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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Five Powerful Learning Techniques Most People Have Never Tried

Obscure yet very powerful methods of learning that many people have never tried Here are five uncommon but highly effective learning techniques: 1. Intuition Flooding To understand something well on a gut level, spend hours looking closely at a huge number of examples, until your intuition forms a predictive model. I do this fairly often but don’t think I’ve heard it discussed! Example: Look carefully at 100 user interfaces. 2. Expert Observation Ask an expert if you can wa...
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