The best UXR comes up with a mental model and then design studies to falsify it.
The best UXR comes up with a mental model and then design studies to falsify it. If you experiment without a hypothesis you might overreact to noise.
Topic: mental model
72 chunks · 55 episodes
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- mental model appears in 72 chunks across 55 episodes, from 2023-10-09 to 2026-04-06.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 3/10/25 (2025-03-10), with 4 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with llms, disconfirming evidence, and ground truth, while by chunk count it sits between Claude Code and schelling point; its yearly rank moved from #4 in 2023 to #19 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
Users are stickier to UX than agents are to APIs.
...X than agents are to APIs. That's because it's harder for users to switch their mental models than for agents to rewrite the API they code to. Humans are lazy and would rather not update their mental models. Agents have infinite patience and ...
The ability and willingness to absorb disconfirming evidence is a superpower.
...f we can absorb it. The more disconfirming evidence you absorb, the better your mental model. If the disconfirming evidence is durable, it accretes, and then compounds.
Leave easter eggs for delight in your product.
Leave easter eggs for delight in your product. "My mental model was that this was great, but there are other things in it that surprised me that are great, so it's even better than I thought!" That makes it more r...
I wonder if the whole focus on AGI is downstream of LLMs talking like humans.
...e this kind of fundamentally incorrect "LLMs are basically computers as people" mental model natural. Because it's easy to imagine, it dominates our horizon. What's more interesting to me is: what happens when every human has auto-compounding...
Excellent analysis by Orion Reed on Digital Topology and Economic Power.
...nalysis by Orion Reed on Digital Topology and Economic Power. It complicated my mental model by reminding me that before the cloud, there were opaque proprietary file formats, giving apps more power over their users. Apps always had a leg up ...
The technical term for when a tool merges with our mental model is mechanical sympathy.
The technical term for when a tool merges with our mental model is mechanical sympathy. Humans are really really good at tool use. When a tool is predictable, it starts feeling like an extension of our body. It me...
A rough mental model of Reinforcement Learning curriculum.
A rough mental model of Reinforcement Learning curriculum. You want to give examples at the right time to the model as it's learning. If the example is too hard too early...
Marketing to agents breaks our mental model of advertising
Marketing to agents breaks our mental model of advertising Most assumptions about advertising presume a human audience: attention, persuasion, emotion, recall. When the decision-maker becomes a...
Two mental models for software: robot and a plant.
Two mental models for software: robot and a plant. A robot has its own form of motive force, even though it's not its own agency. It is an automaton, it doesn't have ...
LLMs communicate in language so we naturally assume it's human.
...bvious in contexts where the AI is presented like a person. The default chatbot mental model is one singular friend who is omniscient and subservient. But, of course, it actually has more loyalty to its creators than to you.
A mental model for a mathematic proof.
A mental model for a mathematic proof. You start off in a pitch black house. The only way to make progress is by fumbling around, using touch. Over time you develop...
An excellent post from Brendan McCord: A World Unobserved.
...back loop to see how their actions affect the world, to be able to update their mental model. They are situated. LLMs are not in the world, not directly. They have no direct learning loop.
It's not too hard to prompt inject humans, too.
...reet to give him their watch by doing this aborted routine carefully. Here's my mental model for what's happening. When you start a stored social routine, your brain expects to simply execute it. Presumably the prefrontal cortex goes to sleep...
Socrates railing on books was the first push back on RAG.
...d can retrieve it and don't need to learn it. Where learn it means "update your mental model"
Emergent phenomena can't be understood by reductionism.
...opular product and usage increases discontinuously. On the team, the exec has a mental model that there must be a single driver of the increase. If they can't find it, they might erroneously conclude that the increase is illusory.
Surprise is the gradient of improvement.
Surprise is the gradient of improvement. Surprise requires a mental model to be surprised in the first place. If you are incurious about the world around you you can't be surprised. Surprise is a precious gift, because it s...
If you don't perceive the cost of coordination, you'll underestimate timelines by orders of magnitude.
...s not the individual execution, it's the coordination between people. Sharing a mental model with enough fidelity to be able to work on it in a way that can cohere into something that works. One of the curses of the human experience is that o...
There's a difference between "create a chat" and "create a chatbot" in an AI-native system.
... chat" and "create a chatbot" in an AI-native system. The former encourages the mental model that you're talking to the omniscient service in a new thread. The latter encourages the mental model of spinning up a specific chat thread with an e...
It's easier to keep an active prediction of a system in check than to come up with one.
... there's apparently a saying of "don't be behind the plane." That is, keep your mental model of what's happening, where you're going, what you're going to do next, active. If you lose that mental model, if you have a failed prediction, you ge...