrelated and contradictory. They are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and cannot be reduced to a single principle. This distinction is based on an ancient saying that a fox knows many things, while a hedgehog knows one big thing. **Sayre’s law**, named after political scientist Wallace Sayre, offers that in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. **Main character syndrome** is a term used to describe a mindset where individuals see themselves as the central character in their life story, often leading to self-centered behaviors and a lack of empathy for others. **Darwin's Blind Spot** primarily refers to the limitation in Charles Darwin’s original theory of evolution that overlooked the critical role of symbiosis—cooperation and the merging of different species—as a major creative force, focusing too heavily on competition. Symbiosis Over Competition: Popularized by author Frank Ryan, this view argues that "survival of the fittest" is not the only mechanism, and that the blending of life forms (symbiosis) is vital for major evolutionary leaps, such as the evolution of eukaryotes from prokaryotes; some thrive by outcompeting (à la Selfish Gene) and others by out-cooperating (à la Darwin’s Blind Spot) **Lateral Thinking Principles** developed by Edward de Bono - alternatives - look for different ways to solve the problem - Focus - train your brain to think more clearly - Challenge - think in nontraditional ways - Random entry - be open different lines of thought - Provocation - turn a provocative situation into something useful - Treatment of ideas - alter ideas to fit different scenarios **IDEAL method for problem solving** * identify the problem * Define the problem * Examine the options * Act on a plan * Look at the consequences **Six thinking hats method** developed by Edward de Bono, is a structured approach to thinking and decision making that encourages parallel thinking and diverse perspectives - white hat - facts and information (data and logic) - blue hat - planning and process (facilitator/ensure process) - green hat - Creativity and innovation (out of the box/exploration) - red hat - Emotions and feelings (intuitive / gut) - yellow hat - Optimistic and positive (vibes/constructive) - black hat - Critical judgement (risk/challenges/feasibility/skepticism) **Illusion of explanatory depth** refers to the way our self-assurance crumples when we are invited to explain apparently simple ideas. **Gell-Mann Amnesia** where people are able to see the flaws in reporting on subjects they understand, but often take things at face value outside their familiarity. **Tell a story. Keep it simple**. - The style that scientists use to communicate science to peer scientists is mostly objective, complex, and full of technical jargon, which is difficult for the general public to connect to—even if it is in the same language." Another way to mitigate science skepticism is through storytelling. **Michelangelo effect** - refers to the capacity of individuals to bring out their partners’ best qualities The Reverse Michelangelo Effect, often called the "Blueberry phenomenon" or "Golem effect," occurs when partners in a relationship hinder each other's growth, bringing out the worst traits rather than the best. Instead of "sculpting" an ideal self, this dynamic involves toxic criticism, stifling autonomy, and fostering self-doubt, which damages self-esteem and relationship satisfaction. **Lateral thinking** - First coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, it’s a method of thinking across otherwise irreconcilable dialectical disciplines and then arriving at solutions that cannot be arrived at via deductive or logical means. We might call this “thinking outside the box”. Consider this: A man walks into a bar and asks the barman for a glass of water. The barman pulls out a gun and points it at the man. The man says “thank you” and walks out. Why? The man had hiccups. **Conway’s law** - organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations **Hanson law of computing states** - Any software system, including advanced intelligence, is bound to decline over time. It becomes less flexible and more fragile. **Campbell's law** - The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. **Brooks’s Law** - adding manpower to a late software project makes it later **For N's of Meat Eater Rationalization** - eating meat is natural, normal, necessary, and nice **Propinquity effect** - the tendency for people to form friendships or romantic relationships with those whom they encounter often, forming a bond between subject and friend **Backfire effect** — the idea that refuting misinformation can just make individuals dig their heels in deeper **The effectiveness trap** - the inclination to remain silent or to acquiesce in the presence of the great men—to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that you can be “effective” on later issues—is overwhelming. **Hick's Law** - The greater the complexity or number of choices, the harder it is to make a decision. Hick’s law poses that increasing the number of choices will increase decision time logarithmically. The more choices presented to users, the longer it will take them to reach a decision but the marginal decision time per extra choice decreases. This is what