Mental Model
The Chinese Room
Searle's Chinese Room challenges the claim that executing the right formal program is sufficient for understanding
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Cognitive Move
The Counterfactual Twin
Compare your plan against a twin reality using the same time and money on the best alternative.
Mental Model
The Curse of the Cauliflower
Dennett's cauliflower example begins with differences in taste and liking, then challenges the assumption that intrinsic qualia can be isolated from contextual, relational, and dispositional features of experience.
Cognitive Move
The D/S bright line
A one-question test for telling Destination problems (what outcome counts as better, and who has the right to define or revise it) apart from System problems (who or what carries the work, through which handoffs and checks), so teams stop arguing about ownership when the real gap is an unsettled definition of success.
Mental Model
The Dao (Way) as Process Philosophy
The Dao is not a fixed entity but the ongoing, self-generating process underlying all reality
Mental Model
The Ego Default
The pervasive cognitive default where decisions are unconsciously driven by ego protection—maintaining self-image, avoiding embarrassment, seeking status validation, or defending against perceived threats to identity—rat…
Cognitive Move
The Empty-Chair Veto
Give the absent person who absorbs consequences a seat, voice their strongest objection, and decide if it's a veto, floor, or question.
Cognitive Move
the face and the want
One abstraction, one circle, two dots and a mouth, and a single want written in its own voice. The structure around it stays exactly as it was. The want is the whole treatment, so it has to be one sentence, and it has to be the sentence that makes the thing predictable. Give it two wants and the reader stops tracking it as a character and starts reading it as a mood.
Mental Model
The Founder's Trap (Post-Founder Vacuum)
Distinct from Founder's Syndrome (where a founder won't let go), the Founder's Trap is the organizational crisis that occurs when a charismatic founder's departure reveals that the organization's functionality depended o…
Cognitive Move
The Goal Rehire Interview
Fire the goal for 60 seconds and ask, with today's evidence, whether you would hire it back and at what scope.
Cognitive Move
The Goldilocks Band
Replace an exact target with 3 zones, too little, workable, too much, each with an observable boundary.
Cognitive Move
the habit as a roommate
A recurring behavior drawn as a housemate who lives in your space, takes a share of it, and leaves things where you find them later. The space is what makes this one work. The figure has to physically occupy the room in the drawing, so what it displaces is visible rather than implied, and the argument stops being about willpower.
Mental Model
The Idea Maze
Balaji Srinivasan's concept that the value of a startup isn't just the initial idea but the founder's mental map of the entire space of possible pivots, competitor responses, and market evolutions surrounding that idea
Mental Model
The Identification Problem - The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart
Self-sorting complicates the attribution of group outcomes because selection, group influence, and shared circumstances can produce similar observed differences
Mental Model
The Inertia Default
The tendency to maintain the status quo, stay in our comfort zone, and continue doing what we've been doing even when better options exist
Mental Model
The Inner Critic vs. The Creative Self (Cameron/Pressfield)
Julia Cameron and Steven Pressfield describe creative self-doubt and avoidance using the Inner Critic and Resistance
Mental Model
The Intentional Stance
The intentional stance predicts behavior by attributing beliefs and goals under suitable rationality assumptions
Mental Model
The Law of Diminishing Returns
Diminishing marginal returns means that, beyond some point, additional units of one input add progressively less output while other relevant inputs remain fixed
Cognitive Move
The Lead–Lag Couple
Pair one weekly steerable behavior with one delayed real result, and set a date to distrust the lead if the lag doesn't move.
Mental Model
The Library of Mendel: Vast and Vanishing
The Library of Mendel represents genomes within a vast combinatorial sequence space
Mental Model
The Logic of Network Formation
Network-formation models connect link creation and removal rules with resulting patterns
Mental Model
The Many Model Thinker
Many-model thinking compares relevant representations and mechanisms to expose assumptions, disagreements, and omissions
Mental Model
The Map Is Not the Territory
The distinction between a representation and what it represents