Mental Model
Leverage Trap (The Amplification of Ruin)
The pattern where borrowed money amplifies both gains and losses, creating the illusion of genius during good times and the reality of ruin during bad times
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Mental Model
Li (Pattern/Principle in Neo-Confucianism)
In Neo-Confucian philosophy, li refers to the inherent pattern or principle underlying all things
Mental Model
Li (Ritual Propriety as Social Technology)
Li refers to rituals, ceremonies, manners, and social protocols that Confucius considered essential to civilized life
Mental Model
Liability Allocation Framework
When harm occurs, liability allocation determines who pays—and the answer depends on which allocation rule society chooses
Mental Model
Liberation Theology Framework
Liberation theology, originating in 1960s-70s Latin America through Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff, reinterprets ethics, economics, and social structure from the perspective of the poor ('the preferential option for…
Mental Model
Liebig's Law of the Minimum (Growth Limited by Scarcest Resource)
Liebig's minimum principle describes a model in which an essential resource insufficient relative to need limits growth despite abundance of other resources
Mental Model
Life Review Therapy (Butler)
Robert Butler's life review theory, introduced in 1963, reframed reminiscence in older adults from a symptom of cognitive decline to a crucial developmental process
Mental Model
Life Story Model (McAdams)
McAdams' Life Story Model proposes three levels of personality: dispositional traits (Big Five, relatively stable), characteristic adaptations (goals, coping strategies, values—context-dependent), and the life story (the…
Cognitive Move
lifeline
One thing followed from its beginning to its end, with everything that happened to it marked along the way. The subject can be a person, a document, a habit, or a single decision. Because only one thing is being tracked, there is room to band the stretches between events by what state it was in, which is where most of the time actually sits.
Mental Model
Lifestyle Creep (The Diderot Effect Extended)
Named after Denis Diderot's essay about how a new scarlet robe made all his other possessions seem inadequate, triggering a cascade of upgrades
Mental Model
Lifestyle Inflation Trap
Lifestyle inflation is the tendency to increase spending proportionally with income, so surplus never grows despite earning more
Mental Model
Likely
'Likely' expresses probability with a meaning dependent on context or a stated convention
Mental Model
Liking and Social Acceptance Bias
We're more easily influenced by people we like and evaluate ideas more favorably when they come from likeable or high-status sources
Mental Model
Liking Bias (Tendency to Agree with People We Like)
The systematic tendency to evaluate ideas, proposals, and arguments more favorably when they come from people we like—and more critically when they come from people we dislike
Mental Model
Liking Principle
The liking principle describes a tendency to respond more favorably to people one likes
Mental Model
Liking/Loving Tendency
Munger's observation that the tendency to like or love someone produces systematic cognitive distortions: we ignore faults of those we like, distort facts to favor them, accept their claims without scrutiny, and adopt th…
Mental Model
Liminal Space Navigation
Liminality, from anthropologist Victor Turner's work on ritual transitions, describes the threshold state between an old identity and a new one—you're no longer what you were but not yet what you will become
Mental Model
Liminality (Turner): The Threshold Between Identities
Liminality is the transitional threshold between socially recognized statuses, developed from van Gennep's rites-of-passage framework by Victor Turner
Cognitive Move
Limits
Write down what this round of evidence still cannot settle: which rival explanations it leaves alive, how imprecise the numbers are, and who it does not cover. This is the line that names the next probe, or proves another probe would not help.
Cognitive Move
Limits
Write down, before the number ships, the questions it cannot answer: what it does not cover, what it cannot prove caused what, and which claims you agree not to make from it. This blocks later overreach.
Cognitive Move
Limits and uncertainty
Check the precision, confounding, boundaries, and known unknowns before treating the finding as settled.
Mental Model
Limits to Growth Archetype
Peter Senge's system archetype where initial success creates a reinforcing growth loop that eventually encounters a balancing constraint—and the constraint, not the growth engine, determines the system's ultimate traject…
Mental Model
Lindy Effect
Taleb's formalization of the principle that the future life expectancy of non-perishable things (ideas, technologies, books, institutions) is proportional to their current age
Cognitive Move
line
Points joined in order along an axis that has an order to it, almost always time. The line's slope is the rate of change, so a steep stretch, a flat stretch, and a turn all read as facts about speed rather than about level. Joining points only means something when the gap between them is real, which is why a line across unordered categories lies.