Gurwinder

A NEW MENTAL MODEL MEGATHREAD HAS ARRIVED!

In 20 tweets I’ll summarize 20 key principles to understand the world.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.
Value: potentially a lifetime.

1. Herostratic Fame:
Many people would rather be hated than unknown. In Ancient Greece, Herostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis purely so he’d be remembered. Now we have “nuisance influencers” who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout.

2. Hotelling's Law:
Rival products (burgers, pop songs, political parties) tend to grow more alike over time, because creators copy more successful rivals to replicate their success and steal their customers/audiences.

Paradoxically, this increases the value of being different.

3. Goodhart’s Law:
When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure. Since schools started to use test-scores as targets, they’ve gradually stopped teaching kids how to live fulfilling lives, and now mainly teach them how to pass school tests (See: Campbell’s Law).

4. The Reading Recession:
There is more text than ever, yet people are reading ever less and outsourcing writing to chatbots. This is dangerous because language is the basis of thought, and if you can’t read or write well, you won’t think well.

h/t @george__mack 

5. Segal’s Law:
“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.”

Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn’t make us more informed but more confused.

6. Beginner's Bubble Effect:
"You cannot learn what you think you already know."
—Epictetus

The most ignorant are not those who know nothing, but those who know a little, because a little knowledge grants the illusion of understanding, which kills curiosity and closes the mind.

7. Parkinson's Law:
Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. No matter the size of the task, it often takes precisely the amount of time you set aside to do it, because more time means more deliberation &amp; procrastination.

8. Benford's Law of Controversy:
We tend to fill gaps in information with emotion. We fear what we don’t understand, love what we naively romanticize, etc. As such, the things that fire people up most are usually the things they understand least.

9. Pareidolia:
We see whatever we look for.
Survival favored the paranoid—those able to discern a predator from the vaguest outline. From these survivors we inherited hyperactive pattern-detection, which once saved us from the lions, but now curses us to see them even in the sky. 

10. Safetyism:
After US schools banned peanuts because some kids had allergies, more kids developed peanut allergies from lack of exposure. We’re increasingly protecting kids from life, which only makes them more vulnerable to it. Too much safety is dangerous.

h/t @JonHaidt

11. Phronemophobia:
Wilson et al. (2014) found that people with nothing to do except think or give themselves an electric shock would often choose the shock. Many of us are so eager to avoid ourselves that we’d rather do something harmful than do nothing at all.

12. Serial-Position Effect:
We tend to recall the beginnings (Primacy Effect) and endings (Recency Effect) of things better than the middles. So if you create anything with a beginning &amp; ending, focus more effort there.

(Don't worry, I’m saving the best concepts for last…)

13. Licensing Effect:
Believing you’re good can make you behave bad. Those who consider themselves virtuous worry less about their own behavior, making them more susceptible to ethical lapses. A big cause of immorality is self-righteous morality.

14. Preference Falsification:
If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech – whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship – is ultimately a request to be deceived.

15. Nutpicking:
Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy. The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.

16. Moral Pollution:
We act like bad reputations are contagious, and mere proximity to something labelled immoral is itself immoral. Brands cut ties with people deemed unethical not because they value ethics, but because they fear contamination. Cancellation is moral quarantine.

17. KISS Principle:
The design of everything is gradually being stripped down, because simple is easy &amp; safe; the less there is, the less there is to offend or justify. But such rampant minimalism comes at a cost; our cultures are losing their uniqueness and identity. 

18. Cosmic Schmuck Principle:

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who sometimes worry that they’re a moron, and actual morons.

In other words, the best way to be less of an idiot is to treat yourself like one.

19. Cynical Genius Illusion:
Cynical people are seen as smarter, but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal &amp; disappointment without having to actually think.

20. Generation Effect:
If you really want to understand a topic, don’t read about it, write about it. The act of explaining something helps connect the dots and commit them to memory far better than the passive act of reading. (One reason I make these threads!)

h/t @david_perell

And that's 20 concepts! To see the entire list of 30, together with links to relevant sources, check out my blog: https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/30-useful-principles-autumn-2023