The Great Mental Models, Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology

by Shane Parrish

Taking action that works with the world is more effective, less stressful, and ultimately more rewarding. We don’t waste our time fighting to accomplish the impossible.

We use models to retain knowledge and simplify how we understand the world. We can’t relearn everything every day, and so we construct models to help us chunk patterns and navigate our world more efficiently.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Marie Curie1

Relativity helps us to understand that there is more than one way to see everything.

Galileo thus demonstrated that perspective influences what we perceive as reality and how we understand the world.

You will always have limitations to your frame of reference that you need to account for in an effort to better understand reality.

On the morning of July 4, 2000, 20-year-old Chris Kinison was killed in a convenience store parking lot in Ocean Shores, Washington, USA. Minh Duc Hong was charged with the crime.

When you see someone doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.

Perspective often comes from distance or time. If you’re trying to solve a problem and you’re stuck, try shifting your vantage point.

What matters is understanding the complexity and value of multiple perspectives. No one sees it all. Multiple perspectives layered together reduce blind spots and offer us a more textured and truer sense of the underlying reality.

“Quid pro quo,” Latin for “something for something,” appeared in regular usage in the 16th century. We also have “give and take,” “tit for tat,” and “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

The act of doing good causes an equal reaction in terms of feeling good.

Life is an iterative and compounding game. In the words of Peter Kaufman, it pays to “go positive and go first.” Also, remember that people make mistakes. Assuming there is no maliciousness, it pays to forgive.

Daniel Kahneman explains it like this: “When directly compared or weighted against each other, losses loom larger than gains.”

Become what you want to see in the world and it will be so. If you want an amazing relationship with your partner, be an amazing partner. If you want people to be thoughtful and kind, be thoughtful and kind. If you want people to listen to you, listen to them. The best way to achieve success is to deserve success. Small changes in your actions change your entire world.

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transferred or changed from one form to another, such as from light to heat.

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy (a measure of disorder simply understood as energy unable to be used to do work) of an isolated system always increases.

The third law of thermodynamics states that as temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a given system approaches a constant value.

It states that if two objects are in thermal equilibrium with a third object, then those two objects are also in thermal equilibrium with each other.

As Adrian Goldsworthy writes of Hadrian’s Wall, “Ultimately, its success rested less on the fortifications and barriers than on the soldiers who manned them.”7 This statement is true of all walls.

The Chinese walls were an expression of political desire to set the location of the northern border, and as Julia Lovell explains in The Great Wall, they were not purely defensive structures.

The Value of Contrast The problem of equilibrium. Writing in Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche says of politics, “Almost every party grasps that it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposing party should not decay in strength.”1 This is pointing out that there is value in contrast. If all the forces are balanced, a true state of equilibrium, there is no change, no growth, no movement. It is contrast that drives development.

Fairy tales are one way we have combated disorder in our history. They offer explanations for occurrences that seem to have none, giving a structure to what we find hard to comprehend.

The Hero‘s Journey ‘Home’ is threatened The protagonist suffers from some kind of flaw or problem The protagonist goes on a journey to find a cure or the key to the problem Exactly halfway through they find a cure or the key On the journey back they’re forced to face up to the consequences of taking it They face some kind of literal or metaphorical death They’re reborn as a new person, in full possession of the cure; in the process ‘home’ is saved.

Everything is moving toward equilibrium, including people, culture, ideas, and information.

Entropy is a similar constant. The end state of high entropy is also incompatible with life. Sensing this, we try to understand randomness and the unexplainable through stories that seem to put order back into our lives, thereby reducing entropy.

Starting something is hard, but so is stopping something. In physics, inertia refers to the resistance a physical object has to a change in its state of motion.

Keeping things as they are requires almost no effort and involves little uncertainty.

We are lazy by default.

When we go to the grocery store we seldom invest the energy to apply critical thinking to the products we’ve bought dozens of times.

I always buy Coke Diet instead of trying new ones.

In Learning from the Octopus, Rafe Sagarin writes that belief systems have an “enormous evolutionary inertia behind them,”11 explaining that our capacity for belief has been one of our survival mechanisms and that this biological relevance helps explain why beliefs are so resistant to change.

Energy is precious and we employ it sparingly. It’s human nature to allow the current state to remain as changing it requires us to expend energy. Getting started is the hardest part.

In Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, Serhii Plokhy describes the entire scope of the disaster. He explains that the leadership of the Soviet Union was characterized by an approach of burying the past instead of learning from it.

The result of the changes to the assembly line was a system that produced cars that needed less rework at the end.

To get to a goal, we cannot just focus on being fast, but need to be aware of the direction we want to go.

This is why having a direction is so important: it lets us evaluate the usefulness of what we are doing by giving us a measurement of where we want to go.

Think of written language: a way to leverage what people have learned in the past so that we don’t have to relearn everything from scratch with each new generation.

Roger J. Volkema, in his book aptly titled Leverage, explains two of the principles of leverage in negotiations. The first is that leverage in human interactions is based on perceptions and second that it is a social or relational construct.1

Leverage is best paired with reciprocity—building in win-win thinking helps you keep your leverage sustainable and achieve better, longer lasting, outcomes.

Double the atmospheric CO2 levels and temperatures rise by 5–6°C, probably more like 2–3°C per modern estimates. Arrhenius even recognized the possible role of fossil fuel burning, except he didn’t see it as much of a threat, figuring that later generations would just have nicer weather to look forward to.

Sustaining significant change requires the same effort. You have to plan for not only the initial flame, but all the energy required to get and sustain the fire you want.

Real change takes effort. Invest more than you think you need to, and you just might get there.

While European culture had stagnated for centuries, the weakening of the church enabled dramatic advancements in science and significant changes in the topics pursued in literature and poetry.

People and technologies often act as catalysts, increasing the pace of social change and development.

Combining a deep specialized knowledge in a domain with a broader understanding of the rules that govern the physical world is a rare combination that saves you time, money, and problems.

Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow explain in The Story of French that “three main events pushed the language from one phase to the next: the fall of the Roman Empire, the conquest of England, and the rise and fall of Paris as a center of power.”10

The French Academy, of course, completely ignored scientific and technical vocabulary, as well as new vocabulary from the colonies.”14

Some people react by fighting to keep the language “pure” and consistent with centuries-old usage. They advocate a top-down approach to language development.

The lens of evolution and natural selection suggests that trying to freeze a language, or trying to maintain tight control on its evolution, is the exact wrong reaction in terms of preventing extinction.

The main reason Latin fell out of use is its complexity. Learning Latin is far more arduous than learning any of the languages it spawned as there are numerous ways to modify each word depending on the context.

not necessary. Latin trades off clarity for precision.

For instance, “antique” and “ancient” come from antiqua, meaning “old.”

antique Middle French, from Latin antiquus, from ante before — more at ANTE- ancient Middle English ancien, from Anglo-French, from Vulgar Latin *anteanus, from Latin ante before — more at ANTE-