The Great Mental Models
Four illustrated volumes of thinking tools taken from several disciplines at once
Four short volumes. They turn the concepts Farnam Street writes about into illustrated chapters you can find again. Volume one holds the general thinking tools: first principles, inversion, second-order thinking, Occam's razor. The rest borrow from physics, chemistry and biology, then systems and mathematics, then economics and art. Every model gets a few pages, a worked example, and a line on where it stops being useful. Few owners read the set front to back.
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Does it: documented as part of their own routine. Recommends: explicitly advises other people to do it. Discusses: covered it substantively without clear personal adoption; this can include criticism or disagreement.
- Shane ParrishRecommends
Writer · Farnam Street and The Knowledge Project
Sold singly or as a boxed set of four. Volume one lays out nine general thinking concepts, inversion and second-order thinking and first principles among them. The three that follow take their models from physics, chemistry and biology, then systems and mathematics, then economics and art.
Source: fs.blog: The Great Mental Models
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Book entry · notes paraphrased from cited sources, quoted excerpts copied from the transcript they link to. Not medical advice. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by anyone listed. How this works.