Mental Models
About Mental Models and Their Power
It is one thing to know the known mental models. But the real value comes from knowing where and how to apply them - not only within but across multiple disciplines. The major disciplines have their respective mental models. The interesting part and creativity comes from applying the models to situations where it is not obvious that they apply. As a simple example - consider Inertia. This applies clearly in physics - but one can easily see the application of this law in business and other areas. It appears that the application of mental models in far-fetched cases is the true genius of knowing how to work with mental models - to tap their creative and explanatory potential. Because the obvious mental models - everyone can see them. The less obvious applications - can lead to profound creative insight - in that simply few people can make the connection- thus the problems are deemed 'hard' to average people. The value of interdisciplinary, open, rapid learning lies in securing a broad base of knowledge across many areas - so that connections between the disciplines can be made fluently. This applies to many areas of learning or performance - such as the more languages you know the faster you can learn a 'completely new' one - the more of the natural sciences you know the more interesting insights you can make - the more you know about physiology the better sportsman you can be - the more you know about design the better you can design something in an area you have no experience with. Indeed, the concept of Mental Model Escape Velocity can be coined here - a condition where just about any new problem not previously solved has an easy solution - as derived readily from combining a finite set of existing models. This would be a condition of effortless creativity and problem-solving ability.
In addition to mental models - mental performance hacks can be taught - to improve counting, memory, logic, physiological control of the body, cognitive overrides - or peak performance in many ares.
For OSE, since we are aiming to popularize innovation by the masses - it is useful to make all the mental models, skills, and hacks - transparent and accessible for easy learning. We believe that 98% of the population can operate at the creative genius level [1]. Instead, by the time people reach adulthood - only 2% operate with creative genius. Getting this back to near-perfect level as found in children is a tangible goal - we simply cannot dumb people down through schooling. In fact, schooling should develop the 98% of genius further - to hypergenius level. There is no limit to how people can evolve in the areas of intelligence, creativity, and transcendence. So that people become less creative as they age is a bug in societial design which needs to be fixed.
Understanding mental models can be a start to more effective behavior. This can also influence one's emotional intelligence - and the combination of Cognitive Skills, Emotional Intelligence, and Body Intelligence can contribute to building the Integrated Human.
Examples
OSE Specific
Collections
- Farnam Street List - [2]- looks better than Weinberg below. Here's the deal: on
Problem Solving
- "I don’t want to be a great-problem-solver. I want to avoid problems – prevent them from happening and doing right from the beginning." — Peter Bevelin on Seeking Wisdom, Mental Models, Learning, and a Lot More
Books
- Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg (founder of DuckDuckGo) - [3]. Reviews - [4]. Critical review - [Over long passages it feels the author copy-pasted from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, etc. for his own notebook and decided to publish it afterwards.]
Links
- Logical Fallacies
- General Semantics - states that all we have are mental models - they are all abstractions of reality. This is the seminal work for driving ourselves sane.