At the beginning of 2019, I wrote a series on Putting Mental Models to Practice. That series was an actionable summary of the judgment and decision ma

The Mental Model FAQ

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2021-05-30 21:30:09

At the beginning of 2019, I wrote a series on Putting Mental Models to Practice. That series was an actionable summary of the judgment and decision making literature, and existed as a constructive alternative to my criticism of mental model writing in The Mental Model Fallacy.

This post is a shortened version of the conclusions in my mental models series. It makes plain what is otherwise buried in a mountain of summarised information. I've taken some time to write this post because I wanted to dig further into Munger’s writing and world views. After about seven months of reading and research, I am satisfied that I got nothing significantly wrong in my original pieces.

A mental model is a simplified representation of the most important parts of some problem domain that is good enough to enable problem solving. (This definition is lifted from Greg Wilson’s book Teaching Tech Together here.)

The origins of mental models as a psychological construct may be traced back to Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development. However, much of mental model writing today is not about Piaget’s original theory. It is instead used as a catch-all phrase to lump three different categories of ideas together: