The Exchanges

Q tribal tend to blend, right? More so than the other one. It was mental models that first drove me to your book. I mean, one of my friends read it, and they pointed out that you were talking about mental models in your book. And at the time, and I mean, to a large extent today, so few people are talking about that. What's your definition of a mental model?

A Well, I have a sort of technically inspired definition in the book, as you may recall. So I used something called the belief, desire, intention model of Michael Brotman, who's a philosopher at Stanford, and it's been the basis of a lot of artificial intelligence research. So that's one sort of effective way to get at defining what a mental model is. It's a set of beliefs, desires, and intentions. But I think that sort of definition is useful for certain narrow technical needs. Um, UI people have similar sort of technical definitions. Politics people have similar definitions, like you've mentioned George Lakoff a couple of times in your writing, I think, and Lakoff has one based on conceptual metaphor. All these narrower technical definitions of mental models, they're useful for certain, certain questions that are honestly a little, I don't know, too detailed and deep for a general mass audience. They're not interesting. So for a mass audience, I would say The best definition of a mental model is a world in the sense of science fiction or fantasy, right? So you've got, say, a universe like the Harry Potter universe or the Lord of the Ring universe, and so there's the world, and then there's the story that's told in the world. And look at the way the most popular science fiction and fantasy is written. You're told the story, but through learning the story, you also learn about th…

AI assessment note: “The best definition of a mental model is a world in the sense of science fiction”

Q What's your process for reading? Do you, do you have a process? Do you? Like, walk me through this. You, you, you connect so many things. You.

A I don't really have a process. If I'm working on a particular well-defined project, like right now I'm working on, uh, Breaking Smart, uh, the second season work, then there's a set of books that obviously I have to sort of get through and read and process. So that's somewhat like, uh, you know, academic, uh, work where you have to do a literature survey and understand, um, you know, what, uh, uh, some people call the idea maze of a domain. Um, this is a phrase in the startup world that was coined by Balaji Srinivasan. It's the idea that you need to understand the map of, uh, the area you're exploring. So that kind of reading is relatively well defined, where you have a goal you want to get to, and you have a rough idea of the path, but you have to go about assembling a map so that you can actually navigate your way there. So that's one kind of reading, and I think, uh, uh, traditional education teaches that kind of reading very well. The other kind is, uh, probably, I don't know, 80% of my reading, which is, uh, honestly, pretty much completely random. I follow trails on Twitter, on Facebook, people send me stuff, I spot, uh, things on Amazon, and it's, uh, I don't read as much as I used to, my sort of stamina for that is going down, but this process is, yeah, Pretty much random, but that isn't to say that the effect of the process is random. The effect of the process is, uh, …

AI assessment note: “I don't really have a process. If I'm working on a particular well-defined project”

Q If you had to pick a few, like, what would you say?

A Well, I have a page on my blog. It's rubenfarm.com slash now reading. So now dash reading, where I maintain kind of an active radar of things in my pipeline, so to speak. And, uh, I do have a list there of, uh, top books and they're top in the sense that I referenced them a lot. They're like foundational mental models. So Lakoff is one of the metaphors we live by. Um, we've got, uh, Gareth Morgan's images of organization, uh, James Carr's finite and infinite games. So there's a bunch of books that I reference a lot and sort of, uh, bread and butter frameworks that I use a lot, but I wouldn't say that they are the books that have influenced me the most because that's, that's actually a question that's, uh, kind of problematic because influence is a very hard quantity to measure where you might say that when you were going through like a very angsty teen crisis at the age of And you read The Little Prince or Catcher in the Rye, and that totally, I don't know, saved your sanity back when you were 17 and, you know, kicked your life on a 90 degree different course. That's very influential. It might have steered your life that way. Whereas another book might be this sort of little trickle of a drop at a time seeping into your brain because you reread it every three years, like say Lord of the Rings. For whom, for a lot of people, Lord of the Rings is something that we reread every th…

AI assessment note: “Lakoff is one of the metaphors we live by. Um, we've got, uh, Gareth Morgan's images of organization”

Q Do you think those tribe decisions are based on the particular decision that you're making, or are they based on the tribe at large? So if I, am I gravitating towards a tribe on particular issues, or is it that I want to be like that tribe in all issues?

