This is a book summary of Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann (Amazon):
Here’s an audio introduction to Super Thinking, Gabriel Weinberg, and Lauren McCann:
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in quotation marks is from the authors unless otherwise stated.
- I’ve organized content into my own themes/order vs the author’s chapters.
Book Summary Contents: Click a link to jump to a section below
30 Mental Models from Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg & Lauren McCann (Book Summary)
About the Book
“Recurring concepts are called mental models. Once you are familiar with them, you can use them to quickly create a mental picture of a situation, which becomes a model that you can later apply in similar situations … We call these broadly useful mental models super models because applying them regularly gives you a super power: super thinking—the ability to think better about the world—which you can use to your advantage to make better decisions, both personally and professionally.”
- “Super models are shortcuts to higher-level thinking. If you can understand the relevant models for a situation, then you can bypass lower-level thinking and immediately jump to higher-level thinking. In contrast, people who don’t know these models will likely never reach this higher level, and certainly not quickly.”
- “Every discipline, like physics, has its own set of mental models that people in the field learn through coursework, mentorship, and firsthand experience. There is a smaller set of mental models, however, that are useful in general day-to-day decision making, problem solving, and truth seeking. These often originate in specific disciplines (physics, economics, etc.), but have metaphorical value well beyond their originating discipline.”
- “You want to use the right tool for a given situation, and to do that, you need a whole toolbox full of super models. This book is that toolbox: it systematically lists, classifies, and explains all the important mental models across the major disciplines.”
- “Mental models are a tool set that can help you be wrong less. They are a collection of concepts that help you more effectively navigate our complex world.”
- “By the time you’ve finished reading this book, you will have more than three hundred mental models floating around in your head from dozens of disciplines, eager to pop up at just the right time.”
Key Concepts
1. Veil of Ignorance:
More about the veil of ignorance: What is the “Original Position” or “Veil of Ignorance” Thought Experiment? (John Rawls Excerpts)
- “Another tactical model to help you have greater empathy is the veil of ignorance, put forth by philosopher John Rawls. It holds that when thinking about how society should be organized, we should do so by imagining ourselves ignorant of our particular place in the world, as if there were a veil preventing us from knowing who we are. Rawls refers to this as the ‘original position.'”
2. Birth Lottery:
Pair with: The Lottery of Birth — All the Things You Don’t Control in Life
- “Speaking of privilege, we (the authors) often say we are lucky to have won the birth lottery. Not only were we not born into slavery, but we were also not born into almost any disadvantaged group. At birth, we were no more deserving of an easier run at life than a child who was born into poverty, or with a disability, or any other type of disadvantage. Yet we are the ones who won this lottery since we do not have these disadvantages.”
3. Just World Hypothesis:
- “It can be challenging to acknowledge that a good portion of your success stems from luck. Many people instead choose to believe that the world is completely fair, orderly, and predictable. This view is called the just world hypothesis, where people always get what they deserve, good or bad, because of their actions alone, with no accounting for luck or randomness. This view is summed up as you reap what you sow.”
4. Tragedy of the Commons:
- “Any shared resource, or commons, is vulnerable to this tragedy … As more and more people make the same decision, the common resource is collectively depleted, reducing the ability for everyone to benefit from it in the future.”
5. Externalities:
- “Consequences, good or bad, that affect an entity without its consent, imposed from an external source … Addressing negative externalities is often referred to as internalizing them. Internalizing is an attempt to require the entity that causes the negative externality to pay for it.”
6. Perverse Incentives:
- “High-stakes testing culture—be it for school examinations, job interviews, or professional licensing—creates perverse incentives to ‘teach to the test,’ or worse, cheat.”
7. Boiling Frog:
- “There is a broader class of unintended consequences to similarly watch out for, which also involve making seemingly good short-term decisions that can still add up to a bad outcome in the long term. The mental model often used to describe this class of unintended consequences is called the boiling frog: Suppose a frog jumps into a pot of cold water. Slowly the heat is turned up and up and up, eventually boiling the frog to death. It turns out real frogs generally jump out of the hot water in this situation, but the metaphorical boiling frog persists as a useful mental model describing how a gradual change can be hard to react to, or even perceive.”
8. Flywheel:
Pair with: What is the Flywheel Effect by Jim Collins? (& How to Build Momentum for your Life Purpose)
- “The good news is that if you can establish inertia and momentum in an adaptable culture, or in any context really, it can have staying power. A mental model that captures this process well is the flywheel, a rotating physical disk that is used to store energy. Flywheels are still used in many industrial applications, though a more relatable example to get the concept is a children’s merry-go-round. It takes a lot of effort to get a merry-go-round to start spinning, but once it is spinning, it takes little effort to keep it spinning.”
9. Polarity:
Pair with: Polarity Thinking 101: An Introduction to the Power of Polarities (+ Visuals)
- “A concept from physics called polarity, which describes a feature that has only two possible values. A magnet has a north and south pole. An electric charge can be positive or negative … Polarity is useful because it helps you categorize things into one of two states: good or bad, useful or not useful, high-leverage or low-leverage, etc. When you mix two groupings together, you get the 2 Ă— 2 matrix.”
10. Counterfactual Thinking:
- “Thinking about the past by imagining that the past was different, counter to the facts of what actually occurred.”
Biases, Fallacies, & Effects
11. Confirmation Bias:
- “Individuals still hang on to old theories in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence—it happens all the time in science and in life in general. The human tendency to gather and interpret new information in a biased way to confirm preexisting beliefs is called confirmation bias.”
12. Disconfirmation Bias:
- “You may also succumb to holding on to incorrect beliefs because of disconfirmation bias, where you impose a stronger burden of proof on the ideas you don’t want to believe.”
