Stray thoughts on LLMs.
...ut before the sense making happened. That creates a lot of chaos and swirl. The mental model for what it is hasn't fully emerged out of collective tinkering yet.
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.
We maintain mental models of the systems that we interact with that can be wrong, and sometimes confuse us.
We maintain mental models of the systems that we interact with that can be wrong, and sometimes confuse us. Matt Webb told me he had heard somewhere that humans tend to categ...
Let's pull on a thread starting from the observation that LLMs only "think" one token at a time.
...get the illusion of a pre-planned result, when it really wasn't at all. Another mental model: LLMs are like the main character in memento. The main character "wakes up", sees the tattoos and the sticky notes, and says "well I guess the next s...
"Wrinkling your brain" is "adding complications to your previously overly simplistic mental model"
...kling your brain" is "adding complications to your previously overly simplistic mental model" Wrinkling something makes it more nuanced, more complex, more capable of handling subtlety. Fractally-wrinkled things are more resilient. You can't ...
Don't spend time thinking about the boring things.
... the boring things. Boring things here means, "unsurprising", which means "your mental model is sufficiently calibrated to correctly predict its output in practice" For boring things, automate them. Get to good enough and don't overthink it. ...
It's hard to understand how a black box works.
...t's hard to understand how a black box works. You understand a system when your mental model can accurately predict what it will do in response to most inputs. With a black box you don't know what state it's in at any given point and have to ...
Good epistemic hygiene is not "write a lot of docs" and "do every analysis down to minute detail in triplicate."
...n triplicate." It's "humbly seek disconfirming evidence and absorb it into your mental model, and don't waste time chasing down the illusion of certainty".
Imagine two discussion participants.
...things they fundamentally disagree on--that are so outside each others' current mental model that they track as incomprehensible noise or actively clash--then they'll lose trust and come out of the conversation with nothing to show for it. Th...
Games are magic at building up knowhow.
...make active decisions. To take actions means they have to be engaged and have a mental model of the situation. Building a robust, useful mental model is what builds knowhow. So games create knowhow as a kind of byproduct, and that byproduct c...