Notes from: Mental Models - Farnam Street
    • Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
    • 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
    • The Lindy Effect: the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.
    • An observer cannot truly understand a system of which he himself is a part.
    • When one species evolves an advantageous adaptation, a competing species must respond in kind or fail as a species. Standing pat can mean falling behind. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” - The Red Queen
    • Availability Bias
    • Humans have a Narrative Instinct - stories are valuable tools, use them. There is also such thing as a "narrative bias."
    • First-Conclusion Bias
    • Fundamental Attribution Error
    • Tendency to Want to Do Something (Fight/Flight, Intervention, Demonstration of Value, etc.)
    • All theories/maps are wrong, but some are useful.
    • Second-order thinking is thinking farther ahead and thinking holistically. It requires us to not only consider our actions and their immediate consequences, but the subsequent effects of those actions as well.
    • “Personally seeing the front” before making decisions – not always relying on advisors, maps, and reports, all of which can be either faulty or biased. Not only does seeing the front provide firsthand information, but it also tends to improve the quality of secondhand information.
    • Stress causes both mental and physiological responses and tends to amplify the other biases and push us into “System 2” type reasoning. Stress causes hasty decisions, immediacy, and a fallback to habit. “In the thick of battle, you will not rise to the level of your expectations, but fall to the level of your training.”
    • Use inversion; approach a situation from the opposite end of the natural starting point. Inversion allows us to flip the problem around and think backward.
    • We experience Satisfaction/Misery relative to either our past or their peers, not absolute. These relative tendencies cause us great misery or happiness in a very wide variety of objectively different situations and make us poor predictors of our own behavior and feelings.
    • Humans are subject to a bias towards keeping their prior commitments and staying consistent with our prior selves when possible. This trait is necessary for social cohesion: people who often change their conclusions and habits are often distrusted. Yet commitment/consistency can be the “hobgoblin of foolish minds” – when it is combined with the first-conclusion bias, we end up landing on poor answers and standing pat in the face of great evidence.