The best way to make intelligent decisions: Mental Models

Truths unveiled.

Aug 18, 2021

Hello 👋,

Moghal Saif here, I send you these amazing recommendations to make you smarter and more knowledgeable. We have just started our journey, please be kind enough to share this post with your friends and family and spread the word on the internet.

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions

Via Farnam Street

Photograph: Jeremy Lishner

A Little Brief:

What Are Mental Models?

Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.

Learning to Think Better

The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our heads and their usefulness in the situation at hand. The more models you have—the bigger your toolbox—the more likely you are to have the right models to see reality. It turns out that when it comes to improving your ability to make decisions variety of matters.

Most of us, however, are specialists. Instead of a latticework of mental models, we have a few from our discipline. Each specialist sees something different. By default, a typical Engineer will think in systems. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A biologist will think in terms of evolution. By putting these disciplines together in our heads, we can walk around a problem in a three-dimensional way. If we’re only looking at the problem one way, we’ve got a blind spot. And blind spots can kill you.

“ You can train your brain to think better. One of the best ways to do this is to expand the set of mental models you use to think. " —- James Clear about mental models.

There are a total of 100 mental models, which are classified into 8 categories

Which are Core thinking concepts, Physics & Chemistry, Biology, Systems, Numeracy, Microeconomics, Military & War, Human Nature & Judgement.

Shanne Parrish has given a brief understanding of mental models in the original article and if you are interested in reading it further he also has a book collection which is so 4 parts and 2 parts of it already written, you can get yours by going the fs.blog website.

More on the original.

Why the Evolution of Religion Should Worry Believers

Via Benjamin Cain

Photograph: Birmingham Museums Trust

The Problem of Religion’s Evolution

Perhaps this analysis of the variety of religions is flawed; certainly, it’s simplistic. Nevertheless, there’s bound to be some such account of the historical evolution of religions, and of how different conceptions of divinity were socially applied. There are, then, two explanations of this kind of narrative, one that upholds the religious enterprise and one that deflates theologies and rejects religions as wrongheaded.

Practitioners of religion can say that God or some divine power is real, and that we’ve merely been flawed or biased in our understanding of divinity. We might exploit the idea of a divine power for our political purposes, construing God as limited or as omnipotent, depending on which social narrative is most useful, but that would be due to our waywardness.

Alternatively, we could deny that there’s any special reality addressed by religions, holding religions to be just projections of our personal and political agendas. The reason religions have evolved, and the domain of divinity has shrunk is just that human societies have evolved and used religious narratives as excuses and obfuscations. The gods were just mascots that cheered on this or that endeavour, masks for the real human agents that shaped history.

The Problem of Atheistic Religiosity

Still, this dismissal of Everyman’s religion doesn’t do away with the central topics of religion (sacredness, faith, transcendence), because there are those atheistic equivalents. Atheists are often functionally religious about something, treating this or that as though it were their god, and those atheists who hold nothing to be sacred or of ultimate importance probably aren’t worth knowing. If you’re passionate about nothing, you’re likely not so interesting as a person, and you should search for the spark that piques your interest so that you might become interesting in pursuing it.

The root of this humility is secular humanism: humanists may be proud and ambitious, but they’re not so easily driven to delusions of grandeur since they understand that they evolved from animals by a mindless evolutionary process. We can progress but only by doing the best we can, and we can save ourselves only by holding off for so long the much greater force of nature’s indifference to our welfare.

Still, the source of this humility — the ultimate futility of our ventures — seems a bigger problem than the baselessness of religious sanctimony.

More on the original.

The Truth About Hard Work

Via Kunal B Sarkar

Photograph: Ibrahim Rifath

When we are talking about hard work, we aren’t necessarily talking about physically working hard or doing mentally challenging tasks. The concept of hard work depends less on the task and more on the human performing the task. If the task at hand is very easy and simple, but the human wants to do something else at that time, then even that easy task feels difficult to do. This feeling is Hard work.

The concept of Hard Work can not exist without inner conflict. So the opposite of Hard Work is not Easy Work; Everyone’s got a different taste, whether it be regarding food, people, or work. There are some default likes and dislikes of your body and mind. I am not talking about likes and dislikes created by the mind, but I am talking about the inclinations of your entire being (body, brain, mind, feelings, emotions, upbringing, DNA, all combined).

A work feels hard when you are working against your being’s inclinations. You might be good with logic, but are forcing yourself to do some labour work. That’s hard work for you, but someone else might find the same labour work more engaging than analysis work. If you are asked to eat a scoop of your favourite food every day, that’s not a big of an issue, but if you are asked to follow a diet composed of food you do not like, it becomes hard work. Working hard for a better future?

It’s commonly advised to young kids to work hard to accumulate the maximum amount of things early in life. This is probably the worst advice for young kids. The youth is for exploration. It’s the best time to explore their interests and talents. If someone tells you to invest this precious time in making 200 sales calls every day to accumulate more money early in life, I’d say stay away from that person.

Investing time to find your art is the best investment you can make when you are young. Once you find which skill deeply interests you, triple down on it. Gain mastery in it. And you know what, it won’t feel like hard work at all. Yes, it will feel DIFFICULT for sure, but it won’t feel like hard work. And eventually, all the external things you desire will come to you through that skill.

More on the original.

Tweets :