- The power of free markets to be dramatically more efficient than central planning.
- Moral hazard, the brutality of open markets, and precedent setting of bailouts
- The power of incentives, monetary or otherwise, all across life (e.g. parents' downside-only position in freedom of kids)
- The best way to have X is to deserve X (eg a good spouse, trust, that job) (this is somewhat Economics, somewhat Life)
- Economies of scale -- internal specialization, bulk purchasing power, leverage in best practices
- Diseconomies of scale -- can't address niche markets, bureaucracy
- Circle of competence (investing)
- Decision trees
Engineering / Systems Engineering
- The Law of Unintended Consequences
- Abstraction of complexity / modularity of components
- Redundancy and backups
- Carrying capacity, queuing theory
Logic / misc
- Correlation vs causation
- Persuade xor discover
- What cannot go on forever, must stop.
- Sample bias
- Experiment design
- Sometimes, Fast is slow and slow is fast.
- The idea that knowing a name for something doesn't mean you know anything about that thing (a la Feynmann), and that names/words are just arbitrary and sometimes cause confusion when people are using slightly different definitions for something where there is no fundamental disagreement
- "If the path to victory is not clear, do nothing." -Shogun
- Train harder than you fight
- Sometimes reactions swing too far in the other direction, and have to come back to center (e.g. vulgarity in rap lyrics, hippy thinking in the 70's)
- If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
- Keep your identity small (a la Paul Graham and/or Paul Buchheit)
- You can only be good to yourself AND good to others, or neither (a la Paul Buchheit)
- Interesting way of thinking about work and personal improvement and health and everything else: working for your future self
Where people often go wrong
- Confusing the way things are with the way you wish they were.
- Differentiating just plain bad vs bad, but a sign of a good thing (thinking through second-order effects)
Dimensions some people tend to be biased on
- How much (and when) one takes responsibility for others' emotions
- Tendency to over- or under- bake things (advice is either "done is better than perfect" or __?__, respectively)
Market Disruption / Innovation
- Differentiating on important dimensions (blue ocean strategy)
- Shifts in platforms often open window for new entrants (e.g. MS Office with GUI's)
- Proxies for demand
- What's new in the world that's enabling the innovation?
- Barriers to entry / network effects / fragmented vs consolidated incumbents
- Rich customers, not competing on price
- Technology And Courage -- the immense courage needed to do innovative work, and tools for building courage
- The irrationality of humans, e.g. Cialdini's Influence: social proof, reciprocity, consistency bias, authority, friendship, scarcity bias, social distance
- Confabulation, i.e. people don't know why they do what they do, and the bias to attribute others' actions to their nature while attributing our own actions to our circumstances
- People are affected by their environment moreso than basic character. This is part of Cialdini, but worth breaking out into its own point. E.g. with the no-poach fiasco in Silicon Valley. E.g. the Stanford prision experiment.
- How slow changes over long periods of time are underestimated and tend to result in irrational inaction (Boiling frog)
- Ideas from negotiation, e.g. anchoring.
- Wikipedia List of Cognitive Biases
- Paradox of choice
- Social capital decays (for example, if I do something big and one time for you in exchange for you doing something small over a long time for me, you will feel like you got the worse end of the bargain)
- People will often do things for free that they won't do for small amounts of money
- Joint v.s. separate evaluation (Distinction Bias)
- Being good: "PERMA" = Positive Emotion, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment
- Face reality
- Past is prologue (this is an anecdote to things like learned helplessness, ___?)
- The "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in making predictions / planning for the future
- Conflict has a certain shape that makes it attract a particularly higher amount of mental attention than it should
- Pavlovian associations
- Liking familiarity -- e.g. in branding
- Picture superiority effect
- Legitimacy exchange -- e.g. at burning man the hippies and engineers exchanging legitimacy
- (International security) People tend to overestimate the degree to which their adversary's actions are coordinated.
- Balance of powers (e.g. legislative, executive, and judicial branches)
- Evolution / survival of the fittest
- Basic probability -- Gaussian distributions, independence versus non-independence
- Game theory, equilibria
- A list here of general techniques Map of math tools
- Exponential growth results from growth fueled in proportion to current levels (e.g. the solution to dx/dt = k*x is x = e^t)
Statistics / machine learning
- Overfitting / reading too much into limited data
- Explore versus exploit
- The Pareto principle, 80/20 rule
- Work expands to fill the time allowed for it
- What gets measured gets done, and incentives
- Critical mass / tipping points
- Feedback loops: positive and negative
- Control systems, impulse response
- Robustness principle / static discipline: be conservative in what you output, liberal in what you accept
- It's okay/natural for not everyone to like you. 1/3rd of people will like you, 1/3rd will think you're okay, 1/3rd will not care for you
Writing / communication (these don't really fit because they're more tactics than models)
- Use stories
- Speak in the first person ("I ...")
- Big picture before details. Meaning before details.
- Have an antagonist. This creates a narrative.
- Educate about things broadly and inform re your stuff, simultaneously. (related: show knowledge superiority.)
- Put numbers in terms that are easy to relate to
- Use imagery
- Create moments of surprise
- What is the one big idea you want to leave with your audience? It should be short, memorable, and in subject-verb-object sequence. (E.g. Apple reinvents the phone)
- Closed v.s. open design space (constraints/approaches relatively known v.s. unknown)
- Environment carrying capacities
- Predactor / prey relationships
- Symbiosis -- mutualism, parasitism
- Explore vs exploit (this is a useful idea in ai as well)
Typically Weak Mental Models
What's Going On Here?