William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman proved back in 1952. The two psychology professors examined the relationship between the number of stimuli present and an individual’s reaction time to any given stimulus. What they discovered later became Hicks Law, or the Hick’s-Hyman Law, that several UX Designers still use today. The law proved that the more information you have at any given time, the harder it is to understand or make a decision. In simpler terms, 2 options are often times better than 20 options. **Brandolini's Law** (aka the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle): - It takes a lot more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it. Hence, the world is full of unrefuted bullshit. **Epistemic Humility** - Instead of trying to be right, try to be less wrong. Avoiding idiocy is easier than achieving genius, and by beginning from the position that you don't know enough (which you don't), you'll gain more awareness of your blindspots and become harder to fool. **Peter Principle** - people in a hierarchy such as a business or government will be promoted until they suck at their jobs, at which point they will remain where they are. As a result, the world is filled with people who suck at their jobs. **Skewed affective forecasting** — affective forecasting before - the ability to accurately predict how a situation’s outcome will make you feel in the future **Compassion Fade** — People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups because the smaller the group, the easier it is to identify individual victims. **Ringelmann Effect** — Members of a group become lazier as the size of their group increases. Based on the assumption that “someone else is probably taking care of that.” **Cobra Effect** — Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter. **Lumpers and splitters** are opposing factions in any discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. A "lumper" is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways. **Sorites paradox** sometimes known as the paradox of the heap, is a paradox that arises from vague predicates. A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap? **[The Evaporative Cooling Effect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs)** describes the phenomenon that high value contributors leave a community because they cannot gain something from it, which leads to the decrease of the quality of the community. Since the people most likely to join a community are those whose quality is below the average quality of the community, these newcomers are very likely to harm the quality of the community. With the expansion of community, it is very hard to maintain the quality of the community. **Pascal’s wager** - Blaise Pascal’s famous argument for believing in God. Pascal argued that it’s always a better “bet” to believe in God because the expected value of the gain to be achieved by believing in God is always greater than the expected value in the case of unbelief. **Poe's law** is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied. **Similarity-attraction effect** - refers to the widespread tendency of people to be attracted to others who are similar to themselves in important respects. Attraction means not strictly physical attraction but, rather, liking for or wanting to be around the person. **Self-verification theory** - People want to be perceived in a way that aligns with their own beliefs about themselves. The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed. This creates a double burden. **Parkinson’s law of triviality**, named after naval historian Cyril Parkinson, which states that organizations tend to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. **Parkinson’s law** states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” **Tall poppy syndrome** describes aspects of a culture where people of high status are resented, attacked, cut down, strung up or criticized because they have been classified as superior to their peers. **Law of Jante** (Danish: Janteloven) is a code of conduct known in Nordic countries that portrays not conforming, doing things out of the ordinary, or being overtly personally ambitious as unworthy and inappropriate. Used generally in colloquial speech in the Nordic countries as a sociological term to denote a condescending attitude towards individuality and personal success, the term refers to a mentality that denigrates individual achievement and places all emphasis on the collective. **[Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve)** shows that just one hour after learning we forget more than half of the learned information. One week later we remember only 20%. **Porter’s five forces** - Developed by Michael Porter in 1979, Porter’s Five Forces is a framework to look at competitive forces in an industry. The five undeniable forces are: 1) threat of new entrants, 2) threat of substitutes, 3) bargaining power of customers, 4) bargaining power of suppliers, and 5) competitive rivalry. **Cammarata’s Razor**: If you want more agency, ask yourself what you’d do if you had ten times more agency — then do it **Uncanny valley effect** is a hypothesized psychological and aesthetic relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing _almost human_ will elicit uncanny or eerie feelings in viewers. **The Shower Test** - We’re