When you have the wrong or ineffective mental model for a situation, it creates the possibility for a nasty surprise.
- When you have the wrong or ineffective mental model for a situation, it creates the possibility for a nasty surprise.
- The wrong mental model that doesn't actually capture the relevant dynamics of the system gives you a faux confidence.
- "I understand how it works, and it is doing this thing" when in reality it's not.
- What Taleb calls the Turkey problem,
- "My mental model is that the farmer is my friend who just wants me to eat well. It hasn't been shown to be wrong yet".
- Then one day the incorrectness of your mental model is revealed to be disastrously wrong and you die.
- Every mental model is wrong.
- It must be. it's projecting a multi-dimensional phenomena to a much smaller number of dimensions, which requires loss of information.
- Yet some mental models are more wrong than others.
- Ride the gradient of improving the effectiveness of your mental model, especially in high stakes situations.