mental models
Tags: episteme
What is a mental model?
- Originally traced back to Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
- Modern usage covers:
- Frameworks
- Frameworks for decision making and for life
- Thinking tools
- Tools and techniques for thinking, sometimes “rationality” research
- i.e. ‘reasoning from first principles’, ‘avoiding cognitive bias’, etc
- Tools and techniques for thinking, sometimes “rationality” research
- Mental representations
- Piaget’s orginal theory, internal representations of some problem domain
- ’tacit knowledge’ vs ’explicit knowledge’, or technê vs epistêmê
- Made through experience
- Piaget’s orginal theory, internal representations of some problem domain
- Frameworks
- https://fs.blog/mental-models/#what_are_mental_models
Types of Mental Models
- Descriptive models
- How people actually think (biases)
- Normative models
- How people should think (probability theory)
- Perscriptive models
- What is needed to get people thinking from descriptive models to normative ones
Issues with mental models?
- https://www.instapaper.com/read/1298804126
- Mental models are confined to what people communicate, true expertise is built up via experience and practition
- Framework mental models are always limited, overreliance misses signals
- Thinking tools are best applied in the original domain, and can be transferred iff the contexts are very similar
- Note taking in Astro is applicable to note taking in finance
- Mental representations are difficult to communicate, and requires practice, emulation, or experience
- Accents, sounding in a different language
- Mental models are not a catchall, nor are they pokemon to collect
- Is significant usefulness to thinking all things as systems, and each system has its rules. Figuring out the rules reaps the rewards.