13. In-Group Favoritism & Out-Group Bias:
- “People are susceptible to the black-and-white fallacy because of the natural tendency to create us versus them framings, thinking that the only two options are ones that either benefit themselves at the expense of ‘others,’ or vice versa. This tendency arises because you often associate identity and self-esteem with group membership, thereafter creating in-group favoritism and, conversely, out-group bias.”
14. Publication Bias:
- “Unfortunately, studies are much, much more likely to be published if they show statistically significant results, which causes publication bias. Studies that fail to find statistically significant results are still scientifically meaningful, but both researchers and publications have a bias against them for a variety of reasons.”
15. Gambler’s Fallacy:
- “Gambler’s fallacy, named after roulette players who believe that a streak of reds or blacks from a roulette wheel is more likely to end than to continue with the next spin. Suppose you see ten blacks in a row. Those who fall victim to this fallacy expect the next spin to have a higher chance of coming up red, when in fact the underlying probability of each spin hasn’t changed.”
16. Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy:
- “Defining a hypothesis up front helps to avoid the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. This model is named after a joke about a person who comes upon a barn with targets drawn on the side and bullet holes in the middle of each target. He is amazed at the shooter’s accuracy, only to find that the targets were drawn around the bullet holes after the shots were fired. A similar concept is the moving target, where the goal of an experiment is changed to support a desired outcome after seeing the results.”
17. Conjunction Fallacy:
- “Most people are, unfortunately, hardwired to latch onto unnecessary assumptions, a predilection called the conjunction fallacy, studied by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who provided this example in the October 1983 Psychological Review: ‘Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable? 1. Linda is a bank teller. 2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.’ In their study, most people answered that number 2 is more probable, but that’s impossible unless all bank tellers are also active in the feminist movement. The fallacy arises because the probability of two events in conjunction is always less than or equal to the probability of either one of the events occurring alone.”
18. Cobra Effect:
- “When an attempted solution actually makes the problem worse. This model gets its name from a situation involving actual cobras. When the British were governing India, they were concerned about the number of these deadly snakes, and so they started offering a monetary reward for every snake brought to them. Initially the policy worked well, and the cobra population decreased. But soon, local entrepreneurs started breeding cobras just to collect the bounties. After the government found out and ended the policy, all the cobras that were being used for breeding were released, increasing the cobra population even further.”
19. Streisand Effect:
- “When you unintentionally draw more attention to something when you try to hide it. It’s named for entertainer Barbra Streisand, who sued a photographer and website in 2003 for displaying an aerial photo of her mansion, which she wanted to remain private. Before the suit, the image had been downloaded a total of six times from the site; after people saw news stories about the lawsuit, the site was visited hundreds of thousands of times, and now the photo is free to license and is on display on Wikipedia and many other places. As was said of Watergate, It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.”
20. Chilling Effect:
- “When people realized they were being watched by their governments, some of them stopped reading articles that they thought could get them into trouble. The name for this concept is chilling effect … In the legal context where the term chilling effect originated, it refers to when people feel discouraged, or chilled, from freely exercising their rights, for fear of lawsuits or prosecution. More generally, chilling effects are a type of observer effect where the threat of retaliation creates a change in behavior.”
Laws, Principles, & Razors
21. Goodhart’s Law:
- “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This more common phrasing is from Cambridge anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in her 1997 paper ‘Improving Ratings’: Audit in the British University System. However, the ‘law‘ is named after English economist Charles Goodhart, whose original formulation in a conference paper presented at the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1975 stated: ‘Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes’ … When you try to incentivize behavior by setting a measurable target, people focus primarily on achieving that measure, often in ways you didn’t intend. Most importantly, their focus on the measure may not correlate to the behavior you hoped to promote.”
22. Hick’s Law:
- “The more choices you have, the harder it is to choose between them. In the early 1950s, psychologists William Hick and Ray Hyman separately conducted a number of experiments to try to quantify the mathematical relationship between the number of choices given and how long it takes to decide. They found that a greater number of choices increased the decision time logarithmically, in a formulation now known as Hick’s law.”
23. Murphy’s Law:
- “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. It’s named after aerospace engineer Edward Murphy, from his remarks after his measurement devices failed to perform as expected. It was intended as a defensive suggestion, to remind you to be prepared and to have a plan for when things go wrong.”
24. Sayre’s Law:
- “Sayre’s law, named after political scientist Wallace Sayre, offers that in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. A related concept is Parkinson’s law of triviality, named after naval historian Cyril Parkinson, which states that organizations tend to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Both of these concepts explain how group dynamics can lead the group to focus on the wrong things.”
25. Hofstadter’s Law:
- “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. In other words, things take longer than you expect, even when you consider that they take longer than you expect!”
26. Metcalfe’s Law:
- “This relationship, known as Metcalfe’s law, is named after Robert Metcalfe, the co-inventor of the networking technology Ethernet. It describes the nonlinear growth in network value when nodes are connected to one another.”
27. Joy’s Law:
- “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else … Great people are unlikely to be concentrated in a single organization.”
28. Shirky Principle:
- “A model related to the strategy tax is the Shirky principle, named after economics writer Clay Shirky. The Shirky principle states, institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
29. Ockham’s Razor:
- “The simplest explanation is most likely to be true. When you encounter competing explanations that plausibly explain a set of data equally well, you probably want to choose the simplest one to investigate first … This model is a razor because it ‘shaves off’ unnecessary assumptions.”
30. Hanlon’s Razor:
- “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness. Like Ockham’s razor, Hanlon’s razor seeks out the simplest explanation. And when people do something harmful, the simplest explanation is usually that they took the path of least resistance. That is, they carelessly created the negative outcome; they did not cause the outcome out of malice.”
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