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June 27 - September 20, 2020
The concept of inverse thinking can help you with the challenge of making good decisions. The inverse of being right more is being wrong less. Mental models are a tool set that can help you be wrong less. They are a collection of concepts that help you more effectively navigate our complex world.
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world …. You kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “What are we sure is true?” … and then reason up from there
When arguing from first principles, you are deliberately starting from scratch. You are explicitly avoiding the potential trap of conventional wisdom, which could turn out to be wrong. Even if you end up in agreement with conventional wisdom, by taking the first-principles approach, you will gain a much deeper understanding of the subject at hand.
Ultimately, to be wrong less, you also need to be testing your assumptions in the real world, a process known as de-risking. There is risk that one or more of your assumptions are untrue, and so the conclusions you reach could also be false.
Once you identify the critical assumptions to de-risk, the next step is actually going out and testing these assumptions, proving or disproving them, and then adjusting your strategy appropriately.
minimum viable product, or MVP. The MVP is the product you are developing with just enough features, the minimum amount, to be feasibly, or viably, tested by real people.
“Everything should be made as simple as it can be, but not simpler!”
ask yourself: Does this assumption really need to be here? What evidence do I have that it should remain? Is it a false dependency?
this approach leads to an unnecessarily small dating pool. If instead people reflected on whom they’ve dated in the past in terms of what underlying characteristics drove their past relationships to fail, a much simpler set of dating criteria would probably emerge.
they probably do need to make each other think and laugh and find each other attractive.
the probability of two events in conjunction is always less than or equal to the probability of either one of the events occurring alone,
You can be nudged in a direction by a subtle word choice or other environmental cues. Restaurants will nudge you by highlighting certain dishes on menu inserts, by having servers verbally describe specials, or by just putting boxes around certain items.
Another concept you will find useful when making purchasing decisions is anchoring, which describes your tendency to rely too heavily on first impressions when making decisions. You get anchored to the first piece of framing information you encounter. This tendency is commonly exploited by businesses when making offers.
these mental models are all instances of a more general model, availability bias, which occurs when a bias, or distortion, creeps into your objective view of reality thanks to information recently made available to you.
When you put many similar filter bubbles together, you get echo chambers, where the same ideas seem to bounce around the same groups of people, echoing around the collective chambers of these connected filter bubbles. Echo chambers result in increased partisanship, as people have less and less exposure to alternative viewpoints. And because of availability bias, they consistently overestimate the percentage of people who hold the same opinions.
to be wrong less when thinking about people, you must find ways to increase your empathy, opening up a deeper understanding of what other people are really thinking.
MRI asks you to approach a situation from a perspective of respect. You remain open to other interpretations and withhold judgment until necessary.
To avoid mental traps, you must think more objectively. Try arguing from first principles, getting to root causes, and seeking out the third story.
Use Ockham’s razor and Hanlon’s razor to begin investigating the simplest objective explanations.
Actively seek out other perspectives by including the Devil’s advocate position and bypassing the filter bubble.
taking in a variety of perspectives will help you become a super thinker.
There is a class of unintended consequences that arise when a lot of people choose what they think is best for them individually, but the sum total of the decisions creates a worse outcome for everyone.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
When you try to incentivize behavior by setting a measurable target, people focus primarily on achieving that measure, often in ways you didn’t intend. Most importantly, their focus on the measure may not correlate to the behavior you hoped to promote.
For any decision, ask yourself: What kind of debt am I incurring by doing this? What future paths am I taking away by my actions today?
You need to find the right balance between preserving optionality and path dependence.
you want people to make quick decisions, reduce the number of choices. One way to do this is to give yourself or others a multi-step decision with fewer choices at each step, such as asking what type of restaurant to go to (Italian, Mexican, etc.), and then offering another set of choices within the chosen category.
you want more variety in your life, one suggestion is to front-load the decisions on your outfits and meals for the week to Sunday. Making these decisions on a usually lower-stress day can free up your decision-making capacity for the workweek.
dedicating long, uninterrupted periods of time to making progress on your most important problem.
Activities in quadrant I (Urgent/Important, such as handling a medical emergency) need to be done immediately. Activities in quadrant II (Not Urgent/Important, such as deep work) are also crucial, and should be prioritized just after the activities from quadrant I. You should focus your creative energies on these quadrant II activities as much as possible, because working on them will drive you fastest toward your long-term goals. The activities in quadrant III (Urgent/Not Important, such as most events and many “pressing” matters) might be better delegated, outsourced, or just ignored.
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law of diminishing utility, which says that the value, or utility, of consuming an additional item is usually, after a certain point, less than the value of the previous one consumed. Consider the difference between the enjoyment you receive from eating one donut versus eating a second or third donut. By the time you get to a sixth donut, you may no longer get any enjoyment out of it, and you might even start getting sick.
people really, really value instant gratification over delayed gratification, and this preference plays a central role in procrastination, along with other areas of life where people struggle with self-control, such as dieting, addiction, etc.
Just as species develop biological adaptations over generations, you need to be open to new ideas and paradigms, adjusting your thinking and behavior as necessary.
The more inertia you have, the more resistant you will be to changing these beliefs, and the less likely you will be to adapt your thinking when you need to.
In physics, momentum is the product (multiplication) of mass and velocity, whereas inertia is just a function of mass. That means a heavy object at rest has a lot of inertia since it is hard to move, but it has no momentum since its velocity is zero. However, a heavy object gets momentum quickly once it starts moving. The faster an object goes, the more momentum it has. However, its inertia remains the same (since its mass remains the same), and it is still similarly difficult to change its velocity.
Think of people in your organization who are motivated to make the change happen. They may be willing to help you. Talking to a diverse set of potential stakeholders can help you discover these hidden pockets of potential energy.
When attempting change, you want to understand the activation energy required and look for catalysts to make change easier.
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. No one plans to lose their spouse at a young age, or to graduate from college during an economic downturn. You
If you want greater luck surface area, you need to relax your rules for how you engage with the world. For example, you might put yourself in more unfamiliar situations: instead of spending the bulk of your time in your house or office, you might socialize more or take a class. As a result, you will make your own luck by meeting more people and finding more opportunities. Thinking of the butterfly effect, you are increasing your chances of influencing a tornado, such as forming a new partnership that ultimately blossoms into a large, positive outcome.
A happy medium has you attending occasional events that expose you to people who can help you advance your goals.
Your life will be a bit less orderly, but disorder in moderation can be a good thing.
When you are able to make time for important activities, you are more easily able to adapt to your changing environment because you have the ability to allocate time to a particular important activity when needed.
People are susceptible to the black-and-white fallacy because of the natural tendency to create us versus them framings, thinking that the only two options are ones that either benefit themselves at the expense of “others,” or vice versa. This tendency arises because you often associate identity and self-esteem with group membership, thereafter creating in-group favoritism and, conversely, out-group bias.
Adopt an experimental mindset, looking for opportunities to run experiments and apply the scientific method wherever possible.
Respect inertia: create or join healthy flywheels; avoid strategy taxes and trying to enact change in high-inertia situations unless you have a tactical advantage such as discovery of a catalyst and a lot of potential energy.
Actively cultivate your luck surface area and put in work needed to not be subsumed by entropy.
In fact, software exists that allows you to compose a diagram of a system on your screen and then immediately turn it into a working simulation. (Two such programs that do this online are Insight Maker and True-World.)
When you are in a conflict, you should consider how its framing is shaping the perception of it by you and others.
