Cognitive Move
The Minimum Viable Win
Find the smallest real result that would change your next decision or prove the core mechanism.
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Mental Model
The Organization of Cities
Urban-organization models examine how location, transport, economic activity, institutions, and interaction shape cities
Mental Model
The Personal/Sub-personal Distinction
Dennett distinguishes descriptions of persons and their activities from explanations of contributing subpersonal processes
Cognitive Move
The Portfolio Pie
Allocate 100 points across the outcomes that must coexist to expose what one salient goal is consuming.
Mental Model
The Problem Hypothesis
A problem hypothesis states a provisional claim about who encounters a difficulty, in what circumstances, and with what consequence
Mental Model
The Replicator Equation
The replicator equation models rates of change in population shares through relative fitness: dxᵢ/dt = xᵢ(fᵢ − f̄), where f̄ is the population-weighted mean fitness
Cognitive Move
the rule as a gatekeeper
A rule, threshold, or prerequisite drawn as a figure standing in a gap, with one question it asks and a visible record of what passed and what was turned back. Writing the question in the gatekeeper's own words is the work here. Most rules that keep stopping people have never been said out loud, and the drawing fails until that sentence exists.
Cognitive Move
The S/D boundary rule
The S/D boundary rule is the test that tells you whether a stuck problem is a System problem (who or what carries the work, through what handoffs and checks) or a Destination problem (what outcome counts as better, and who has the right to decide). Ask whether everyone would call the same result a win. If yes, compare carriers. If no, stop comparing and settle the goal.
Cognitive Move
The Sacrifice Budget
Price the maximum time, money, risk, and stress you'll spend, and mark the one resource that can't be traded away.
Mental Model
The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity
Dennett proposes understanding the self as an organizing abstraction associated with narrative patterns, analogous to a center of gravity rather than an inner controlling object.
Mental Model
The Seven Secrets of Computer Power Revealed
Dennett introduces elementary computation through a register machine and develops seven lessons about competence without comprehension, representation, stored instructions, universality, and implementation
Cognitive Move
The So-That Ladder
Add 'so that...' to your goal 3 times until you reach a state that's valuable in itself.
Mental Model
The Social Default
The powerful cognitive and behavioral tendency to DEFAULT to whatever option requires the least social friction—choosing what others are doing, what's expected, or what avoids standing out, rather than what's optimal
Mental Model
The Sorta Operator
Dennett uses sorta to discuss partial, precursor, or approximate versions of capacities without prematurely demanding a fully developed all-or-nothing category.
Mental Model
The Standing Ovation Model
The standing-ovation problem examines how private assessments and observation of others can combine to produce collective responses
Cognitive Move
The Stoplight Contract
Precommit green, amber, and red triggers so evidence, not hope or sunk cost, decides what happens next.
Mental Model
The Structure of Networks
Network topology summarizes connection patterns through measures such as degree, clustering, paths, and communities
Mental Model
The Teleclone Fall from Mars to Earth
Dennett's teleclone story explores whether informational reconstruction would preserve a person and what kinds of continuity matter
Mental Model
The Test of Time
The evaluative framework of assessing ideas, practices, strategies, and relationships by whether they've ENDURED rather than whether they're novel
Cognitive Move
The Three Clocks
Write Now, Next, and Later with one desired state and one cost under each, and stop borrowing from protected later states.
Mental Model
The Tree of Life
The tree of life represents evolutionary relationships through common descent
Mental Model
The Tuned Deck
The Tuned Deck illustrates how a seemingly unified feat can be produced by different methods on different occasions
Mental Model
The U-Curve of Happiness in Aging
Large-scale studies across dozens of countries consistently find a U-shaped pattern in life satisfaction: happiness starts relatively high in youth, declines through the 30s and 40s to a nadir around ages 45-50, then ris…