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If you haven't seen it, this is one of the best resources on the subject: https://fs.blog/mental-models/ Farnham Street blog has a TON of fascinating articles.
There real challenge is remembering them, and determining which to use and investing the time to use them.
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+1 I just recently read this book and i was met with gem after gem. Also made me start looking at the world in terms of feedback loops, is it a balancing, goal-seeking or reinforcing feedback loop? How tight are these feedback loops? etc. Definitely a must read!
which book?
This question is strange to me. Mental models are simply how your brain works. You don't need to read books about them before they become effective. You don't need to understand how your legs operate before you can learn to walk. The only thing you can learn are concepts. But there's billions of them. It's what education does. It's somewhat useful to understand how the brain operates through mental models. But there'…
Learning about the number of calories in everything, and reading research that said the whole "low fat" movement wasn't useful, was what finally helped me lose weight.
Reading about the best ways to exercise helped me train effectively.
So maybe I do need to read more books about the brain.
There are many good recommendations here, but I’d add that reading books about mental models is worth 10%, while practice thinking about real situations is 90%. To get practice, you can’t just sit and scratch your chin. You have to make a predction, write it down, then see how real life played out a few years down the road. It helps to write down predictions you considered but rejected and why.
That sounds like quite possibly the least effective method of learning. There are people out there who have done all that work for you. All you have to do is pick up a book, learn their models, then stand on their shoulders as you develop your own.
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Just reading through comments to aggregate notes, and as the OP, yep: I meant something closer to "favorite books" but with the condition that they happen to introduce, by intention or unintentionally, a (single) "mental model" (not to be too strict about the definition) or perspective of sorts. I realize now my original question was not that clear, sorry about that!
Well. Thanks for the apology; I feel the pain. Broad minded thinking runs into this problem frequently. But the more I think about it—What’s good in literature and science and also satisfies the constraint of a grand conceit—the more I believe the only satisfactory ‘answer’ is the one they answer for their self. I’ve been trying to answer some similar questions in philosophy of language since 2005, and I’m still at i…
https://blog.usejournal.com/effort-neglect-and-the-second-te...
P.S. I am not part of “Journal,” and don’t use it. One of their people reached out to me and asked if I’d submit my piece to their publication.