A I think it's the latter, because if you're talking about being like the tribe on particular issues, you're way too individualistic. You're making decisions based on the merits of a particular case. Like you might say that on capital punishment, I'm with liberals and I'm against it. Uh, I'm referring to a US context of course here. So you might say on capital punishment, I've thought through the issues and I'm against it. Therefore I'm with the Democrats. But on gun control, I've talked through it, and I'm with the Republicans on that. That's too much thinking. It shows that you're not a tribal thinker. For a tribal thinker, it would be, who do I want to be with as sort of the operating system of my life? Who do I want to have barbecues with? Who do I want to hang out with? Who do I want, um, sort of as my friends in my bowling league? That sort of Uh, issue. It's not explicit. They don't sit through and say, all right, these are the 50 activities and habits that define my life. Therefore, I'm going to pick the optimal tribe to join. No, it's not like that. It's, it's more a process of emotional resonance. And after that, you basically are partisan in a predictable way on all issues. And to people who are more individualistic and discriminating thinkers, this seems kind of stupid. It's like, how could you possibly take This huge set of, like, 50 different issues with very differ…

AI assessment note: “I think it's the latter, because if you're talking about being like the tribe”

Q Do you think those tribe decisions are based on the particular decision that you're making, or are they based on the tribe at large? So if I, am I gravitating towards a tribe on particular issues, or is it that I want to be like that tribe in all issues?

A I think it's the latter, because if you're talking about being like the tribe on particular issues, you're way too individualistic. You're making decisions based on the merits of a particular case. Like you might say that on capital punishment, I'm with liberals and I'm against it. Uh, I'm referring to a U S context of course here. So you might say on capital punishment, I've thought through the issues and I'm against it. Therefore I'm with the Democrats. But on, um, gun control, I've talked through it, and I'm with the Republicans on that. That's too much thinking. It shows that you're not a tribal thinker. For a tribal thinker, it would be, who do I want to be with as sort of the operating system of my life? Who do I want to have barbecues with? Who do I want to hang out with? Who do I want, um, sort of as my friends in my bowling league? That sort of Uh, issue. It's not explicit. They don't sit through and say, all right, these are the 50 activities and habits that define my life. Therefore, I'm going to pick the optimal tribe to join. No, it's not like that. It's, it's more a process of emotional resonance. And after that, you basically are partisan in a predictable way on all issues. And to people who are more individualistic and discriminating thinkers, this seems kind of stupid. It's like, how could you possibly take This huge set of, like, 50 different issues with very …

AI assessment note: “I think it's the latter, because if you're talking about being like the tribe”

Q do you think that, I mean, between, um, the framing of those, I mean, it leads us to the obvious conclusion that the first one is better, um, you know, not putting it in a good versus evil context. Do you think people approach the good versus evil in terms of I'm the hero and I'm trying to write this evil, or do you think it's more nuanced than that?

A Uh, well, first I would resist the temptation to conclude that the first approach to thinking and decision making is the best. It's the one most suited to certain personalities, certainly, and in certain situations, it makes for, like, um, much higher probability of survival and success and thriving, right? Like, uh, in, say, the American context, because of whatever the social operating system for the country at large is, um, whether, for better or worse, uh, Americans tend to believe in individualism, the myth of individualism, even though Americans are not super individualistic, but if you believe in the myth of individualism, the first approach to decision-making where you kind of maintain this fiction of, uh, uh, processing everything on your own and staying away from tribal, uh, pandering and so forth, that tends to work very well. Whereas if you go over to, like, strongly traditional Asian cultures, the reverse might be true, where, uh, Everything is framed with respect to the context of the social environment, and that might be a much better survival strategy if you want to actually succeed in that environment. So I, I'd say whether or not one is better than the other is a question of context and what you mean by better, but to your other question of, um, good and evil types, I don't know. I've been thinking about it for a Quite a while yet and at a philosophical and a …

AI assessment note: “I would resist the temptation to conclude that the first approach to thinking and decision making is the best.”

Q Yeah, I thought it was fascinating. Can we, can we dive into that a little bit? I mean, if you were to synthesize today, um, the knowledge that you had learned, and that was the culmination of it, and how you apply it today, how would you do that?

A I would say that writing that down actually helped me move beyond it, because right after I wrote the book, some of the more interesting criticisms that I encountered actually helped me see what the book didn't cover well, and exploring that ended up being a very fruitful thing for me. So I'll just point out a couple of those things. One was The idea that there are a couple of major categories of decision-making styles, so to speak, and the book really strongly focused on one of them, and I was sort of unaware of the sort of structure of the other approaches to decision-making that were equally big. So the big one that I've concluded in my mind is there's this approach to decision-making that you could say is based on Not reasoning per se, but it's a very conceptual approach where you think in terms of, say, mental models, what frames am I looking through? What metaphors am I using? Uh, what is the sort of significance of my decisive actions versus my random actions? What narrative is sort of framing the unfolding of events? So that's an approach that's very natural to me. It's why I think I ended up becoming an engineer. Uh, it's also an approach that's very natural to you. Uh, Farnham Street, I think, uh, Explores that in a great deal of detail from a variety of different sources. So that's, uh, I don't know what to call it, but let's call it sort of conceptual reasoning as a…

AI assessment note: “I would say that writing that down actually helped me move beyond it”

Q So with season two, what are you trying to do with Breaking Smart?

