Great mental models

I just finished reading Shane Parrish’ Great Mental Models book. I read this book because I’ve been a big fan of his podcast titled the Knowledge Project. And he brings in an interesting set of guests in the show, AND he is quite a good conversationalist. I’ve also religiously followed his decision making template especially when I’ve taken mission-critical irreversible life decisions such as changing jobs, moving to a new country etc..

This is quite a short book, and I’ll present some ideas that quite resonated with me:

This is one of my favourite ideas from Shane Parrish Mental Models book which I read recently, and it’s so applicable, that it doesn’t exist to me as this abstract idea which seldom translates to the reality.. it’s very tangible..

The map is never be the territory. In other words, the “description” of the thing, is not the thing in itself.

So, the Argentinian writer Luis Borges, in his brilliant allegorical style, summarized the mental model nicely in a one-paragraph short story, On Exactitude in Science:

… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

This is a fictional tale of a map that is so precise of its’ “territory” that it is “useless”, after all, one could just follow the territory instead of using the map. Why use a map then?

It’s a brilliant thought experiment which highlights the fact that maps are lossy, and you lose a lot of details in the process, and this is not a bug, but a feature of it being a map.

Even the best maps are reductions, and they’re never perfect. They differ in their exactitude..

And this is my commentary on the notion that AI is taking away all the “human jobs”, it would at the end of the day, AI can only be an approximation, and cannot exactly replace the human.

It could probably be more than what a human can do, or sometimes, less than what humans are meant to do. Love, care and kindness etc, are not something they can exact, and can only mimic.

My thinking now is that, as long as these approximations exist, the human jobs are not going away any time soon.

I do have a similar argument to suggest folks to read raw transcripts. This is quite a contrary opinion still, and we’re more used to referring to summaries. Maybe that’s a quick nugget and has faster absorption, but we do mistake comprehension for understanding sometimes. They are not the same. If I do have the luxury of time, I would personally prefer reading through the raw transcripts to get more higher dimensional granularity to what’s going on..

If we extend the analogy, the raw transcript is almost like the “territory” we’re speaking about. And the insights generated, are more or less like the “map”. And the map can never be equivalent to the territory.

Apart from this quirk to read raw transcripts, I also have a similar asymmetric thumb rule when it comes to reading long form blog posts. Some of them are really high alpha, high signal, so when a writer deeply resonates with me, I go the last mile and read the whole essay end to end.

I have a similar principle here that I want to read it in its lossless format, without it being stripped of any details.. as “map is not the territory”, I do prefer waltzing through the territory in some occasions, and not use the map instead..

Karl Popper’s ideas on falsification..

Falsification is a very key concept, and we all owe a lot of gratitude for Karl Popper’s ideas in this context. It’s a good mental model helping us understand what’s really true in this world…

According to Karl Popper, falsification is the idea that a theory counts as scientific only if it can, in principle, be shown false by some possible observation or experiment.

Consider Popper’s discussion of the concept of falsifiability in the context of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which is broadly about the role of repressed childhood memories influencing our unconscious, in turn affecting our behavior. Popper was careful to say that it is not possible to prove that Freudianism was either true or not true, at least in part. We can say that we simply don’t know whether it’s true because it does not make specific testable predictions. It may have many kernels of truth in it, but we can’t tell. The theory would have to be restated in a way to allow for experience to refute it.

We can probably say, yeah, so what? isn’t that how it works. Well, not exactly. Let’s take astrology for example, a pseudoscience where the movement of the stars are used to explain the future of a person.

In this case, a “prophecy” cannot be shown false even if they make a prediction. The astrologer, can always deny the statement, coming up with a different explanation on why the calculation of the stars was wrong when they previously did it, and therefore explaining why the previous prediction didn’t come out to their expectations.. in this way, there is a lot of what-aboutery when it comes to non-science.

But with science, there is a clear way in which a statement can be shown false by an experiment. Because in the same way, something can be proven right, it should also be proven wrong in certain cases..

This also trumps previous ways of truth seeking fashionable in the past such as induction and empiricism.

These are both not fool-proof methods to derive what’s true. Regarding inductivism, we have all heard about the classic example of a chicken being fed everyday:

Bertrand Russell’s classic example of the chicken that gets fed every day is a great illustration of this concept. 14 Daily feedings have been going on for as long as the chicken has observed, and thus it supposes that these feedings are a guaranteed part of its life and will continue in perpetuity. The feedings appear as a law until the day the chicken gets its head chopped off. They are then revealed to be a trend, not a predictor of the future state of affairs

Similarly, empiricism is also faulty. “sense experience” alone cannot justify universal claims..

take the case of sun rising every day. if we were to go by our experience, we can say “it always rises”, but that’s based on our past experience, of us as a local. However, if a person is magically placed in the Artic circle in winter for the first time experiencing even sunrise for the first time, they would not see any sunrise, and then would deduce that “there is no such thing called as sun” and that the”the sun doesn’t rise”..

Without “falsification” there are no modern scientific theories, it allows us to build upon existing ideas.. and without it, what we see now as progress of science wouldn’t have been even possible..

Veil of ignorance

One of the most important concepts of justice is the one around veil of ignorance: what would your stance be, if you didn’t know what your position even was? you could be lucky, or rich, or poor, or unlucky etc. you could be anything, and if so, how would you provide a law that is fair and just for all such citizens? even the unlucky ones? the best laws are the ones which are derived “without knowing the economic status” than the ones in which we know what the economic status is.

Before this chapter, the book covers self-interest and how it works to some extent.. Shane Parish says that to know why a decision was taken, it’s important to unveil the “incentive” behind it.. by means of having this veil of ignorance, John Rawl makes this start move to strip away any self-interest from the law, and looks at it primarily from the fairness angle..

