Mental Model
Tendency to Distort Due to Liking/Loving or Disliking/Hating
Munger's unified treatment of how both positive and negative emotional orientation toward a person systematically distorts all related cognition
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Mental Model
Tendency to Feel Envy & Jealousy
Munger's inclusion of envy as a fundamental psychological force that drives an enormous amount of human behavior while being almost universally denied
Mental Model
Tendency to Minimize Energy Output
Organisms conserve energy whenever possible—taking shortcuts, choosing the path of least resistance, and defaulting to habits over deliberate thought
Mental Model
Tendency to Overestimate Consistency of Behavior (Fundamental Attribution Error)
The cognitive bias of assuming that people's behavior is more consistent across situations than it actually is—overestimating the role of personality traits and underestimating the role of situational factors
Mental Model
Tendency to Overgeneralize from Small Samples
The persistent cognitive error of drawing broad conclusions from insufficient data—treating a few observations as representative of the whole population
Mental Model
Tendency to Stereotype
The cognitive process of categorizing individuals based on group membership—attributing group characteristics to individual members without evaluating them individually
Mental Model
Tendency to Want to Do Something (Fight/Flight, Intervention, Demonstration of Value, etc.)
The deep human drive to demonstrate agency through action—encompassing action bias, fight/flight response, and the organizational need to demonstrate value through visible activity
Mental Model
Tensegrity (Integrity Through Tension)
Tensegrity uses an interacting tension network with separated compression elements in a stable geometry
Mental Model
Termination as Therapeutic Event
In therapy, termination (ending the therapeutic relationship) is not merely an administrative event but one of the most therapeutically significant phases of treatment
Mental Model
Tertulia (Intellectual Salon)
Tertulia is the Spanish and Latin American tradition of regular, informal intellectual gatherings where a consistent group discusses literature, politics, philosophy, and current events
Cognitive Move
Test
Name the check someone could actually run on the finished work to say yes or no. Not a quality feeling, not a deadline: a specific observable condition that settles whether the packet is done, decided before the work starts.
Mental Model
Test Sensitivity vs. Specificity
Sensitivity is the probability that a test correctly identifies someone WITH a condition (true positive rate)
Mental Model
Testimonio (Witness Narrative)
Testimonio is a Latin American literary and political genre where an individual narrates their lived experience of oppression, struggle, or marginalization as representative of a larger community's experience
Mental Model
Testing Effect (Retrieval Practice)
Using attempts to retrieve information as learning events can improve later retention under many conditions, with effects depending on the task and schedule.
Mental Model
Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
Drawing a target around bullet holes after shooting and claiming you hit the bullseye—finding a pattern in random data and then constructing a hypothesis to explain it as if you'd predicted it
Mental Model
The “Surely” Operator: A Mental Block
The surely operator is Dennett's suggestion to inspect confidence words for assumptions a writer expects readers to accept
Mental Model
The 2-List System
A prioritization exercise that separates a small active goal set from attractive goals deliberately not pursued during the same period.
Mental Model
The 36 Stratagems
A collection of tactical principles from Chinese military and political history, organized into six categories of six: for winning positions, confrontation, attack, confused situations, gaining ground, and desperate situ…
Cognitive Move
The After Photo
Imagine one photo before and after success: what could an observer literally see done differently in 30 days?
Mental Model
The Arrival Fallacy
Tal Ben-Shahar's term for the illusion that reaching a major goal will produce lasting happiness, followed by the disorienting emptiness when it doesn't
Cognitive Move
The Bad-Weather Test
Stress the goal with 3 ordinary shocks and design a minimum version that survives them.
Cognitive Move
The Beneficiary Seat
Draw 3 seats, who benefits, who pays, and who can veto, and put a named person in each.
Mental Model
The Big Coefficient vs The New Reality
The contrast distinguishes improving within an existing model from considering changes that alter its variables, relationships, or feasible options
Mental Model
The Boys from Brazil: Another Boom Crutch
Dennett critiques a manipulation-based responsibility argument by Greene and Cohen inspired by The Boys from Brazil