socially conditioned to chase what we think everyone else wants. But your true heart’s desire can often be found in the thoughts you gravitate to while undistracted, such as in the shower **1% rule** In online communities, around 1% of users produce almost all of the content. As such, what you see online is not representative of humanity, but merely of a loud, obsessive (and often narcissistic, psychopathic, low-IQ) minority. Social media is literally a freakshow. **Pronoia** - The opposite of paranoia. The suspicion that the universe is secretly conspiring to help you. **Original Position Fallacy** (opposite of the Golden Rule) - refers to a situation where someone supports a system or policy that may harm others, mistakenly believing they will benefit from it themselves. **Coyote’s Law** Don’t give the government a power you wouldn’t want your political enemies to wield. **The Politician’s Syllogism** “We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.” It’s more important for a government to be seen tackling an issue than to actually solve it, so governments often implement simplistic policies that look like they work but don’t, like rent controls, plastic straw bans, and diversity training. **Idiosyncratic Rater Effect** - human beings are unreliable raters of other human beings **Benign Violation Theory** explains that humor arises when a situation involves a violation of social norms that is also perceived as harmless or acceptable **Cockroach theory** - When bad news is revealed, there may be many more related negative events yet to be revealed. There’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen. **Unknown unknowns** - Known unknowns are risks one is aware of, such as canceled flights or worker injuries. Unknown unknowns are risks coming from situations that are so out of this world that they are not imagined in advance. **Critical mass** - A term borrowed from physics, critical mass is the minimum amount of something required to sustain itself going forward. In social networks, critical mass refers to the number of adopters for the network required for the further adoption rate to be self-sustaining. In nuclear physics, it’s the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction. **First-mover and last-mover advantage** - The advantage gained by the initial occupant of a market. First-mover advantage may be gained by technological leadership or early purchase of resources. However, in certain growth markets, the last-mover might be better positioned competitively if it’s able to introduce the last great development in that market to gain years of monopoly profits. **Principal-agent problem** - The theory deals with relationships where one party (the principal) delegates the performance of a given task to another party (the agent). The principal wants the agent to perform the task satisfactorily, but the principal has a problem that consists of establishing a payment structure—a reward—that gives the agent sufficient incentive to perform the task per the principal’s wishes Principal-agent problems are frequent causes of market failure. **Curse of knowledge** - Once you learn something, you find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it and thus find it difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people. The more knowledgeable you become on a subject, the more unnatural it becomes to communicate that idea simply and clearly. In short, knowledge itself becomes a barrier to its propagation. **Anchoring** - The tendency to rely too much on an initial piece of information when making subsequent judgments. **Principle of least effort** - A theory postulating that animals, humans, and well-designed machines will naturally seek the path of least resistance, and that effort declines as the minimum acceptable result is attained. **Reputation fragility** - As Warren Buffett says: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.” **Gresham's Law** is an economic principle stating that "bad money drives out good," meaning that when two forms of currency are in circulation, the one with lesser intrinsic value tends to be used more often, while the more valuable currency is hoarded or removed from circulation. **The arrival fallacy** refers to the mistaken belief that finally “arriving” at a long‑sought goal will deliver lasting happiness. In fact, “arrivals” sometimes recalibrate the happiness bar and send us chasing the next ever-greater milestone, a cycle researchers call hedonic adaptation. **Serpico effect** - Named after Frank Serpico, who became known for whistleblowing on police corruption in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Serpico effect is the tendency to rationalize an action because everyone else is doing it. **Buridan’s ass** - Coined after French philosopher Jean Buridan, Buridan’s ass is a type of decision paralysis where two equally good options lead to no decision. The paradox is explained by the story of a donkey who is equally hungry and thirsty and placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. **Three men make a tiger** - A Chinese proverb that underlines the tendency to accept absurd information as long as it is repeated enough times by enough people. **Woozle effect** - When frequent citation of previous information that lacks evidence misleads individuals into believing