Mental Model
A Deterministic Toy: Conway's Game Of Life
Conway's Game of Life is a deterministic cellular automaton using simultaneous local updates on a grid
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Cognitive Move
a diagram given a face or a speech bubble
You already drew the flowchart, the tree, or the loop. Add two dots, a mouth, and a bubble to exactly one node, the one that is behaving badly. Nothing else changes. The rest of the diagram stays readable and operable, and the face marks where the judgment sits without erasing the structure it sits on. This is the cheapest cartoon available and the easiest one to overuse.
Cognitive Move
a layout at room scale you walk
The model laid out on the floor at a size that takes steps to cross. Stations get taped or marked, and you move through them one at a time, standing in each. Scale changes what is available: at room scale you cannot see all of it at once, so the order of the walk carries the structure and the gaps between stations become distances rather than lines.
Mental Model
A Simple Markov Model
A Markov model assumes that the current state contains the information from the past needed to determine the next-state distribution
Cognitive Move
a system with appetites
A whole system drawn as one creature with intake, sized by what it consumes. Each thing it eats gets a mouth, and mouth width follows the real quantity, so the drawing still carries the numbers. This is the sub-mode that keeps the most information, because an appetite is a magnitude and can be drawn to scale without inventing anything.
Mental Model
A Thing about Redheads
Dennett's example asks whether a meaningful disposition must be representable as a particular sentence believed true
Mental Model
A Truly Nefarious Neurosurgeon
Dennett imagines a surgeon falsely telling a patient that an implant controls every decision
Cognitive Move
a wall of movable notes
The same idea on a vertical surface, where notes stay where you put them and everyone can see the whole thing at once without leaning across a table. Clusters form by proximity rather than by a drawn boundary, so a group is allowed to be half formed. Notes keep getting moved for days, which a table you have to clear cannot survive.
Cognitive Move
A/B, randomized, ablation, or controlled intervention
Change one factor while a comparable group stays unchanged, creating the most credible version of 'what would have happened otherwise.'
Mental Model
AARRR
Dave McClure's AARRR framework organizes customer measures around Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral
Cognitive Move
Abandonment
Say in advance what evidence would end the pursuit outright, not adjust it. Unlike revising the target or rolling back to an earlier version, this closes the goal, releases the people and money, and names who is allowed to make that call.
Mental Model
Absence Blindness
The systematic human failure to notice things that DON'T happen—events that were prevented, disasters that were averted, problems that didn't occur because someone solved them proactively
Mental Model
Absolute vs Relative Risk
Absolute risk is the probability of an outcome over a specified period
Mental Model
Abstinence Violation Effect
The abstinence violation effect (AVE), identified by Alan Marlatt, describes the cascade when someone committed to abstinence has a single lapse
Mental Model
Abstraction Trap (Too High-Level Thinking)
The failure of making decisions at too high a level of abstraction, where everything sounds good in theory but fails in practice because critical implementation details are never addressed
Cognitive Move
Acceptable Floors, Ceilings, and Budgets
Set the minimums, maximums, and resource limits before you start optimizing anything.
Cognitive Move
Acceptable means
Names which methods you will and won't use to advance, apart from how fast or in what order. Some shortcuts reach the endpoint while damaging you, your relationships, or your integrity, so you rule them out in advance, before the temptation arrives.
Cognitive Move
Acceptable region
A set of outcome combinations that all count as satisfactory because multiple configurations can serve the purpose.
Cognitive Move
Access and provenance
Two questions about inputs rather than outputs: what data does this thing actually need to see, and can you later trace any result back to where it came from? Cut the access down; log sources, permissions, versions, and edits.
Cognitive Move
Accountability diffusion
When many people and tools touch a job but no one person is on the hook for the final result, the job quietly stops having an owner.
Mental Model
Accountability vs. Blame Distinction
Accountability and blame are often conflated but serve opposite functions
Cognitive Move
Accumulation
Name the pile the loop builds. Loops carry memory: something collects between passes and its level, not the current flow, drives what happens next. Ask what fills, what drains it, and how fast.
Mental Model
Accusation Audit
An accusation audit is a pre-emptive technique where you list every negative thing the other party might be thinking about you or your proposal—and say it yourself before they do
Mental Model
Accusation Audit Protocol
A pre-emptive negotiation technique from Chris Voss in which you list and voice every negative thing the counterpart might think about you or your position BEFORE they say it