Mental Model
Nudging
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's concept of designing CHOICE ARCHITECTURE to gently steer behavior toward better outcomes without restricting freedom of choice—making the desired option the easiest, most natural choice…
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Cognitive Move
Null Inward
When focusing inward on your body is unwanted, destabilizing, or unsafe, refusing it is a valid answer; use an external, environmental, social, or practical route instead.
Cognitive Move
Null, chance, or normal variation
One rival you must always list says nothing happened: the swing sits inside the range your numbers bounce around anyway. Before hunting for a cause, ask whether this month's figure would look unremarkable next to the last two years of month-to-month noise.
Cognitive Move
number line
The same axis with a unit attached, a zero, and ticks. Now distance is measurable and a threshold has a value you can compare against. Positions can be checked by someone else, and the gap between two marks can be added up or divided. The cost is that you can only draw what you are willing to measure, so a number line quietly narrows the question to the measurable part of it.
Mental Model
Number Needed to Treat (NNT)
NNT is the reciprocal of an absolute beneficial risk difference for a specified outcome, comparator, population, and period
Cognitive Move
numbered steps
A list where the order is load bearing. The numbers assert that item three comes after item two, and that running them out of order costs something. Use numbers only when that is true, because a numbered list of things with no real order teaches the reader to ignore your numbers.
Mental Model
Numbers and Their Meaning
Numbers without context are meaningless—a number only becomes information when placed in a framework that gives it meaning
Mental Model
Numinous Experience (Otto)
Rudolf Otto's concept of the numinous, from The Idea of the Holy (1917), describes a distinctive category of experience characterized by the 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans'—a mystery that simultaneously terrifies and…
Mental Model
Nutrition Tracking Protocol (Awareness-Based)
A protocol for using food tracking to build nutritional awareness without triggering obsessive behavior, designed for sustainable improvement rather than strict dieting
Mental Model
Nutritional Periodization
Nutritional periodization applies the athletic training principle of periodization—systematically varying training stress—to dietary strategy
Mental Model
Nutritional Psychiatry
Nutritional psychiatry examines how dietary patterns directly affect mental health through neurotransmitter synthesis, neuroinflammation, gut-brain signaling, oxidative stress, and epigenetic modification
Mental Model
Nyaya Epistemology (Four Valid Means of Knowledge)
The Nyaya school identifies four pramanas (valid knowledge sources): Pratyaksha (direct perception), Anumana (inference from evidence), Upamana (comparison/analogy), and Shabda (testimony of reliable authorities)
Mental Model
Objectivity vs. Fairness Debate (Journalism's Central Tension)
Traditional objectivity holds that journalists should give 'both sides' equal weight
Cognitive Move
objects on a table standing in for parts
Whatever is within reach, placed to mean something. A mug is the deadline, a pen is your manager, a coin is you. Meaning lives in position: distance, direction, what faces what, what sits behind what. Nothing gets written down, so the setup takes a minute, and anyone can move a piece to show they see it differently without having to phrase the disagreement first.
Mental Model
Oblique Strategies (Brian Eno)
Oblique Strategies is a set of prompts by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt intended to offer an indirect approach during creative work
Cognitive Move
Observable
Every construct needs a stand-in you can actually see in a log or a form. This slot names that visible event precisely, so any two people can point at the same row and say yes or no. The arithmetic comes later.
Cognitive Move
Observable check
Name a concrete test that proves the transfer actually landed, and run it before you step away. Not more explaining, not a promise to check in later. Evidence you can see: a teach-back, a sample of real work, a reconciliation, an independent spot-check.
Cognitive Move
Observable indicators
Name what a bystander could see, hear, or count in the moment that tells you the term is present. Not a story or an explanation, just the visible signal, specific enough that two people watching would record the same thing.
Cognitive Move
Observation packet
Keep the raw observation separate from your interpretation of it, along with where it came from and what went wrong.
Mental Model
Observer Effect
A change in a phenomenon caused by the process of observing or measuring it
Mental Model
Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics (Measurement Changes the System)
Measurement can alter a quantum system through the specified physical interaction
Mental Model
Observer Effect vs Hawthorne Effect
Two distinct but often confused phenomena: The Observer Effect (from physics) is the principle that measuring a system changes it—observation alters the observed
Mental Model
Observer-Expectancy Bias (Experimenter Bias)
The tendency for researchers' or evaluators' expectations to influence the outcomes they observe—not through deliberate manipulation but through subtle, unconscious cues that shape the behavior of subjects or the interpr…
Mental Model
Occam’s Broom
A metaphor, attributed by Dennett to Sydney Brenner, for sweeping inconvenient evidence out of view to protect a preferred explanation.