it’s evidence. As Daniel Kahneman puts it: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” **Abilene paradox** - The situation where a group decides to make a decision that is counter to the thoughts and feelings of its members in the group. It happens because the members fail to communicate their individual beliefs. **Abilene paradox** - The situation where a group decides to make a decision that is counter to the thoughts and feelings of its members in the group. It happens because the members fail to communicate their individual beliefs. **Cunningham’s law** - Ward Cunningham, the creator of the first wiki, said: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question. It’s to post the wrong answer.” **Randomness** - Randomness is present everywhere in the real world but it often doesn’t fit how we think about the world. An erroneous strive for pattern-seeking sometimes makes us see patterns that are not there. As Nassim Taleb puts it, we are “fooled by randomness”. **Apophenia** is a psychological phenomenon where random and meaningless impressions are perceived as meaningful. It’s a way to comfort the mind in explaining how the world works. To see patterns and connections when none are present is also called patternicity **Churn** - Churn is a form of entropy. It’s the measure of the number of people or items moving out of a collective group over a specified period (think customers of insurance companies or subscription services). Reducing churn requires constant care of the group. **Bloom’s taxonomy** - Created by Benjamin Bloom in 1956, Bloom’s taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical orders of thinking about any subject in terms of levels. It consists of three learning domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor, and it then assigns to each of these domains a hierarchy that corresponds to different levels of learning where each level subsumes the levels that come before it. The levels of the cognitive domains are ordered as knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. **Bak's theory of punctuated equilibrium** - explains rapid evolutionary changes (punctuations) followed by long periods of stability (stasis) as a "self-organized critical" state. It suggests ecosystems naturally evolve to a critical point where small, random mutations can trigger "coevolutionary avalanches" of widespread, sudden species extinction and adaptation. See **Paradigm shift** - When an important change occurs that replaces the usual way of thinking about or doing something. **Bradford's Law of Scattering** describes how literature on a specific subject is distributed across academic journals, stating that a small "nucleus" of core journals produces most of the articles, while a larger number of journals contribute fewer, rapidly diminishing returns. A few journals publish a huge volume of research, while many journals publish only a few articles on a topic. **Lotka’s Law of productivity**, formulated by Alfred J. Lotka in 1926, is a bibliometric principle stating that a small number of researchers produce the majority of scientific publications. **The OODA loop** — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—is a four-step, iterative decision-making model developed by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd for rapid, effective action in, dynamic, high-stakes situations. It helps individuals and organizations outpace opponents by cycling through, learning from, and adapting to new information faster than they can. **Zipf's Law** states that in many data sets—ranging from language to city populations—the frequency of an item is inversely proportional to its rank, meaning the n-th most frequent item appears 1/n as often as the top item. ex. The largest city in a country is often about twice the size of the second largest, and three times the size of the third; A small number of websites receive most of the traffic. **Gas and Brake Paradox** - This paradox shows up when you press the gas pedal of ambition, opportunity, or desire while unknowingly stomping on the brakes through unconscious resistance. You’re accelerating and stalling simultaneously. **The 80/50 Rule** - If you’re not 80% done by the time you’ve used 50% of your resources, you are behind **LATCH mode for information organization** (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy) _“Information may be infinite, however…The organization of information is finite as it can only be organized by LATCH: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, or Hierarchy.”