The Mental Models You Don’t Know About

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-...
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Making Really Hard Decisions

Suppose that you have to make a decision that will significantly alter the course of your life. For instance, imagine that you are trying to: decide whether to marry your boyfriend or girlfriend choose between two job offers in different fields decide whether to finish your PhD program or drop out pick between two cities that you're thinking of moving to These kinds of decisions can be excruciatingly hard, and people often waffle in an unpleasant state for months trying to ch...
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