40 mental models and laws to help you understand the real world

1. Littlewood’s Law.

The average person will encounter a “coincidence” (or even witness a miracle with a probability of one in a million) every 30 to 35 days. All over the world, as long as the sample size is large enough, no matter how unimaginable things can happen. But since there are so many miracles, we are slowly coming to terms with it.

2. Hanlon’s Razor.

The number of truly evil people in the world is insignificant compared to the number of idiots, so never blame malice for things that can be adequately explained as stupid.

3. Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Ignorance.

The German theologian Bonhoeffer said, “Stupidity is a moral defect, not an intellectual one. Some people are intelligent, but they are stupid; some people are inferior, but they are not stupid. made, not born”.

Evil can be prevented, stupidity cannot. The great power of the evil few in the world cannot be attained without the help of the many foolish people in the world. So the threat of stupidity far outweighs the evil.

4. The hot and cold world syndrome.

News exists to get your attention, so it tends to report shocking stuff. News often does not fully reflect our reality, but only sift through a tiny fraction of reality. But since that’s all we’ve seen, we’ve come to think the world is crazier than it really is.

5. Sea lion behavior.

Sea lion behavior refers to a method of frequently harassing others on the Internet: pretending to be sincere in online discussions, constantly asking trivial questions, in order to exhaust the opponent’s patience, anger the opponent, and make the opponent “unreasonable”. lose the debate.

6. Two-step flow theory.

Most people’s opinions are obtained from their favorite influencers, who in turn copy opinions from their favorite mass media. So politics is largely a battle between two puppet armies controlled by a handful of real thinkers.

7. The illusion of introspection.

We generally feel that we understand our own thinking patterns and behaviors, but that others do not understand their own thinking patterns and behaviors. We judge others as mentally ill, but we judge ourselves as God.
 
8. Searle Law.

The lower the stakes, the more vicious the politics. In the tense nuclear talks, both sides behaved civilly. But on social media, people acted like the end was coming, full of madness and anger, calling for war because the keyboard warriors had nothing to lose. Academic politics is also the most vicious and painful form of politics because the stakes are low.

9. Find fault theory.

Pick the most unreliable member of the enemy team and target them to make the opponent’s entire lineup look outrageous as well. This is a common attack tactic on social media. It can be said that the entire network culture war is that the two sides find soft bones in each other’s camp and start to attack continuously.

10. The blind man touches the elephant.

We’ve only experienced 0.00000001% of the world, and we’re trying to explain 80% of the world. We believe that our experiences represent the whole of the universe and base our understanding of reality on trivial experiences. Shrink the world to a level that suits your thinking and arrogantly think your own ideas are enough to interpret the world.

11. Experiencing barriers.

We categorize those who disagree with us as stupid, crazy, or evil, so that we don’t have to pay attention to what they say and face complicated facts. Everyone’s view of things depends mainly on their own experiences, and it is precisely because of our different experiences that we interpret the same things differently.

12. Hug Heating Syndrome.

In times of crisis, support for political leaders rises as people band together to fight threats. This has led to those leaders who were originally unpopular to deliberately exaggerate and fabricate crises and even initiate wars in order to win votes.

13. Journalists and politicians.

Journalists and politicians make good use of cheating people. Although they are not lying, they do not represent the real reality.
For example, a reporter asks if a person is racist.
“How dare you ask such a question!” he said.
“He refused to deny that he was racist,” the reporter reported.
Fact: True, but not his exact words.
 
14. Minimal effort principle.

Humans tend to choose ways to achieve their goals with little effort. Because, we take in the first thought that pops up in our brains, get information from the first relevant search result, and so on. This makes it easy to predict and make mistakes.

15. Sturgeon’s Law.

90% of everything is crap, whether it’s books, scientific papers, tweets, or YouTube videos. Due to the principle of minimum effort, the vast majority of work produced in any medium is garbage produced by people with little care. So we have to consume content with great prejudice.

16. The illusion of time.

Cleopatra (Cleopatra) lived in an era closer to the time when the Great Pyramid was created than when Twitter was created. The age of Tyrannosaurus rex is closer to the age of our lives than the age of Stegosaurus. These facts (and evolution) are counterintuitive because our minds cannot comprehend the vastness of time.

17. Moral luck.

Suppose you drink and drive and get home safely. Now imagine that you did the same thing, but someone was hit by you while crossing the road on your way home. In both cases, your behavior is exactly the same, but in the latter case, you’ve caused a catastrophe.

18. The Galimians.

Anthropologists studying American history coined the term Nacirema to describe the primitive peoples of remote jungle tribes. In fact, the word is a reversed letter of American. When we are overly familiar with a topic, we selectively turn a blind eye. To keep our distance, we use unfamiliar language to describe it. The author hereby implies that the seemingly bizarre Gallimians are actually Americans themselves.

19. The Streisand Effect.

When you prohibit someone from using something, it makes them want to use it more. An important reason censorship is often ineffective is the Streisand effect. Attempts to prevent the general public from knowing something, or suppressing specific online information, backfired and made the event more known.

