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.

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.

The theory of relativity is founded on empathy. Not empathy in the ordinary emotional sense; empathy in a rigorous scientific sense. The crucial idea is to imagine how things would appear to someone who’s moving in a different way than you are.» Steven Strogatz1 Thought

Rashomon, the classic Japanese film, is an excellent exploration of the differences in the testimonies of several eyewitnesses to a crime. A samurai is found murdered in a forest. A bandit is accused of the crime. During the subsequent trial, the bandit, the samurai—speaking through a medium—his wife, and a woodcutter who observed the whole incident each give testimony. Each story is different, partly due to the self-interest of each of the characters, and partly due to the fact that each can only understand the events that play out through a single perspective—their

The audience does not get any closure on what actually happened, which is an accurate portrayal of life. They are simply left with the contradictory testimonies and the implication that each of these have become the truth for the persons telling them.

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.

we are not dispassionate, neutral observers. We bring our sensibilities into what we see.

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

A great chapter in the book Influence as well

Reciprocity teaches us why win-win relationships are the way to go, why waiters leave candies with the bill, why it’s a good idea to use the least force possible to secure an outcome, and why a lot of companies don’t permit their employees to accept gifts. This model demonstrates why we should view giving as being as valuable as having. It prompts us rewrite the Golden Rule to say, “Do unto others knowing that something will be done unto you.” So what exactly is reciprocity?

In physics, reciprocity is Newton’s third law, which states that for every force exerted by object A on object B, there is an equal but opposite force exerted by object B on object A.

Consider the tackle in American football. The force that the defender puts on the receiver’s body in order to bring him to the ground is equivalent to the force felt by the defenseman’s body during the tackle. You can’t initiate force without having a force put on you. For the tackle, this is very important. If the defenseman felt nothing there would be no incentive for him to be strategic in the application of his force on the receiver. And who would actually want to be a receiver if this were the case? If the guy who initiates the force feels nothing—much better to be him.

Reciprocity can be summed up like this: when you act on things, they act on you.

Quid pro quo Sometimes, if you want to understand how pervasive a concept is, you can look at the vernacular of a society. English speakers from Commonwealth countries have many expressions that suggest the basics of reciprocity are foundational for how we expect our society to function. “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 meaning behind these expressions, which implies an expectation of reciprocity, is perhaps best summed up by another Latin phrase: “do ut des,” translated as, “I give, so that you may give.”

Bethune’s achievements continue to be regarded as heroic by the Chinese. The first hospital he founded still exists, and his story is mandatory learning for primary school students in China.

Should ask Cynthia about if she remembers learning about Bethune

For this reason, evolution tends to select for cooperative behavior in groups—it benefits everyone in the long run.

However, straightforward tit for tat is not as effective as the strategy known as tit for tat with forgiveness. This strategy involves occasionally cooperating in the face of defection. It is easy for two opponents to get stuck in a cycle of mutual defection from which they cannot escape unless and until one decides to cooperate. If both are using tit for tat, a cycle of mutual cooperation will then commence. 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.

Loss Aversion

Thinking, Fast and Slow!

gains.” According to Kahneman, people are willing to risk losing $100 for every $250 of potential gains.1 The loss aversion coefficient is 1:2.5.2

Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.

This is why putting ourselves out there, engaging people who might dismiss or reject us, is so scary. Because in the one-off situation, the pain it will cause is perceived as stronger than the positive feelings of acceptance. The trick is to start looking at outcomes in the aggregate instead of focusing on each unique situation.

Humans engage in two types of reciprocity with each other: direct, which is “I help you and you help me;” and indirect, which is either a pay-it-forward concept, “I help you and then you help someone else,” or more about reputation building—“I help you, building a reputation as one who helps, so that someone else helps me in the future.” Both kinds work.

A lot of people seem to expect the world to just hand them things without putting in any effort. This is a poor strategy because it doesn’t align with the human behavior you can observe around you every day.

Reciprocation teaches us that if you give people cynicism and curtness or nothing at all, you are likely to receive the same. But if you give people opportunity and the benefit of the doubt, you will, more often than not, be on the receiving end of the same behavior.

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. People tend to receive what they offer to the world. Thus, to change our world, we must change what we offer to others. Reciprocity teaches us to be mindful of how our actions tend to come back on us. It’s importan...

One of the most useful aspects of thermodynamics is that it applies to all systems everywhere in the known universe, giving it a broad applicability. All work requires energy, and all systems are headed toward equilibrium.