In fact, this really shook the justice system to a large extent.. the very fact that most of us have a balanced portion of market efficiency combined with strong safety nets that make being worst off far more tolerable is all because of the “veil of ignorance” mode of thinking..

This mental model could also be extended where you’re putting a veil on different aspects:

• say, you have veil over time, where you could either be born now. Born 500 years ago. Or ten years from now..
• Or say, you have a veil over information..You’re the least informed participant in an experiment..
• etc etc..

What is necessary, and what is sufficient..

What is necessary, and what is sufficient are two different things. They seem very similar in their definitions, and I keep mistaking one for the other.

But if we look at it mathematically with sets, what is to be the set of conditions that are necessary to be X, is a part of the conditions that are sufficient to be Y. What is “sufficient” is usually far smaller than what is necessary..

In mathematics they call these sets. The set of conditions necessary to become successful is a part of the set that is sufficient to become successful. But the sufficient set itself is far larger than the necessary set. Without that distinction, it’s too easy for us to be misled by the wrong stories.

Examples:

Take the example of a “fire”.. oxygen is necessary for a fire, but a “lit matchstick in dry wood” can be sufficient for a fire to happen…

Now in reality, some statements are neither necessary nor sufficient which is why it sometimes gets confusing..

For example, “getting high scores” is neither necessary for getting into a university, as you can get in even if you have low scores but are good at athletics.. in the same way it’s also not “sufficient” to get into university. In some cases you might need extracurricular as well to make it through university, or have strong recommendations etc

Beware of second order, third order effects

Famous example of people raising cobras, to then catch them and get the bounty reward from the British colonial rule.

We see examples of this throughout history. During their colonial rule of India, the British government began to worry about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi. To reduce the numbers, they instituted a reward for every dead snake brought to officials. In response, Indian citizens dutifully complied and began breeding the snakes to slaughter and bring to officials. The snake problem was worse than when it started because the British officials didn’t think at the second level. Second-order effects occur even with something simple like adding traction on tires: it seems like such a great idea because the more you have the less likely you are to slide, the faster you can stop, and thus the safer you are. However, the second-order effects are that your engine has to work harder to propel the car, you get worse gas mileage (releasing more detrimental carbon dioxide into the atmosphere), and you leave more rubber particles on the road.

Another example of a second order effect which could have only known in retrospect is that of the antibiotic resistance:

When it comes to the overuse of antibiotics in meat, the first-order consequence is that the animals gain more weight per pound of food consumed, and thus there is profit for the farmer. Animals are sold by weight, so the less food you have to use to bulk them up, the more money you will make when you go to sell them. The second-order effects, however, have many serious, negative consequences. The bacteria that survive this continued antibiotic exposure are antibiotic resistant. That means that the agricultural industry, when using these antibiotics as bulking agents, is allowing mass numbers of drug-resistant bacteria to become part of our food chain

Most of the choices we take in our life are more asymmetric than we think they are. For example, when it comes to moving to a new city, there is a lot more upside when it comes to an increased level of opportunities which we see, compared to being in the same city we were born.

Principles of inversion

Remove the cloak and the dagger, and see the problem for itself. One of the ways we could do that is by inverting. We need to keep inverting to see through the X-ray vision and know what the problem actually is.

The 19th century German mathematician Carl Jacobi became famous for a number of reasons—including solving some ungodly difficult problems—but is perhaps best remembered for his advice to “invert, always invert.” Jacobi solved a range of problems by starting with the endpoint. When faced with proving an axiom in a difficult math problem, he might instead assume a property of the axiom was correct and then try to determine the consequences of this assumption. From that point, he could work out surprising, and at times counterintuitive, insights.

a famous thought experiment here is by Hipassus while deriving the square root of 2:

Hippasus decided to take the reverse route, thinking about what the square root of 2 might imply, and working backwards from there. If he couldn’t find it the way he had expected to, he’d start by proving what the number couldn’t be. His quest forever changed what we understood about mathematics, and led to the discovery of the first irrational number.

It has been shown that by inversion, we could look at the problem in a very different light.. it’s a form of prototyping with a different framing of the problem, and it sometimes helps to uncover very different insights..

Occams razor, and when it violates

When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses and not zebras. I mean there is no harm to think of zebras first, but it’s usually the most common, simplest explanation that might be the right one, not always but it does serve as a good thumb rule..

Occam’s Razor can be quite powerful in the medical field, for both doctors and patients. Let’s suppose that a patient shows up at a doctor’s office with horrible flu-like symptoms. Are they more likely to have the flu or have contracted Ebola? This is a problem best solved by a concept we explored in the chapter on Probabilistic Thinking, called Bayesian Updating. It’s a way of using general background knowledge in solving specific problems with new information. We know that generally the flu is far more common than Ebola, so when a good doctor encounters a patient with what looks like the flu, the simplest explanation is almost certainly the correct one. A diagnosis of Ebola means a call to the Center for Disease Control and a quarantine—an expensive and panic-inducing mistake if the patient just has the flu. Thus, medical students are taught to heed the saying, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras

Hanlon’s Razor

This is also a razor variant, commonly called as the “Hanlons Razor” named after the person who coined this..

Don’t attribute to malice, what can be attributed to ignorance.

Especially in low-stakes situation, if something gets messed up, it might usually because of the Hanlons razor, there might have been some incompetence somewhere which resulted in the mess up, mostly beneficial to assume ignorance first..

But in high-stakes situations, something I usually follow is to assume strategic intent first, and only in case there are repeated harmful efforts with strong incentives, then to assume malice playing a role..