Mental Model
Automating the Elevator
Dennett's invented elevator-automation story traces a rulebook into executable machinery
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Mental Model
Automation
Automation assigns specified tasks to a system that executes them with reduced direct human intervention
Cognitive Move
Automation bias
Automation bias is when you trust a tool's answer more than the evidence behind it, usually because it has been right often enough that you stopped checking.
Mental Model
Automation Complacency (Ironies of Automation)
Lisanne Bainbridge's foundational insight: automation creates three paradoxes that can make systems less safe rather than more
Cognitive Move
Automation debt
The rules, shortcuts, and automations you set up keep running long after the world they were built for has changed, so they quietly go wrong while still looking like they work.
Mental Model
Automation Threshold Analysis
Not every repetitive task should be automated—automation has costs (development, maintenance, debugging, reduced flexibility) that must exceed savings
Mental Model
Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose
Daniel Pink's synthesis (from Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory) of the three intrinsic motivators that drive deep engagement and performance: AUTONOMY (the desire to direct your own work and life—control over ta…
Mental Model
Availability Bias
Tversky and Kahneman's finding that people judge the frequency or probability of events based on how easily examples come to mind—and ease of recall is determined by vividness, recency, and emotional impact rather than a…
Mental Model
Availability Cascade
A self-reinforcing cycle where a belief becomes more plausible through repetition in public discourse—regardless of its truth
Mental Model
Availability Heuristic
The mental shortcut where the ease with which examples come to mind serves as a proxy for frequency, probability, or importance
Mental Model
Availability-Misweighing Tendency
Munger's term for the systematic overweighting of information that is easily available to the mind—vivid, recent, emotionally charged, or frequently encountered—while underweighting information that is harder to recall b…
Cognitive Move
Available inputs
Spell out what the worker actually gets: the source data, the files, the logins and permissions, the tools, and any prior work they can build on. Whatever you assume they already have but never hand over becomes the thing that stalls the job.
Cognitive Move
Average benefit
The headline gain, stated plainly: what the mean or total actually measures, over which population it was computed, and who inside that pool is personally collecting it. This part is the baseline claim your later checks will test, not yet a check itself.
Cognitive Move
Average to Distribution
When the average describes almost nobody, show the spread, subgroups, and tails instead.
Cognitive Move
Averages to distributions
Stop summarizing with one middle number. Ask instead how the cases spread out: how often the high end shows up, how often the low end, and how wide the gap is. Two situations with identical averages can need opposite fixes.
Mental Model
Awe as Transformative Experience
Research by Dacher Keltner, Jonathan Haidt, and others has identified awe as a distinct emotion with specific cognitive and behavioral effects: perceived vastness (encountering something larger than the self's usual fram…
Mental Model
Ayurvedic Constitution Types (Tridosha)
Ayurveda classifies constitutions into three doshas: Vata (air/space — creative, quick, anxiety-prone), Pitta (fire/water — driven, analytical, anger-prone), and Kapha (earth/water — steady, patient, inertia-prone)
Mental Model
Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation
Rough quantitative estimation using simplified assumptions and round numbers to quickly assess whether an idea, market, or plan is in the right ballpark
Mental Model
Backchannel Communication
Backchannel communication refers to secret, unofficial exchanges between adversaries conducted outside public view—often through intelligence services or trusted intermediaries
Mental Model
Backfire Effect
The phenomenon where presenting people with evidence AGAINST their strongly held beliefs can actually STRENGTHEN those beliefs rather than weakening them
Mental Model
Backup Systems/Redundancy
The engineering principle of building duplicate capabilities so that failure of one component doesn't cause system failure—having more capacity than the minimum needed for normal operations
Mental Model
Backward Induction
A game theory and planning technique where you start from the desired end state and reason backward to determine optimal decisions at each preceding step
Mental Model
Backward-Engineered Expertise (Expert-Novice Research)
Expert-novice research reveals systematic cognitive differences: (1) experts perceive meaningful patterns where novices see random details; (2) experts organize knowledge around deep principles, novices around surface fe…