Attendees
Alpha, Mingming, Jason, Harsha, Vanessa, Annie, Isla, Rohit, Weihan, Ashley, XY, Manu, Kimi, Rachel, Eric, Nikhil
Moderator
Introduction
Village is a diverse community of people who are genuinely curious about understanding the world and the people around them better. We get together once a month for moderated discussions on important issues like sustainability, health & wellbeing, and education. In last month’s dinner, we discussed happiness. From the U.S. Declaration of Independence to day-to-day discussions about life, it seems that happiness is something that we should actively pursue. However, the definition of happiness appears to be highly contextual to one’s individual circumstances, and in fact, some people have argued that we shouldn’t pursue happiness. In the last post, we took you through each of the main questions we discussed, along with the views expressed by our group during the discussion. You can read the post from the last dinner here.
This month, we shifted our focus to mental models. Farnam Street describes mental models as “how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.” Mental models are used often in business, but we wanted our group to think about mental models in their personal lives, too. We explored questions like: How can mental models be applied outside their original context? Mental model is a fancy way of saying “heuristics” or “rules of thumb.” What are the edge cases of your rules of thumb? Are subconscious mental models actually mental models? Where is the line between intuition and self-awareness? In this post, we take you through the full discussion with our group.
Pre-event Questionnaire
Before the event, we asked members to share a few heuristics that they use often in their personal lives, dive into how they formulated those heuristics, and ponder whether or not those heuristics have changed over time. Although some members chose to keep their responses private, below are a few of the responses people shared.
Heuristics:
“When you think you have something to teach others, the moment is ripe for you to be humbled”
“Compounding return in x: believe the power of compounding return in many things in life/work - e.g. relationship, habits, learning, career, wealth creation etc.”
“Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.000000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.”
“Golden rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
How these heuristics were formed:
Growing up in specific communities (immigrant households, strict religious beliefs and practices)
Mostly came from professional life and then applied to personal life
Personal experience (purely trial and error, and then reflect)
Through engagement with content (books, blogs, podcasts), and conversations with people
Are mental models really the cause or effect? That is, are they just the end result of people justifying their past experiences?
View 1: Mental models are purely the effect.
People have lots of experiences in their life - upon reflection on those experiences, people try to fit a mental model around them to determine why certain outcomes came to fruition. Members pointed to different business leaders (Ray Dalio, Charlie Munger, etc.) and posited that in reality, it’s likely that these business leaders acted on intuition first, and upon reflection came up with a way to explain their intuition as a mental model that they had when evaluating different scenarios. Whether or not they were conscious that they were applying the mental model in the moment is not as relevant.
View 2: It’s not an X causes Y or Y causes X relationship, the relationship between a mental model and an outcome is more reflective.
That is, mental models are constantly updated based on the outcomes that an individual experiences in their life. In this case, they are both the cause and effect - mental models can inform how we make decisions, and the outcome of those decisions can inform how we update our mental models.
View 3: Spending time thinking of mental models isn’t valuable - mental models are a way to rationalize, and try to make non-deterministic outcomes deterministic.
For example, mental models are not 100% effective when applied (members pointed to recent decisions made by leveraging previously effective mental models that turned out very poorly).
One member went so far as to say that not even the laws of nature are 100% the truth - they are just the best way of explaining the world given the context that we have at a given moment.
Another member pushed back on these claims and stated that whether or not these models are fool-proof is irrelevant. It is important to humanity to have good explanations – current peaks of knowledge given the state of society at a given time. The space for mental models is the space for good explanations.
Another pushback on the idea that mental models are useless was that our evaluation criteria of mental models is incorrect. One member stated that mental models should be viewed as a way to prevent someone from making really bad decisions - without the mental model the set of possible outcomes could be much worse.
An example of this was the way that expert chess players think about a chess board - because of the intuition that they’ve built up, they look at a chess board and see the range of good moves (they ignore the bad moves that could be made).
Are there certain patterns or ways of living that you’ve found valuable?
Extrapolating outside of the traditional definition of mental model, this question explored the frameworks people leverage in their day-to-day lives.
One member chose to share a specific practice that he has built into his life: Clarity and momentum comes only after action.
The applications of this model to the member who shared this included taking action in moments where there is uncertainty or risk both in personal and professional scenarios
Most members talked about how it’s very difficult to apply some logical framework to their day-to-day lives because these frameworks ignore the emotional side. In applying mental models, we are making an assumption that we are rational.
How do you determine what practices to build into your life? That is, how do you build your own mental models?
View 1: Intuition.
I’ve tried using mental models and building them into my life, but intuition has led to the best decisions that I’ve made in my life.
View 2: Conversations with other people.
Being able to absorb the models that other people use through witnessing their actions and adopting their ways or through more concrete methods (i.e. someone talking about how a mental model they have and then adopting it).
View 3: Mistakes.
Self-failure is the biggest factor that leads people to adopt a practice or recognize what they should not do, which is arguably more important than what they should do.
Another member took this thought one step further and described how he has adopted mental models through not only his own failures and success but also those of the people he knows really well and has spent a lot of time with (i.e. family and close friends).
In this section of the discussion, members also spent quite a bit of time discussing how mental models have changed over time - questions like: have our practices actually gotten smarter? Are we adopting better models as we evolve?
There was significant debate around whether or not progress is part of human nature, and whether or not that progress can be credited to better practices and models. There was no consensus among the group on this - we’re curious to hear your thoughts!
Will we reach the point where we can model all of the possible outcomes in a given situation and choose the right decision to make based on those outcomes?
That is, although it might be a human limitation to do such a computation, computers are on the path towards reaching the point that this is a real possibility. Will computers be able to make what used to be a non-deterministic decision into a deterministic one?
View 1: Computers will be able to support decision making in a way that is deterministic, and will be able to make the best decision at a given time with the right inputs.
A counter view to this was that computers will not be able to be as good as humans at making decisions until human beings can encode “qualia” - senses that seemingly make humans human (i.e. the ability to understand the taste of a banana or the color blue).
A computer has the ability to learn from mistakes if it can make the realm of possible outcomes limited and actually compute how different actions would lead to different outcomes. Human beings are just guessing at a certain point, because no two scenarios are exactly the same.
At the core, most people agreed that if computers are able to make the realm of possible outcomes limited, the computer will be much better at making decisions than a human being.
View 2: There will be bias built into the ways that computers are evaluating decisions.
I.e. how does a computer know what is good or bad - it is coded to understand what is good or bad by a human being who is biased.
One of the members who aligned with this view pointed to a few examples of how a human being’s view has persisted through time in ways that are hard to fathom. For example, she asked the question why the keyboard is organized in the way that it is - it is because it was originally designed to prevent people from typing too quickly on typewriters. Therefore, we continue to use a keyboard that is actually meant to make us type slower, which is very inefficient. The same phenomenon could happen as we create computers that help us make decisions and encode our own mental models.
Closing thoughts
Although mental models can oftentimes be boxed into narrow applications within the business world, it is clear that lessons can be applied to any aspects of one’s life whether in work, play, or relationships. Many VFC members debated the efficacy and value of mental models, but it was clear that most people (upon reflection) had incorporated models discovered through work into their personal lives whether consciously or subconsciously. Heuristics are a way to make decision-making less stressful, and a way to reflect on patterns of behavior that one may have adopted without realizing. At the end of the day, mental models may be extremely valuable when leveraged by technology that can make non-deterministic outcomes deterministic, as long as bias is considered and mitigated.
If this post sparked your curiosity at all, consider joining us for our next Village Forecasting Club dinner. Apply to Village here.