_ - Richard Saul Wurman, 1996 **VRIO framework** (value, rarity, imitability and organization) is the tool used to a analyze firm’s internal resources and capabilities to find out if they can be a source of sustained competitive advantage. **PEST / PESTLE model** - (Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural, Technical, Legal, and Environmental) for environmental scanning of external factors which have, or may have, an impact on business.Assess internal capabilities with SWOT and external environment PESTLE. [MECE principle](https://en.wikipedia.orq/wiki/MECE_principle) - mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive from Barbara Minto **The Robustness Principle (Postel's Law)** - Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others **The Principle of Least Astonishment** - This principle proposes that systems and interfaces should be designed in a way that features and functionality is easily discovered and matches users expectations. People are part of the system. The design should match the user's experience, expectations, and mental models. **Twyman's law** - The more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error of one kind or another. This law suggests that when there are particularly unusual data points, it is more likely that they are the result of errors or manipulation. **The Stochastic Parrot** - Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output, an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot. - [Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. (2021)](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922) **The Broken Windows Theory** suggests that visible signs of crime (or lack of care of an environment) lead to further and more serious crimes (or further deterioration of the environment). **Putt's Law** - Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand. Putt's Law is often followed by Putt's Corollary: Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion. **Law of Leaky Abstractions** - All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky...abstractions, which are generally used in computing to simplify working with complicated systems, will in certain situations 'leak' elements of the underlying system, this making the abstraction behave in an unexpected way. **Mcdonaldization of society** - concept by sociologist George Ritter describing how the principles of fast food have come to dominate and shape sectors of modern life * Efficiency (optimal means to end) * Calculability (quantity over quality) * Predictability (consistent product/service everywhere) * Control (standardized employees and technology) **Cattell’s theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence** - Crystallized intelligence is based on what we learn from past experiences, knowledge, education, and culture. Fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning is the ability to apply logic and reasoning to a novel situation. It is applied in brief moments and is independent of any past knowledge. However, it is being used on a day to day problem-solving level. As opposed to crystallized intelligence, which we use to solve problems we’ve encountered or learned about before, we use fluid reasoning when we’re facing a new challenge that we’ve never encountered before. Fluid reasoning is exactly what comes into play when you can’t rely on your previous experience or knowledge. Fluid reasoning consists of creative problem solving, outside the box thinking, ability to reframe the situation and see it from a new perspective. **Words of estimative probability**(WEP or WEPs) are terms used by intelligence analysts in the production of analytic reports to convey the likelihood of a future event occurring. From Sherman Kent to separate “poets” (those preferring wordy probabilistic statements) from “mathematicians” (those preferring quantitative odds) as well as how to bridge them | Word | Probability | Range | | -------------------- | ----------- | ---------------------- | | Certain | 100% | Give or take 0% | | Almost certain | 93% | Give or take about 6% | | Probable | 75% | Give or take about 12% | | Chances about even | 50% | Give or take about 10% | | Probably not | 30% | Give or take about 10% | | Almost certainly not | 7% | Give or take about 5% | | Impossible | 0% | Give or take 0% | **Joesph Campbells Hero’s Journey** narrative framework that outlines typical adventure of hero archetype - departure - hero leaves ordinary world; the initiation - hero ventures into the unknown facing obstacles and challenges; the return - hero returns to the familiar world transformed by journey **Empathy mapping** is a visual tool used to understand users' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It typically includes sections for what users say, think, do, and feel, helping teams create user-centered products and improve customer experiences. **Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI)** is a strategy and innovation process developed by Anthony W. Ulwick. It is built around the theory that people buy products and services to get jobs done. Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” Clayton Christensen says, “People buy products and services to get a job done”. **Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)** is a framework that helps businesses understand why customers make certain choices by focusing on the specific goals or "jobs" they are trying to accomplish when they purchase a product or service. This approach emphasizes the circumstances and motivations behind customer decisions rather than just demographic data. **Woozle effect**, also known as **evidence by citation**, occurs when a source is widely cited for a claim that the source does not adequately support, giving said claim undeserved credibility. **Aumann's agreement theorem** states that two rational agents with the same prior beliefs and common knowledge of each other's beliefs cannot "agree to disagree" about the probability of an event. If their beliefs are common knowledge and they update their beliefs using Bayes' rule, their posterior beliefs must eventually align.