Does anybody know of something similar, but written in a more elaborate book-like fashion?
It's not about format, of course, it's just that all these model-zoo's are only half of the story — not useless, but rather incomplete. That is, if you learn a lot of them, one day you might remember something and find it useful — or you might not. This is a bit abstract, but I want to say you rarely ever need any special tools of thinking (or maybe even tools in general) — you want a technology. That is, a relatively broad (but precisely defined) instruction of how to identify and approach a set of problems in some domain. I.e., it is more about when to use a tool or technique, rather than being a exhibition of such tools. I mean, there is important difference — that's kinda the difference between going to college and going to a museum.
For example, GTD is a technology (doesn't matter good or bad). It tells you when to use tools/techniques suggested (and a better book would have more showcases and exercises to internalize the idea, IMO). This site or coursera's famous "Models Thinking" course — aren't.
I like your question. I don't have much of a concrete answer, but systems theory paired with queuing theory has been broadly useful for me in assessing situations and making back-of-the-napkin consequence estimations of various decisions.
Of course, I don't know of any book that teaches systems theory "as a technology" -- it's something I've learned by reading a lot of books on different things and picking up the threads they have in common.
Systems theory relies, really, on a complete map of the causal network of a situation. We're not at a point where we can give a step-by-step instruction for inferring the causal network behind situations. We have some ideas on how to statistically do this in a limited fashion (see Judea Perl) but the general problem is still one of creativity, intuition, fact-checking, Bayesian probability, and so on. You get good at it by doing it a lot in various situations and reflecting on your performance -- the way you get good at most mental skills.
I may have ended up answering a different question to the one you asked, but these were my thoughts.
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I guess with all my rambling I'm trying to say that ultimately, "better thinking" boils down to "a more complete understanding of situations" and the best way to get there in my experience has been the scientific method, democracy (in the true sense of the word), and curiosity. These are very complex technologies that are not easy to teach.
I occasionally review the actual facts as flashcards. But having the notes already in flashcard format has been my secret weapon for seeming intelligent for years.
This is something I also did in the past. I would “ankify” the books I read, hoping to maximize my retention of the material.
However soon I ran into some problems, turns out I couldn’t remember the cues. The same way you can’t remember the capital of a country if you don’t remember the country itself first!
This led me to question the actual value I was getting from this whole ordeal.
I find this happening over the long term (3-5 years after adding) too, but I think of it as more of a feature than a bug. Anki significantly extends the amount of time concepts stay in my brain, but it's unrealisting for me to expect it to do so over a decade or more without my interacting with the source material outside of simply flashcard review.
Anki supports Cloze Deletions, so you could have a card e.g. The capital of {{Burkina Paso}} is {{Uagadugu}}. Anki would then automatically present you with two questions:
The capital of Burkina Paso is ____.
The capital of ____ is Uagadugu.
(You might be able to find an older version for free)
Disclaimer: I've been participating in a Systems Engineering master program @ university a while back which was based on both Haberfellner (and is finally available in English also) and Incose.
Interesting. Just searched HN and it seems you’re right, it didn’t get much traction with developers, perhaps because it was billed as a facilitation toolkit and not about how to generate or validate better startup ideas, like Design Sprints.
There was a point in time where it seemed like I was seeing it everywhere. At conferences, meetings, university classes, hackathons and any number of presentations, etc.
It’s true that once Google Venture’s Design Sprints book took off, it became a bit of a benchmark in the space of collaborative idea workshops etc.
But before Design Sprints, there was Gamestorming. https://vimeo.com/18880751 It might seem a bit overblown. I’d call it a brand name that happens to reflect a style of work popular before Agile and Scrum made everything cookie-cutter from a backlog.
Many people mentioned the Farnam Street newsletter, but Shane Parrish has also published a book in 3 volumes: The Great Mental Models, see https://fs.blog/books/
Not a book, But if you'd like an occasional(non-regular) but high quality newsletter serving the same purpose then checkout - https://www.clearerthinking.org/blog .
P.S. Not affiliated to them in any way, Just a subscriber.
It's not about format, of course, it's just that all these model-zoo's are only half of the story — not useless, but rather incomplete. That is, if you learn a lot of them, one day you might remember something and find it useful — or you might not. This is a bit abstract, but I want to say you rarely ever need any special tools of thinking (or maybe even tools in general) — you want a technology. That is, a relatively broad (but precisely defined) instruction of how to identify and approach a set of problems in some domain. I.e., it is more about when to use a tool or technique, rather than being a exhibition of such tools. I mean, there is important difference — that's kinda the difference between going to college and going to a museum.
For example, GTD is a technology (doesn't matter good or bad). It tells you when to use tools/techniques suggested (and a better book would have more showcases and exercises to internalize the idea, IMO). This site or coursera's famous "Models Thinking" course — aren't.