Created: July 19, 2020
Modified: July 25, 2020
Modified: July 25, 2020
mental models
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- One last thought mental models are so, so important. When I think about computer modeling. It's actually great computers are powerful they can think through things much more complicated with much more rigor than we can. But in terms of furthering human thought, human intellectual capability advances one mental model at a time. Mental models are little intuitions.
- The best academic work comes from models that you can write out very simply, and even formally. For example, thinking of voice and exit. Classically in political science, if you're part of a group, and you're unhappy with something about that group, then you have two options. You can use your voice to persuade the group to change. Or you can exit and leave the group. And they both have benefits, they both have costs, and which one you do will depend on various properties of the situation. Like, how what the alternatives are to being in the group, and how well the group, how, what you think your capacity is to change the group.
- So that's a mental model. You can formalize formulas versions of it and game theory, but it's a stylized problem whose hape fits on to many real world situations.
- Oh with academia. Or at least, much of academia is at some level in the business of coming up with mental models. This is kind of a very broad sense it's what all the best work in the humanities does.
- I think more precisely, a lot of social science skills and mental models. I think a lot of humanities themselves focus on Let's say the texture of life. Things that are richer than simple models that you can easily reason through.
- So, if you come up with a good computer model. It'll run on someone's computer for a while.
- If you come up with a good mental model, then everybody who installs it will be a little bit quicker, a little bit clever smarter about the world.
- I think this is a good intuition. I think it's not obvious that striving for mental models is better than computer models or vice versa. Depends on the thing you're modeling, and it depends on how good the model is. Most social scientists don't accomplish very much.
- But good mental models are gold. I think I've already seen many lists, and I think I've often thought that I've already had that I have many of the mental models that come up on those lists. But I think it'd be useful to try to write a list (writing inbox). I would like to be able to explain to kids what mental models they should have, or what good examples of good mental models.
- And I think it would be useful for me to see which models I come up with. and which models I don't. Which models I find out that I forgot to write about. I think they'll be interesting and I think that in the process of writing them up, I would come to other interesting topics.
- So, This is for the writing inbox: mental models.
- Transcribed by https://otter.ai