20. The iron law of oligarchy.

All organizations that involve people, no matter how democratic and egalitarian, are ultimately controlled by a few. Because if everyone has power, then no one has power; if some people have power, they will use the power at hand to gain more power.

21. The Ringelmann Effect.

We are taught that when people gather firewood, the flame is high. But in reality, people in teams expend less individual effort than when working alone, and the larger the team, the lower the level of individual effort. Because more work partners means more people can shirk their responsibilities.

22. The minimal group paradigm.

Find a random category to group people, such as their favorite ice cream flavor. Competition between these different groups will soon form and discriminate against each other. In the absence of other political and ideological interference, groups of people can also wage a culture war over the taste of ice cream.

23. The sublime leads to the fall.

The greatest sins of human beings often do not come from wanting to do bad things, but from good intentions, but they lead to bad results. People believe that good intentions can justify unscrupulous actions. Throughout history, there have been countless examples of appalling actions from the moral high ground.

24. Poverty interest.

Poverty has interest. Because the poor cannot regularly clean their teeth, they will pay more money for root canal treatment in the future; because the poor cannot have regular physical examinations, they will sacrifice their lives in the future for not finding cancer early.

25. The McNamara Fallacy.

We tend to evaluate results by the metric that is easiest to measure. The Vietnam War was a disaster, largely because U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara used the number of enemy corpses to measure success, ignoring less easily quantifiable but more important indicators such as public sentiment.

26. Agenda-setting theory.

Important things don’t become news, news becomes important things. The issues that the public talks about are often guided by the media and feel that what appears on the news is what matters to us. But in reality, news is nothing more than a select selection of editors.

27. The Johnson trick.

If a powerful figure is trapped in negative news, they may bribe the media by inserting another, larger story into their coverage to divert attention. One way is to get an ally to reveal to the media a high-profile secret of an opponent and rumors. This is a tactic used by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

28. Feller theory.

The pace of society is based on the speed of news coverage. With the development of the Internet, the news cycle has accelerated, resulting in a series of national and international events and scandals being exposed more and more quickly.

29. Disinformation dissemination method.

In a digital age full of myriads of narratives, people who spread disinformation cannot convince you to accept any single narrative, so they suppress you with many conflicting narratives until you start to doubt everything, become confused, negative and Low morale.

30. Compassion fatigue.

The web is full of tragic news designed to evoke our sympathy. But the irony is that a flood of tragic news has made us accustomed and insensitive to human suffering, and has dramatically reduced our empathy.

31. Emotional heuristics.

Emotions have evolved to serve as a compass for how we experience the world, especially in times of uncertainty. As long as we can treat emotions as advisors rather than masters, and understand what they mean: fear for prudence, envy for ambition, regret for wisdom, and hatred for motivation.

32. Fictional paradox.

In the movie Vertigo, a former cop becomes obsessed with a character born to trick him. Like this cop, we can easily form emotional attachments to fictional characters, suggesting that our feelings are easily aroused by hallucinations, so don’t always trust feelings.

33. Alternative Activities.

We eliminate war and strife from real life, but artificially create competitive sports, video games, and culture wars. Because our hearts want peace, we need conflict.

34. Intellectual obesity.

Humans have evolved to find sugar, a scarce energy source, but when we learned to produce sugar on a large scale, the fondness for sugar became a liability. The same goes for ingesting informational data, our curiosity that once led us to explore the digital world now distracts us and floods our minds with spam.

35. 10:10:10 Strategy.

If you’re battling an addiction, want to smoke a cigarette, eat a chocolate muffin, swipe your social media networks… think about how your indulgence now will make you feel 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years from now. Resist the temptation to get instant gratification by looking outside the present moment.

36. Love the gap.

Several studies have found that people underestimate how much others like them during conversations. So don’t be shy, you might be cooler than you think, go make some more friends!

37. Weakness effects.

We look at our mistakes and weaknesses with shame, feeling that they make us look unlikable. But research shows that it’s our mistakes and weaknesses that actually make us more approachable and likeable by others. So don’t be afraid to cover up your shortcomings.

38. Regression.

The more you pursue happiness, the less likely you are to achieve it, because chasing happiness only reminds you how unworthy you are to have it. The best way to find happiness is to stop chasing and worrying.

39. The Illusion of the End.

Our life is in progress. Seeing our present self as the final version blinds us to the possibility of growth. Remember you are not set in stone, you can always be better than you were five minutes ago, human beings have infinite potential.

40. Luriad.

How does something arise out of nothingness?
Perhaps outside our universe, the default state is existence. Our reality does not emerge from the void, but from an infinite decision tree that exhausts all possibilities.
Some things do not come from nothing, but from everything.

• 24 mental models to help you make decisions
• Talking about tutor David Perell, mental model and English writing
• Tom Morgan | The 21 Laws of Life
• Morgan Housel | 17 Summary of How Humans Think
• Tim Ferriss | Seventeen Life-Changing Questions
• 103 Life Lessons From Kevin Kelly
• On Women Writers, Time Management, and the Razor Model