People talk about surprises, delightful or nasty.
...l or nasty. Because we talk about things that are interesting: that updated our mental model and thus might update others', too.
Topic: mental model
89 chunks · 67 episodes
1.9x burst in 2025 Q1
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
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 89 chunks across 67 episodes, from 2023-10-09 to 2026-10-12.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 3/10/25 (2025-03-10), with 4 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with ground truth, gradient, and early adopter, while by chunk count it sits between ground truth and infinite software; its yearly rank moved from #3 in 2023 to #14 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.
Watching my daughter learn to read changes my mental model of what reading is.
Watching my daughter learn to read changes my mental model of what reading is. She's been playing a game called Teach Your Monster to Read for a few months that slowly introduces sounds and letter combination...
Mental models can't disconfirm themselves, by definition.
Mental models can't disconfirm themselves, by definition. In idea space everything works exactly as you expect. Because it's not real, it's your simulation of rea...
Top down and bottom-up organization processes tend to interleave.
...tremely fragile. If even a single thing were different than the administrator's mental model, the system wouldn't work.
Alexa is not your assistant, it's Amazon's!
...ol offered by someone else for you. Software that says "my" at least allows the mental model that the tool is yours.
These vibe coding tools are all about making apps.
These vibe coding tools are all about making apps. Apps are the wrong mental model for little throwaway things that do useful things on your data. We should be moving beyond apps.[pm][pn]
Perfectionists have a harder time collaborating.
Perfectionists have a harder time collaborating. Because they have a mental model of how a given thing should work and their collaborators don't, so unless they have the same very high fidelity mental image of what it will be, they...
I loved Sam Schillace's piece about the problems that arise from viewing LLMs as humans instead of viewing them as a tool.
... concerned the canonical take on the pitfalls of engineers using this incorrect mental model for LLMs.[vb]
Someone told me an interesting story about UXR from the earliest days of Excel.
...o do the sums. They didn't realize the superpower of computer spreadsheets. The mental model was "paper spreadsheets, but in the computer." But by being in the computer, the spreadsheet could be magical and interactive. A massively more power...
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 s...
Knowledge grows from cycles of conjecture and criticism.
...and criticism. (Apparently this is an idea from David Deutsch.) That is, form a mental model, a hypothesis. Then expose that hypothesis to disconfirming evidence, for example ground truthing it. Guess and check. The disconfirming evidence giv...
The Chatbot frame leads LLMs to be treated like genies.
...box[wg]" frame for LLMs quickly leads to icky scenarios and also gives a flawed mental model for what they can do anyway.
To guess what someone means in an ambiguous situation, you need to overlap on mental models.
To guess what someone means in an ambiguous situation, you need to overlap on mental models. If you don't share mental models, your guesses will not align with their assumptions. Your mental models are the frog DNA that fills in the implici...
LLMs don't have memories of their interactions with humans.
...ions with humans.[yr] Another way that the "LLMs are basically a virtual human" mental model is wrong. LLMs have all of the background world knowledge that was statically baked into them during training, but their only "working knowledge" is ...
People are acting like chatbots is the UX for the AI era.
...ss quality that it can be compelling on its own. But they also cement the wrong mental model: "LLMs are just like a person, but virtual." That vastly misunderstands what LLMs are, what they can do, how they could be used. LLMs are an alien br...
Be careful about blindly following your early adopters.
... early adopters. The early adopters can pull you in weird, random directions. A mental model to get the underlying dynamic: Imagine an underlying distribution of points with 0.7 correlation. Imagine adding one point from the distribution at a...
A mental model for retconning your thing: what is a plausible story that is compatible with you being a master of the universe.
A mental model for retconning your thing: what is a plausible story that is compatible with you being a master of the universe. If you were a master of the universe...
LLMs talk to us like they're a human, but they're a collective hive mind of society, presenting as a singular "person".
...-competent person. That is comforting and easy to use… but also gives the wrong mental model for what they can do. LLMs can perform feats of patience and recall that no human ever could. If you don't think about how LLMs are different from hu...
The append-only conversation log to interact with LLMs leaves me wanting more.
...ads of my curiosity, in some cases leading to deep insights that reconfigure my mental model of the world or myself.[alz][ama][amb] These conversations[amc][amd] are long and meandering. They have various dead ends or odd paths that I later d...
Some AI video output is mind-bendingly bizarre.
... then later more signal comes in that requires our brain to snap to a different mental model. Various optical illusions trigger this reliably. When it happens, there's a kind of whooshing vertigo feeling as the whole world reorients around yo...