mental-models
11 essays on this topic.
- Skills Are Collapsed Recursion
Humans handle about three layers of abstraction before working memory fills up. Skills, rules, and frameworks exist to flatten the fourth layer into something you can hold.
- Inline Beats Reference for LLM Attention
When building AI scaffolding, put the knowledge where the decision happens — not in a reference the model is supposed to consult.
- When to Think and When to Count
Machine learning says let the model find the signal. Heuristics research says use one variable and ignore the rest. They're both right — the dividing line is how much data you have.
- The Book That Tells You Not to Read It
Gigerenzer's thesis is that simple rules outperform complex analysis. If you've already internalised that, reading 300 pages of evidence for it might be the exact kind of overthinking he's arguing against.
- The Heuristic Library
Experts don't make more decisions — they make fewer, by having better defaults. The real meta-skill is accumulating simple rules and knowing when to stop reasoning.
- Delegation Is Delegation
Whether you're trusting a doctor's prescription, an AI agent's code, or a junior engineer's pull request — the trust heuristics are identical.
- Guardrails Are Rivers, Not Walls
The best guardrails work like river banks — they don't stop the water, they focus it. Constraints create capability.
- Honesty as Default, With One Exception
A two-tier honesty framework: be honest by default, override only when truth would harm someone vulnerable.
- Compounding: The Only Mental Model
If you could only keep one mental model, keep compounding. It applies to skills, reputation, writing, and tools.
- Over-Capture, Then Cull
Don't filter during capture. Capture is cheap. Ideas are expensive. The cull is where quality happens.
- Play for You, Work for Others
Naval's edge: find the thing that feels like play to you but looks like work to others.