Super Thinking: Upgrade Your Reasoning and Make Better Decisions with Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

Critical mass as a super model applies to any system in which an accumulation can reach a threshold amount that causes a major change in the system.

The point at which the system starts changing dramatically, rapidly gaining momentum, is often referred to as a tipping point.

Sometimes this point is also referred to as an inflection point, where the growth curve bends, or inflects

Will one ever happen? What could be a catalyst? Being an expert in an area that is about to hit a tipping point is an advantageous position, since your expertise has increasing leverage as the idea or technology takes off. Conversely, specializing in an area that is a decade away from hitting a tipping point is a much lower-leverage situation.

Diffusion of Innovation,

Innovators (about 2.5 percent of the population) have the desire and financial wherewithal to take risks and are closely connected to the emerging field, usually because they are specifically interested in trying new things within it.

Early adopters (13.5 percent) are willing to try out new things once they are a bit more fleshed out. Early adopters do not require social proof to use a product or idea. They are often the influencers that help push an idea past a tipping point, thus making it more broadly known.

The early majority (34 percent) are willing to adopt new things once the value proposition has been clearly established by the early adopters. This group is not interested in wasting their time or money.

The late majority (34 percent) are generally skeptical of new things. They will wait until something has permeated through the majority of people before adopting it. When they get on board, it is often at a lower cost.

Laggards (16 percent) are the very last group to adopt something new, and they do so only because they feel it is necessity.

While developed as a theory about technological innovation, the concept of an adoption life cycle also applies to social innovations, including ideas of tolerance and social equality.

in network effects, where the value of a network grows with each addition to it (the effect).

as Metcalfe’s law, is named after Robert Metcalfe, the co-inventor of the networking technology Ethernet. It describes the nonlinear growth in network value when nodes are connected to one another.

Critical mass occurs when there are enough nodes present to make

there are enough nodes present to make a network useful. Amazingly, the fax machine was invented in the 1840s, but people didn’t regularly use it until the 1970s, when there were enough fax machines to reach critical mass. The

The modern equivalent is internet messaging services: they need to reach critical mass within a community to be useful. Once they pass this tipping point, they ca...

Once an idea or technology reaches critical mass, whether through network effects or otherwise, it has gained a lot of inertia, and often has a lot of momentum as well.

chain reaction, known more generally as a cascading failure, where a failure in one piece of a system can trigger a chain reaction of failure that cascades through the entire system.

cascading failure, where a failure in one piece of a system can trigger a chain reaction of failure that cascades through the entire system.

Major blackouts on our electric grid are usually the result of cascading failure: overload in one area triggers overload in adjacent areas, triggering further overload in more adjacent areas, and so on. The 2007/2008 financial crisis is another example of a cascading failure, where a failure in ...

The 2007/2008 financial crisis is another example of a cascading failure, where a failure in subprime mortgages ultimately led to fai...

As technologies and ideas spread, you will be better prepared for them if you can spot and analyze these models—how S curves unfold, where tipping points occur, how network effects are utilized.

Many global systems, including the economy and weather, are known as chaotic systems. That means that while you can guess which way they are trending, it’s impossible to precisely predict their overall long-term state.

butterfly effect to explain the concept that chaotic systems are extremely sensitive to small perturbations or changes in initial conditions.

the path of a tornado could be affected by a butterfly flapping its wings weeks before, sending air particles on a slightly different path than they would have otherwise traveled, which then gets amplified over time and ultimately results in a different path for the tornado.

The fact that you are surrounded by chaotic systems is a key reason why adaptability is so important to your success.

While it is a good idea to plan ahead, you cannot accurately predict the circumstances you will face.

You must continuously adapt to what life throws at you.

You can at least attempt to turn lemons into lemonade by using these chaotic systems to your advantage.

If you want greater luck surface area, you need to relax your rules for how you engage with the world.

you are increasing your chances of influencing a tornado, such as forming a new partnership that ultimately blossoms into a large, positive outcome.

entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system.

context, increasing your luck surface area means increasing your personal maximum entropy, by increasing the possible number of situations you put yourself in.

As entropy increases, things become more randomly arranged. If left to continue forever, this eventually leads to an evenly distributed system, a completely randomly arranged system

If our kids don’t make an effort to clean up, the room just gets messier and messier.

The natural increase of entropy over time in a closed system is known as the

second law of thermo...

On a more practical level, the second law serves as a reminder that orderliness needs to be maintained, lest it be slowly chipped away by disorder.

natural progression is based on the reality that most orderliness doesn’t happen naturally. Broken eggs don’t spontaneously mend themselves. In boiling water, an ice cube melts and never re-forms as ice. If you take a puzzle apart and shake up the pieces, it isn’t going to miraculously put itself back together again. You must continually put energy back into systems to maintain their desired orderly states.

You must continually put energy back into systems to maintain their d...

If you never put energy into straightening up your workspace, it will get ever messier. The sam...

Instead, you need to manage your time so that it is in a state of lower entropy.

These 2 × 2 matrices draw on a concept from physics called polarity, which describes a feature that has only two possible values. A magnet has a north and south pole. An electric charge can be positive or negative.

Polarity is useful because it helps you categorize things into one of two states: good or bad, useful or not useful, high-leverage or low-leverage, etc.

When making decisions, you usually have more than two options. It’s not all black and white. Practically, whenever you are presented with a decision with two options, try to think of more.

showed that with the tiniest of associations, even completely arbitrary ones (like defining groups based on coin tosses), people will favor their “group.”

that transactions are zero-sum, meaning that if your group gains, then the other group must lose, so that the sum of gains and losses is zero.

most have the potential to be win-win situations, where both parties can actually end up better off, or win.

you must continually try to strike the right balance between order and chaos as you interact with your environment. If you let the chaos subsume you, then you will not make progress in any particular direction. But if you are too ordered, then you will not be able to adapt to changing circumstances and will not have enough

You want to be somewhere in the middle of order and chaos, where you are intentionally raising your personal entropy enough to expose yourself to interesting opportunities and you are flexible and resilient enough to react to new conditions and paradigms that emerge.