A Uh, I'm gonna be looking at, um, the future of organizations, which is, uh, it's a topic that's been really interesting to me for almost, uh, 10 years now, and since the beginning of my blogging on Ribbon Farm. In fact, what put me on the map as a blogger was the Gervais Principles series, which I started in And finished, I think, in 2013, so a six-part series that's now an e-book, um, and that was all about organizational psychology and how organizations really work. So that's, uh, one element of the, I don't know, the thread that I want to develop in more careful and complete ways. The other motivation, of course, is that there's, there's things happening in the environment now that Are causing a big change in, uh, how do I put it? The operating system of how organizations are conceived and grown and run and, you know, operationalized. And you've got everything from the extreme fringe of smart contracts on cryptocurrency blockchains, where there is no organization per se, but everybody has the, this sort of digitally mediated Peer to peer relationship with everybody else that they're economically engaged with. So it's like the smart network of contracts that's doing economic work to the other extreme where you might have like a really ancient organization like the Catholic church, uh, which might adopt, um, Digital realities in a very sort of measured and slow way. And it's p…

AI assessment note: “I'm gonna be looking at, um, the future of organizations”

Q So when they're presented to you in these ways, how do you go about validating that they are in fact the way that the world works? Or is it trying to hit on something Almost at a subconscious level in us that elicits a recognition.

A I don't think really mental models are so much about how the world works as much as they're about internal consistency. So think of the world, the universe you live in as an extraordinarily confusing place that's throwing huge amounts of information at you in like an extremely high bandwidth way. Um, I think I read somewhere, I think it was in Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained Where you actually looked at the raw information rate coming through your eyes alone, for example. So your pair of eyes, the retinas, the amount of, like, raw bitrate information they can take in across the frequency band in which eyes are sensitive, that's a certain, like, amount of raw information. And it turns out if we actually had to process that amount of raw information, it would make our heads explode, basically. So there isn't enough processing power in the brain To handle that input raw. So our brain is basically layers and layers of processing that throw out most of it and map it to a sort of toy universe inside our heads. And it's this toy universe that we actually play with. And, uh, the only thing we ask of this toy universe inside our head is that it'd be much, much simpler than the world itself, and that it'd be internally consistent, which means if you close your eyes and shut off input, And sort of wind up your mental universe and run some simulations in your head. Things should n…

AI assessment note: “I don't think really mental models are so much about how the world works”

Q So would you, would you say to some extent that the knowledge in your head there, there's almost a red queen effect going on where you have to do something to maintain and constantly update just to stay in the same relative position?

A That's a very good analogy, yes. So I think it's, it's probably a sign of a very healthy mental process if you are able to create and sustain a Red Queen's arms race between sort of your mindful engagement of external reality data and sort of your eyes shut process of like making your mental models more coherent and useful in terms of simulations and, um, Seeing ahead. You actually mentioned something like this in one of your recent posts, the two by two of engaged versus thinking and good versus bad. This is roughly that distinction and how to keep that process in balance because you let one overwhelm the other, it gets really unhealthy, and the kind of decision making that you and I seem to enjoy has a bias. It tends to preferentially Sort of create momentum and inertia in the internal part, the thinking part, and not so much in the engagement part. And there's other kinds of people with the opposite bias, where their engagement is overwhelmingly strong, and their internal processes aren't keeping up, so their arms race is imbalanced in a different way.

AI assessment note: “That's a very good analogy, yes.”

Q we should, um, pay people based on the value they bring to the table. How do we compensate people in a system like that, in a system where you might be part of a team that creates a three hundred billion dollar product, um, but your role in that team and your value and your contribution versus somebody else's value and contribution in there. How do you think about that?

A I don't think there's a single universal answer. It's a very sort of contentious debate right now. And, uh, people are sort of exploring different answers. So it's useful to think not at the general principle level, but at the example level. So the two examples I think that are driving the conversation forward the most are, uh, Kickstarter and, uh, the ride share economy. So Kickstarter, if you think about it, um, the early group of backers that, uh, gets a project, a project off the ground, They're actually not just paying with their money to support a project. They're paying with their intelligence. They're doing work. They're reviewing, like, lots and lots of projects that they might be scanning on Kickstarter and sort of making recent decisions about, hey, this is an interesting new innovation that deserves support. Now, they might be using any of the three decision-making processes we thought about before. They might be, you know, conceptual thinkers. They might be good versus evil thinkers, or they might be I need to be part of this tribe that makes this happen kind of thinkers. Whatever their approach, they're contributing, you know, intelligence in the form of information in addition to money, and this group typically gets compensated with a bunch of, like, I don't know, gift economy type artifacts. You might get a t-shirt. You might get a shout out on Twitter. You migh…

AI assessment note: “useful to think not at the general principle level, but at the example level.”