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Mental Model

Safeguards

Pre-committed rules and procedures that protect decision quality when you're most vulnerable to poor judgment

Cognitive Move

Safeguards

Write the rules that keep the number honest and keep the test from doing damage: who may touch the metric, what would let someone hit the target without the real win happening, and which side effects must not get worse.

Cognitive Move

Safeguards

Name the ways this number could be pushed up without the real thing improving, then write the specific countermeasure for each: a guardrail metric you watch alongside it, an exclusion rule, or an audit. Anticipate gaming before anyone has an incentive to try.

Cognitive Move

Safety and invariants

List what must not break no matter what, the thresholds you refuse to cross, the smallest safe dose and how far it reaches, how you would undo it, who eats the damage if you are wrong, and what triggers escalation.

Cognitive Move

Safety or quality floor

Set the line the practice must never drop below, even in its shrunken form. Cadence says how often; this says what still has to be true for a session to count as the real thing rather than going through the motions.

Mental Model

Salary Negotiation Framework

Salary negotiation is a specialized form of negotiation with unique dynamics: the information asymmetry is extreme (the employer knows the range and budget; you usually don't), the relationship must survive the negotiati…

Mental Model

Salience Bias

The tendency to overweight information that is emotionally striking, unusual, or attention-grabbing—and underweight information that is routine, statistical, or abstract

Cognitive Move

Same evidence

The middle check asks what you would watch to tell whether each option is working. If both options are judged by the same signal, measured the same way, no test result could ever favor one over the other, so they carry no separate information.

Cognitive Move

Same facts preserved

Check that the new frame drops nothing that matters. Every answer-relevant fact, every honest "I'm not sure," and every hard constraint you're stuck with must still be visible after the switch. Convenient deletions are the failure this catches.

Cognitive Move

Same facts?

Check both preservation and fidelity. The relevant facts, honest uncertainty, and protected constraints must remain, and the new labels, edges, quantities, and examples must not mislead.

Cognitive Move

Same first actions

Write down the first two or three concrete things you would actually do under each option, in the next 48 hours. If those opening moves are identical, the options differ in branding, not behavior. Ignore names, philosophy, and aesthetics here.

Cognitive Move

Same reason for failure

Name the specific condition that would kill each option, not a vague "it might not work." If both die from the identical breakdown, keeping both buys you no protection: one bad stretch takes out your whole shortlist at once.

Cognitive Move

Sample

Ask which slice of the available traces actually got captured, and which got left out: whose cases, which events, what time window, and what quietly went missing. A true signal read off a lopsided slice still points the wrong way.

Cognitive Move

Sample and coverage

Specify exactly which cases, people, and time windows your evidence covers, including the failures and the missing data.

Cognitive Move

Sample, survey, or instrument

Use a defined population and a defensible measuring tool, and show the uncertainty instead of hiding it.

Mental Model

Sampling

Sampling selects a subset of observations to learn about a defined population or process

Mental Model

Sampling Bias

The error of drawing conclusions from a sample that doesn't represent the population you're trying to understand—because the sampling process systematically over-includes some types and under-includes others

Mental Model

Samsara (Cyclical Existence)

Samsara is the philosophical concept of cyclical existence — life, societies, markets operate in recurring patterns of birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth

Cognitive Move

Sankey

One source bar whose height is the whole quantity, then a ribbon to every destination, each ribbon as thick as the amount it carries. The destinations must sum back to the source, which is why a Sankey almost always grows a node called unaccounted. That node is the finding more often than any of the named ones.

Mental Model

Santa Fe Institute Complexity Framework

The interdisciplinary approach to complex systems pioneered by the Santa Fe Institute, integrating insights from physics, biology, economics, computer science, and social science into a unified framework for understandin…

Mental Model

Satisficing vs. Maximizing

Herbert Simon's distinction between choosing the first option that meets your criteria (satisficing) and exhaustively searching for the best possible option (maximizing)