I love Anthea Roberts' concept of dragonfly thinking.

Any mental model we apply to a problem is a lens.

A lens must reduce the signal of the real world into an easier-to-consume distillation.

Lenses are great, because they help us extract new insights from the fractal complexity of the real world.

The danger is if you use a single lens exclusively.

Imagine fusing rose colored glasses to your eyes permanently.

You'd have a dangerously skewed understanding of the world.

That's why it's critical to use a diversity of lenses to understand complex phenomena.

Dragonfly eyes have myriad lenses in every direction.

In Anthea's metaphor, that gives you a multi-faceted understanding of the world around you.

This meta-approach is the best one in complex domains.

Doing this kind of translation takes mental effort; when we're mad or scared or stressed we don't do it.

This is something that AI should in theory be able to help with the heavy lifting of, giving all of us more robust, nuanced understandings.

Looks like that's precisely what Anthea's working on: https://www.dragonflythinking.net/