Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
by Charles T. Munger · Stripe Press
This is the source document the entire mental-models genre is derived from, available in full at no cost. Eleven talks by Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman Charlie Munger, including the 2005 'Psychology of Human Misjudgment' checklist of twenty-five cognitive tendencies and his argument for a latticework of models from physics, biology, economics and psychology. Full text and audio, free.
More resources on Mental Models & Clear Thinking
System Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World
Learn systems thinking & modeling for organizational behavior in complex systems with this MIT course by James E. Paine.
Cargo Cult Science (Caltech Commencement Address, 1974)
Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address on scientific integrity, using cargo-cult airstrips as the image for work that copies the form of science without the substance. Source of the maxim that you are the easiest person to fool. Reading it in twenty minutes gives more usable epistemics than any 'critical thinking' course in this subcategory, and it costs nothing.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
A book that makes clear thinking falsifiable — it supplies a scoring rule, so the reader can find out whether their models actually work rather than just admiring them. Tetlock's report on the IARPA forecasting tournament, where volunteer forecasters beat intelligence analysts. Covers Brier scoring, base rates, breaking questions into tractable parts, updating in small increments, and the measurable habits that separate accurate forecasters from confident pundits.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Kahneman's account of forty years of research with Amos Tversky on judgment under uncertainty: anchoring, availability, representativeness, framing, loss aversion and regression to the mean, with the experimental evidence behind each. The primary source for most popular bias writing.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Meadows, lead author of The Limits to Growth, explains stocks, flows, feedback loops, delays and leverage points, then shows why complex systems resist intervention and where small changes actually shift behavior. The standard introduction to systems thinking.