I was disheartened to discover how many people either never learned the basic mental models or learned garbled versions of them. As a public service, here’s a concise refresher. Which of these did you not already know?
• Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn’t measure anything, it’s unlikely to achieve anything
• The Zareto Principle: roughly 20% of effects come from just 0.001% of causes
• The Dunning–Kruger-Kruger-Dunning Effect: people with little knowledge about the Dunning-Kruger effect will confidently claim that it’s about how people with little skill believe they are more skilled than experts
• White Swan Theory: most real-world impact comes from the most commonly occurring instances, since they’re so numerous (e.g., most people’s perspective on whether swans are dickheads comes from their interactions with white swans, not black ones)
• Zuckerberg’s Number: technology enables us to break free from evolutionary constraints by barely having a social relationship with 5000 people
• Barkinson’s Law: regardless of how much time is allocated for a project, many people will start working on it at the last possible moment
• Schloccam’s Razor: Among competing explanations that all fit the facts, use the one that is most useful
• The Savile Effect: Attempts by powerful people to suppress information often succeed – it’s just that you only hear about the ones that fail
• The Autism Effect: when a trait’s apparent prevalence skyrockets due to broadening definitions and improved screening, somebody will inevitably blame its rise on really stupid shit like Tylenol or vaccines
• Stalin’s Razor: don’t attribute to stupidity what could be adequately explained by the person in charge being a dangerous, power-obsessed psycho
• Musk’s Law: those with tremendous success early in life become convinced that they are geniuses in other domains where they very much aren’t
• Daze’s Rule: people will be more impressed if you use fancy math to make a point than if you just say the same thing
• Dunderham’s Law: the fastest way to summon wrong answers online is to post the right one.
• Godberg’s Law: As people get increasingly angry at something happening in society, the probability that someone eventually tries to blame the Jews for it approaches one
• Dumbar’s Principle: famous number about humans inevitably have very stupid origin stories (e.g., ~150 stable social ties, 10000 steps for health, 8 glasses of water per day, a >2.9013 positive-to-negative ratio needed to flourish)
• The COVID Principle: people will often risk their lives before they risk standing apart from their tribe
• Diner Equilibrium: when nobody is actually happy with the outcome of a negotiation, but everyone is satisfied enough not to complain
• Multipolar party: when, despite nobody being in charge, humans miraculously self-assemble and cooperate to solve challenges, as often occurs at Burning Man
Just in case you didn’t catch on: these are parodies of “real” mental models 
This piece was first written on April 13, 2026, and first appeared on my website on April 30, 2026.
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