Mental Model
Protect Yourself From Bad Advice.
Munger's meta-principle about filtering the influence of others' advice: most advice is self-interested, uninformed, or both—and accepting bad advice can be more costly than making your own mistakes
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Cognitive Move
Protected floors or anti-goals
Name in advance the costs you refuse to pay and the minimums that must survive, so a win bought by wrecking something you care about counts as a loss. State them as hard limits, not preferences, and only for severe, likely, relevant harms.
Cognitive Move
Protected function or state
Names the one thing that must keep working, stated as the underlying function rather than its current packaging. Get this wrong and you defend the wrong thing: the specific venue, the specific night, the specific headcount, instead of what actually delivers the value.
Mental Model
Protein Leverage Hypothesis
The protein leverage hypothesis, developed by Simpson and Raubenheimer, proposes that humans (and many animals) have a specific protein appetite that drives total food consumption
Cognitive Move
Protocol
Spells out how the number will actually get produced, before anyone produces it: who gets measured, over what window, against which comparison group, using what instrument, and who runs the pull. Locking this stops later fights over whether the measurement was fair.
Mental Model
Prototype
A prototype is a representation or preliminary implementation used to investigate selected aspects of an idea
Mental Model
Prototype-Test-Iterate Cycle
The prototype-test-iterate cycle is the engineering practice of building a rough version of a solution, testing it against real-world conditions, learning from the results, and refining the design — repeatedly
Cognitive Move
Prototype, pilot, or field trial
Try the change small and real, in a bounded slice of the actual context, before committing everywhere.
Mental Model
Proximity Principle of Friendship
The Proximity Principle (also called the propinquity effect) is one of the most robust findings in social psychology: physical proximity is the single strongest predictor of friendship formation, stronger than shared int…
Mental Model
Proxy
A measure used to represent a distinct attribute or outcome through an assumed or established connection
Mental Model
Psychoeducation as Therapeutic Intervention
Psychoeducation is the deliberate, structured sharing of psychological knowledge with clients as a therapeutic intervention — not mere information delivery
Mental Model
Psychological Safety
A shared belief within a team that interpersonal risks such as asking questions, reporting mistakes, and raising concerns can be taken without humiliation or inappropriate punishment
Mental Model
Public Interest Test (Justifying Intrusive Reporting)
The public interest test determines whether a story's societal value justifies potential harm from publication—to privacy, security, or ongoing investigations
Mental Model
Public Projects
Public-project models examine collective provision, shared benefits, costs, and contribution incentives
Mental Model
Publication Bias
The systematic distortion of the scientific literature caused by the preferential publication of positive, significant, or novel results—and the suppression of null, negative, or replicating results
Cognitive Move
Pulse
A non-negotiable pre-intervention gate checking frozen predictions, unintended loops, real leverage, safety invariants, and falsifiable evidence, where no strength can offset a safety failure.
Mental Model
Punctuated Equilibrium (Gould & Eldredge)
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge's evolutionary theory that species remain relatively unchanged for long periods (stasis/equilibrium) interrupted by brief periods of rapid change (punctuation)—challenging Darwin's as…
Mental Model
Purchasing Power Parity
Purchasing power parities are statistical conversion factors used to compare quantities of goods and services across economies after adjusting for price-level differences
Mental Model
Pure Coordination Game
A pure coordination game models participants with aligned interests who need to match choices but may have several possible coordinated outcomes
Mental Model
Pursuer-Distancer Dynamic
A broader version of demand-withdraw that operates not just during conflict but as a chronic relational posture
Cognitive Move
puzzle with a win state
One configuration counts as solved, and the player knows it when they reach it. Moves are limited, so every turn spent on a wrong arrangement is a turn gone. The teaching sits in the constraint on moves rather than in the answer: running out of swaps is what makes the ordering rule visible.
Mental Model
Pygmalion Effect
An expectancy effect in which beliefs about someone may influence their performance through changed treatment, feedback, or opportunities
Cognitive Move
pyramid
Levels stacked so each rests on the one below and width shows how much sits at that level. Reading up tells you what depends on what. Reading widths tells you which layer is actually large. The tip is often the thing you talk about most and control least, because it is whatever the layers below leave behind.
Mental Model
Pyrrhic Victory
A victory achieved at such devastating cost that it's effectively a defeat