Mental Model
Anti-Inflammatory Eating Framework
Chronic low-grade inflammation—measured by C-reactive protein, IL-6, and TNF-alpha—underlies cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, depression, and neurodegeneration
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Mental Model
Anticipatory Grief
Anticipatory grief is the grief experienced before a loss actually occurs—during a terminal diagnosis, a gradual decline, an impending layoff, or any situation where loss is foreseen but not yet realized
Mental Model
Antifragile
Nassim Taleb's concept for systems that don't just withstand shocks but actually gain from them
Mental Model
API-First Thinking
API-first thinking evaluates every tool through interoperability: does it expose data and functionality through well-documented APIs allowing integration? In complex tool stacks, a tool's value depends not just on standa…
Mental Model
Apology Languages Framework
Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas identified five distinct 'apology languages' — different ways people give and expect to receive apologies — explaining why some apologies land and others feel hollow even when sincere
Mental Model
Aporia (Productive Puzzlement)
Aporia is puzzlement or an impasse in inquiry, often exposed when a familiar answer encounters a contradiction or counterexample
Mental Model
Appeal to Authority
The reasoning error of accepting a claim as true primarily because an authority figure endorses it—rather than evaluating the evidence independently
Mental Model
Appeal to Emotion
An appeal to emotion uses feelings such as fear, pity, pride, or hope to support a conclusion or motivate action
Mental Model
Appeasement
The strategy of making concessions to an adversary to avoid conflict—most historically associated with Chamberlain's concessions to Hitler at Munich
Cognitive Move
Applicability
Check whether the evidence transports to your specific person, context, scale, and incentive environment.
Mental Model
Applications of Colonel Blotto
Colonel Blotto applications examine resource allocation across simultaneous contests when outcomes depend on relative allocations and an explicit payoff rule.
Cognitive Move
Apply constraints
Screen the capable candidates against your hard limits and drop any that break one: privacy and consent, what happens if it fails, how easily you can back out, effects on your own skill growth, relationships, legal exposure, and money or time you actually have.
Mental Model
Appreciation Ritual Design Protocol
A protocol for building a sustainable practice of expressing appreciation in relationships, based on research showing that perceived appreciation is one of the strongest predictors of relationship longevity
Mental Model
Apprentice-Journeyman-Master Progression
The medieval guild system formalized a three-stage skill pathway that remains the most validated model for craft mastery
Mental Model
Apprenticeship Model (Legitimate Peripheral Participation)
Lave and Wenger's legitimate peripheral participation describes learning as changing participation in a community of practice
Mental Model
Arbitrage
Arbitrage links purchases and sales to exploit a discrepancy between identical or appropriately equivalent instruments or assets
Mental Model
Arbitration vs. Litigation Decision
When disputes arise, you face a fundamental choice: resolve them through private arbitration or public litigation
Cognitive Move
arc
Nodes on a straight line in an order that already means something, with each link drawn as an arch above the line. You keep the order and get the connections in the same picture, which no free layout can do. The thing to look for is arc length. A short arc links neighbours, and a long arc means two things depend on each other across everything sitting between them.
Cognitive Move
architecture
The same components, stacked so each layer rests on the one under it. A layer may call the layer below and may not reach past it. That rule is what makes the drawing useful. An arrow that skips a layer is either a shortcut you did not know you were relying on, or the reason a change in one place keeps breaking something two levels away.
Cognitive Move
area
A line with the space under it filled, so the eye reads bulk instead of height. Stacked into bands it shows how a total splits into parts over time, and the useful reading is which band is swelling while the total holds steady. The cost is that only the bottom band sits on a flat baseline, so the ones above it are harder to measure exactly.
Cognitive Move
Argument and evidence
Draws the claim, the reasons under it, and the objections against them, so you can see which reason it all rests on.
Mental Model
Argument from Ignorance
An argument from ignorance treats a lack of support for one position as sufficient proof of another without establishing that the missing evidence should have been found
Cognitive Move
argument map
Boxes and lines. The claim sits on top. Each reason offered for it sits below with an arrow pointing up, and each objection attaches to the single reason it attacks, drawn with a bar on the end instead of an arrowhead so that support and attack never read the same. Underneath each reason goes what you actually have for it, written as a source or as the word nothing. The gap under a reason turns out to carry as much information as the reason.