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed;

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.

One of the impacts of this law is that we need to expend energy to create order. Without the deployment of energy, all things move away from order.

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

The fourth law of thermodynamics is known as the zeroth law. This is because it was formulated after the first three laws but is fundamental to and assumed by the others. It states that if two objects are in thermal equilibrium with a third object, then...

We can also recognize that we will be influenced by the behavior of the people around us, and therefore, that is why it's so important to be wise in choosing who they are.

The energy state of an economy—that is, its temperature—largely determines what its members can do and how fast they can do it. Temperature—the average kinetic energy of the moving molecules in a gas—affects every chemical process and every physical property associated with life. It influences not only the cost of doing business, but the speed at which tasks can be accomplished, and perhaps most importantly the range of adaptive options available. Temperature is, in other words the crucial link between energy and time; the two components of power.» Geerat Vermeij1

The physical world, all of it, only ever has one destination: equilibrium. » Helen Czerski

But a boundary line, as any military expert will tell you, is also a potential battle line, for a boundary line marks off the territory of two opposed and potentially warring camps. » Ken Wilber8

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel prize winning physicist, clarifies entropy in contexts such as organizing a pile of coins or the mixing of jelly and peanut butter in their containers. Why is it that if someone knocks the table the coins will get mixed up, or that despite their best efforts your children inevitably get jelly into the peanut butter jar and vice versa? “The explanation is that there are more ways for [coins] to be mixed up than sorted. There are more ways for peanut butter and jelly to contaminate each other’s containers than to remain completely pure. To the extent that chance is operating, it is likely that a closed system that has some order will move toward disorder, which offers so many more possibilities.”15

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.

Another way to think of entropy is to imagine the game of broken telephone that you might have played when you were younger. A group of children are sitting around in a circle, and one child starts the game by whispering a sentence into the ear of the person next to them. The sentence gets transferred one child at a time until it has made its way around the circle. The final sentence is compared to the original, often with much hilarity. Something mundane like “today is Wednesday” can turn into “I like scary movies.” Because there are so many more options for change to occur, each repetition is more likely to drift from the original.

Art is born out of as well as encapsulates the continuing battle between order and chaos. It seeks order or form, even when portraying anarchy » John Yorke16

Yorke writes that “every act of perception is an attempt to impose order, to make sense of a chaotic universe. Storytelling, at one level, is a manifestation of this process.”

While works that deviate from the archetypal narrative can be interesting, those that follow it most closely tend to enjoy the most commercial success. They just feel right. They are an escape from the chaotic real world. Unable to face meaninglessness, “in order to stay sane we must impose some kind of pattern.”22 This is what narratives achieve, and it’s the same reason we craft them within our own lives. They give us a sense of a coherent identity.

complex societies.

The collapse of complex societies

“An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

Inertia implies that once we stop doing something, getting started again is harder than continuing the whole time would have been. At a basic level, many brain studies have shown that the idea of multitasking is a myth. When we shift our focus from one input to another, we exert more energy and use more time to finish everything than if we would have completed one task before starting another. Inertia also helps to explain why we continue on with bad habits and why it’s hard to make systematic change. Many cities continue to rely on cars for short commutes instead of implementing an infrastructure to facilitate public transportation, walking, or cycling. We stay at jobs we hate, avoid meaningful conversations with people of different opinions, and almost never change the religion our parents imposed on us at birth. All because it is easier to stay on our current path, however stagnant and unfulfilling it may be.—

If we want people to innovate and take initiative in real time at the ground level, then the organizational culture and structure has to be one where it is supported and safe to do so.

Every worker was given the ability to stop the line “if a problem emerged that they couldn’t fix.”12

The resulting process is called “lean” and is summed up in the following: “It transfers the maximum number of tasks and responsibilities to those workers actually adding value to the car on the line, and it has in place a system for discovering defects that quickly traces every problem, once discovered, to its ultimate cause.”

To achieve our aims, reducing resistance is often easier than using more force. While often hidden, friction and viscosity work against us whenever we try and do something.

Velocity is often confused with speed, but the two concepts are very different. Speed is just movement; even if you are running in place, you have speed. Velocity has direction. You must go somewhere in order to have velocity. This model teaches us that it’s much more important to pay attention to where you are going and not how fast you are moving. No one wants to be a hamster in a wheel, focused on moving so fast that we lose track of what we’re trying to achieve. While speed ensures movement, velocity produces a result.