Grokking Reality with Mental Models
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February 27, 2021
One of my favorite Sensemaker in Residence series at The Stoa was Peter Wang’s series called Mental Models. Peter took us on a tour of his favorite mental models, and the broad theme of the series was relationships and communication, which is a great interest of mine.
I like mental models, and I think it is a good thing to have a big cognitive toolbox of mental models at the ready. I interviewed Gabriel Weinberg before on my podcast, who is the CEO of my favorite web browser DuckDuckGo, and who is also the co-author of a book called “Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models.”
The book contains about 300 mental models that Gabriel uses to navigate his business and life. In the introduction he describes what a mental model is:
Each morning, after our kids head off to school or camp, we take a walk and talk about our lives, careers, and current events. Though we discuss a wide array of topics, we often find common threads—recurring concepts that help us explain, predict, or approach these seemingly disparate subjects … These recurring concepts are called mental models. Once you are familiar with them, you can use them to quickly create a mental picture of a situation, which becomes a model that you can later apply to similar situations.
The book consists of mental models from various disciplines. The more disciplines the merrier, because you can approach reality from various perspectives of these disciplines, but you are only using their core mental models, hence you will not be tethered to the unexamined biases that may haunt a discipline.
I do like the following aphorism used in statistics, “all models are wrong, but some are useful,” because being useful is indeed the thing here. I personally have well over a thousand mental models put to memory, and there are thousands more of which I am aware of. The ones I am aware of but which are not put to my memory can be seen as “extelligence,” which describes the available knowledge that resides outside of one's cognitive processes. This is compared to intelligence, knowledge that resides within one’s cognitive processes.
Mental models are pretty central to how I grok reality actually. I do have a minimum viable philosophy, which is pretty Stoic, but it is probably more accurate to describe it as a modified Stoicism, because there is some Christianity and Existentialism sprinkled in there. Everything else in my mind just feels like a crazy scattered array of mental models.
I actually have a good practice, that might be good to concretize into a public practice. I have a bunch of mental models on Anki, a flashcard app that uses the evidence-based learning technique of spaced repetition. It is like using the cue card technique in school: you have the name of a mental model written on one side of the cue card, with the definition written on the back.
Given the nature of this app, mental models often bump into each other that normally would not. For example I might see the mental model of “master status,” followed by seeing the mental model of “role suction.” The former is about the way one primarily identifies as in society (e.g. I am a: doctor, woman, lesbian, Jew, atheist, etc.), while the latter is about the power that a group often has to impose a role onto a group member (e.g. scapegoat, joker, critic, etc.)
How do these two mental models relate? I do not know yet, but what I do is hold the two together, feel into the tension, and let my mind wander, which usually affords unforeseen connections and cross-pollination to occur. This is basically my take on “idea sex,” and I imagine this idea sex practice is partly why I never have a shortage of things to write about. This also helps with what Nicolas Benjamin calls “concept unfolding,” the ability to unfold new concepts on the spot.
A good benefit of having an abundance of unorganized mental models is that when an issue arises that requires quick sensemaking, a constellation of mental models rushes to my mind in support of sensemaking what is happening. This is related to a mental model I recently came across called “Tawjih,” from a blog called “Post Apathy.” The author defines this as:
One of the most important ways to establish control in your life is to develop the right concepts and language that will orientate your mindset and free your mental horizons. I call this Tawjih, meaning the conscious orientation and harmonisation of one's objectives, thoughts, and actions. It is an Arabic word borrowed (and tweaked) from the sociologist Malik Bennabi who applied this concept at a civilisational level.
Yeah. That is right. This rush of mental models is in service towards harmonisation, and this harmonisation is not permanent for me, it just harmonizes my mind long enough for me to get to the next sensemaking issue. The more mental models the better. What mental models to have in one’s toolkit? I do think it is wise to adopt Farnam Street’s approach, and know all the good ones from each intellectual discipline. That helps with the reality grokking, but I also think it is wise to have ones from the various memetic tribes. This helps me vibe with all the tribes, and affords me to code-switch in the right way.
For example, a lot of memetic tribes have what I’d call the “abstract boogeyman,” concepts that certain reality tunnels tend to reduce all of the world’s problems to. Reactionaries might like to use Curtis Yarvin’s “The Cathedral,” feminists might want to use Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's “Kyriarchy,” and Marxists might like Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s “Empire.” I can find the reality in all of these models, and I can use them in dialogue with those who take them as reality. This obviously helps being a memetic mediator / steal the culture trickster.
The problem I see here with geeking out about all of these mental models, is that one’s speech and writing can turn into a jargon salad. This can obviously be seen as intellectual signalling, which I do not think is the case for me anymore, as I wrote about in the entry “Coming to Terms.” It can lead to intellectual laziness though. You feel like you know what you're talking about when you drop a fancy phrase, but it is a different thing to clearly express the propositions of your argument.
I do acknowledge some of my entries here turn into jargon salads, and I totally cringe at myself after realizing I created one. I partly want to blame this on my mental model reality grokking strategy, but this does largely stem from intellectual laziness. Communicating one’s ideas to the masses is a different skill than using mental models to help grok reality.
So yeah, I do recommend this approach to reality grokking, but not without caution.
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