Mental Model
Premortem (Prospective Hindsight)
Gary Klein's technique: before launching a plan, imagine it has already failed spectacularly, then work backward to identify what caused the failure
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Mental Model
Prepared Environment (Montessori)
The Montessori prepared environment combines physical, social, and psychological conditions intended to support development and independent activity, with appropriate materials, routines, observation, and adult guidance.
Cognitive Move
prerequisite map
The same arrows over conditions and skills rather than tasks. An arrow means the thing above cannot hold until the thing below is solid. Mark each node solid, shaky, or absent, and read upward from the lowest shaky one, because everything resting on it is unstable for the same reason.
Mental Model
Present Bias
The systematic preference for immediate rewards over future rewards, beyond what any constant discount rate would explain—closely related to hyperbolic discounting but emphasizing the behavioral consequences
Cognitive Move
Preservation or resilience
A goal to maintain or rapidly recover something valuable through expected shocks and variation.
Mental Model
Preserving Optionality
The strategic principle of maintaining FUTURE CHOICES by avoiding premature commitment—keeping options open when uncertainty is high and the cost of reversing decisions is significant
Cognitive Move
Prevention objective
Some goals are about what must never happen, not what you achieve. Name the forbidden state or the floor a variable must stay above, the warning signal, and the response rule. Use it when the downside is severe or hard to reverse.
Cognitive Move
Prevention or floor
A destination centered on keeping a critical variable above a minimum or stopping an unacceptable state from ever occurring.
Mental Model
Price Discrimination
Price discrimination involves price differences not fully explained by cost differences, often aimed at different willingness to pay
Mental Model
Price Elasticity
Price elasticity measures the percentage quantity response to a percentage price change under specified conditions
Mental Model
Price of Anarchy
A game theory concept measuring how much worse a system performs when individuals optimize for themselves versus when a central coordinator optimizes for everyone
Mental Model
Price's Law (Square Root of Contributors Do Half the Work)
Price's square-root law is a rough bibliometric hypothesis that half the publication output in a defined field may come from approximately the square root of its contributing authors
Cognitive Move
Primary-source lookup
Go read the original record, study, contract, or dataset instead of a summary of it.
Mental Model
Priming
The psychological phenomenon where exposure to a stimulus influences subsequent judgment and behavior—often without conscious awareness
Mental Model
Principal-Agent Problem
A principal-agent problem can arise when one party delegates decisions to another whose information, incentives, or objectives differ
Mental Model
Principle of Least Effort (Zipf's Law)
The principle of least effort proposes that effort tradeoffs influence behavior, including communication
Mental Model
Principled Disobedience
Principled disobedience is the deliberate, conscious violation of a rule, law, or authority directive because compliance would require betraying a more fundamental ethical principle
Mental Model
Principled Negotiation (Fisher & Ury)
Principled negotiation separates the people from the problem, focuses on interests rather than positions, generates options for mutual gain, and insists on objective criteria for evaluating outcomes
Cognitive Move
printed page
A sheet or a page in a document, read in a column from the top. The page fixes the order, so the reader meets the figure at one particular moment in an argument, with everything above it already read. That is the strongest thing this sub-mode gives you and the easiest thing to waste by dropping a figure in with no lead-in.
Cognitive Move
Prior and baseline
Record what you currently believe and what normally happens before you look at any new evidence.
Cognitive Move
Prior self
Measure the thing against its own earlier state instead of against anyone else. Ask what changed between then and now for this same person, team, or project. It reveals rate and direction of movement, which cross-sectional comparisons to other people cannot show.
Cognitive Move
Priority
Rank the competing goods in a fixed order and settle each decision by the highest-ranked one first. A lower objective matters only when the ones above it are tied. Nothing about the top rank gets traded away for gains further down.
Mental Model
Prisoner’s Dilemma
A game in which each player individually prefers defection, while both prefer mutual cooperation to mutual defection.
Mental Model
Prisoner's Dilemma (extended)
The foundational game theory model where two rational agents, each acting in self-interest, produce an outcome that's worse for BOTH than if they had cooperated