--- title: Mental Models & Clear Thinking description: Mental models are reusable frameworks for understanding the world. You will learn the core models from economics, physics, psychology and systems thinking, and how to use them to reason and decide better. category: personal-development subcategory: soft-skills difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/mental-models --- # Mental Models & Clear Thinking Mental models are reusable frameworks for understanding the world. You will learn the core models from economics, physics, psychology and systems thinking, and how to use them to reason and decide better. ## Available Resources 3 Books • 4 Websites ## Websites ### 1. Farnam Street: Mental Models **Author:** Shane Parrish Farnam Street's collection of explanations of core mental models from physics, biology, economics, psychology and systems thinking, such as inversion, first principles, opportunity cost and second-order thinking, showing how each can be applied to decisions and problems. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://fs.blog/mental-models/ **Tags:** mental-models, decision-making, critical-thinking, first-principles, second-order-thinking ### 2. Farnam Street (fs.blog) **Author:** Shane Parrish Shane Parrish's essay archive on mental models, decision-making and judgment, drawing on ideas from psychology, economics and biography. Reading it gives you a vocabulary of reusable frames such as inversion, second-order effects and circle of competence for working through decisions. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://fs.blog/ **Tags:** mental-models, decision-making, critical-thinking, cognitive-biases ### 3. Cargo Cult Science (Caltech Commencement Address, 1974) **Author:** Richard P. Feynman 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. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm **Tags:** scientific-integrity, epistemology, self-deception, scientific-method, richard-feynman ### 4. Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger **Author:** Charles T. Munger 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.stripe.press/poor-charlies-almanack **Tags:** mental-models, cognitive-biases, psychology-of-misjudgment, decision-making, investing ## Books ### 1. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction **Author:** Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0804136718?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** forecasting, probabilistic-thinking, brier-score, base-rates, judgment-under-uncertainty ### 2. Thinking, Fast and Slow **Author:** Daniel Kahneman 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374533555?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** cognitive-biases, heuristics, behavioral-economics, judgment-under-uncertainty, decision-making ### 3. Thinking in Systems: A Primer **Author:** Donella H. Meadows 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1603580557?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** systems-thinking, feedback-loops, stocks-and-flows, leverage-points, complex-systems --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/mental-models