People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
3,456 entries
These thought experiments examine how a device's function, a word's reference, and an autonomous robot's goals depend on environment, history, and purpose as well as internal organization.
Write 3 endings to 'we hit the target, but it was a real failure because...' and turn the most plausible into an anti-goal.
The zombic hunch is the intuition that a complete physical and behavioral duplicate of a conscious person could nevertheless lack experience
The therapeutic alliance — also called the working alliance — is the collaborative bond between therapist and client, and it is consistently the single strongest predictor of therapy outcomes across all types of therapy
The therapeutic frame is the set of boundaries, rules, and structures that define the therapy relationship: session length, frequency, location, fee arrangements, cancellation policies, limits on out-of-session contact,…
Therapeutic neutrality is the practitioner's stance of not taking sides — not between the client and others in their life, not between different parts of the client's internal conflict, and not between the client's impul…
A therapeutic window is an exposure range expected to provide useful benefit with acceptable adverse effects for a specified treatment use
The therapeutic window (also called therapeutic index) is the range between the minimum effective dose of a drug and the dose that produces unacceptable toxicity
Thermal comfort depends on six interacting variables: (1) air temperature, (2) radiant temperature (heat from surfaces), (3) air velocity, (4) humidity, (5) metabolic rate, (6) clothing insulation
The thermic effect of food (TEF) is the energy your body expends to digest, absorb, and process nutrients—typically 10% of total caloric intake, but varying dramatically by macronutrient
Thinking Electrons highlights the difficulty of modeling purposeful, heterogeneous people who have beliefs, goals, and the capacity to adapt
Steven Sample's heuristic of postponing a firm judgment when relevant evidence and arguments can still inform it, while deciding when circumstances require action.
A reflective heuristic that uses emotional response to generate questions for further analysis, while treating feelings as fallible and context-dependent.
The Third Act model reframes the post-career decades (roughly 60+) not as decline or retirement but as a distinct developmental stage with unique strengths: accumulated pattern recognition, emotional regulation, freedom…
The error of assuming causation between two correlated variables when both are actually caused by a hidden third variable
When facing a false binary, deliberately construct a middle, outside, staged, or decision-changing alternative.
Ray Oldenburg's Third Place theory identifies the crucial role of informal public gathering places — distinct from home (first place) and work (second place) — in community life and individual well-being
A third rail is a metaphor for a topic perceived to carry unusually severe political or interpersonal penalties when raised
The Difficult Conversations framework (Stone, Patton, Heen) of adopting a THIRD STORY perspective: rather than entering a disagreement from YOUR story ('you're wrong') or THEIR story ('I'm wrong'), start from a neutral t…
A structured hypothetical scenario used to inspect implications, clarify concepts, or test the consistency of assumptions through reasoning.
A practitioner contrast between purpose-oriented and primarily transactional approaches to a venture
A computing term for when a system spends more time switching between tasks than doing actual work—the processor is 'busy' but producing nothing because context-switching overhead consumes all available capacity