Thread by @eriktorenberg

What roles do mental models serve?

Simplicity, coherence, and internal consistency.

They’re blinders — like the blinders put on horses to prevent them from getting distracted.

[Quoting @vgr on @farnamstreet podcast:]

Zooming out:

Think of the world as an incredibly confusing place that throws off huge amounts of info in an extremely high bandwidth way

The raw info rate coming through your eyes alone — the amount of raw bit rate info across frequencies band in which eyes are sensitive —

If we had to process that amount raw information…it would make our brains explode.

Not enough processing power in the brain to handle that raw input.

Our brain is basically layers and layers of processing that we map to a toy universe inside our heads

Only thing we ask of this too universe inside our head is that it be much simpler than universe itself and that it be internally consistent/coherent.

The mental models should be coherently put together so that you can close your eyes & analyze a decision like "which university should I attend?"

You're not processing that in the real world--you're processing that in the toy universe in your head that’s a billion times simpler.

That’s where mental models as blinders come in:

They blind you from 99.9999 to all pertinent reality data that could be relevant so that you're paying attention to an extremely narrow stream of information.

That’s the purpose of mental models - to blind you so you can focus.

Thats’ the function of mental models: simplicity and coherence

That’s the only way they can work. In the real world there’s too much information to process in real time, so we rely on mental models.

But how do we evolve our mental models?

We have to ensure that mental models don’t become these perfect leak proof buckets inside which we live through which no reality data can leak at all (e.g. religious fundamentalism)

As the world changes, you have to hope that change leaks through one of the cracks you left open.