读书笔记：The Great Mental Models Volume 2

Highlights

• All of this success was due to trying to answer one question, ‘How can I work with the world, not against it?”

• You will always have limitations to your frame of reference that you need to account for in an effort to better understand reality.

• The scientist cannot hang out in the ocean and watch the boat go past.

• We bring our sensibilities into what we see. The problem is, most of us usually forget this. We are so used to being on Einstein’s train that we forget it is there. But traveling to new places far outside our normal experiences can jolt us into remembering our train, seeing it in a new light, understanding better its size and shape, and remind us that not everyone is on it.

• Making efforts to understand someone’s view helps you understand their frame, their set of beliefs and biases that guide how they see their world.

• tit for tat is not as effective as the strategy known as tit for tat with forgiveness.

• Because in the one-off situation, the pain it will cause is perceived as stronger than the positive feelings of acceptance. The trick is to start looking at outcomes in the aggregate instead of focusing on each unique situation.

• schadenfreude is tied to three things: aggression, rivalry, and justice.

• A lot of people seem to expect the world to just hand them things without putting in any effort. This is a poor strategy because it doesn’t align with the human behavior you can observe around you every day.

• The best way to achieve success is to deserve success.

• Thus, to change our world, we must change what we offer to others.

• Temperature is, in other words the crucial link between energy and time; the two components of power.

• These walls, however, never seem to work.

• Through social structures such as trade or marriage, borders tend to be places of exchange and social evolution. [[Edge Cloud Computing]]

• Controlling the interaction between both sides of the wall, instead of trying to stop it completely, was enough for the Romans,

• It requires an insulator and preventing any temperature change in the two substances is only possible with a constant investment of energy.

• Stories are an attempt to tame the terrifying randomness that surrounds us.

• Yorke writes that “every act of perception is an attempt to impose order, to make sense of a chaotic universe. Storytelling, at one level, is a manifestation of this process.” [[Story Circle From Rick and Morty]] [[Story]][[All Stories Are Wrong, but Some Are Useful]]

• What you learn about the world through fairy tales is to accept things that may not make obvious sense.

• Trust that there is order behind them, and by doing so slow down the entropy of life. [[Entropy]]

• Fairy tales provide a means of mastering your surroundings by presenting a way to understand your world, giving it some order and helping you make your way through it.

• in a similar way, fairy tales combat entropy by creating a common understanding that most people can interact with.

• it’s important to understand that any barrier you try to erect will face a relentless pressure to attain equilibrium. Therefore, it’s important to remember that it takes a lot of work to maintain separation.

• Inertia implies that once we stop doing something, getting started again is harder than continuing the whole time would have been.

• For, like a mass in Newton’s first law of motion, once our minds are set in a direction, they tend to continue in that direction unless acted on by some outside force.

• “every worker can stop the line… the line is almost never stopped, because problems are solved in advance and the same problem never occurs twice.”

• “It transfers the maximum number of tasks and responsibilities to those workers actually adding value to the car on the line, and it has in place a system for discovering defects that quickly traces every problem, once discovered, to its ultimate cause.”

• By “touching the territory” they can empower the people closest to the problem and reduce the friction in their organization.

• even if you are running in place, you have speed. Velocity has direction. You must go somewhere in order to have velocity.

• While speed ensures movement, velocity produces a result.

• If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him.

• They admired Napoleon and completely bought into his vision. Velocity became a group goal. They all wanted to move quickly, seeing it as integral to victory.

• Better go the right direction slowly than the wrong direction with speed.

• First, don’t sell yourself short and underestimate the value of your leverage. Second, keep other people wanting what you have. Third, understand when you can use your leverage and when you can’t.

• Change often scares people. It’s only natural to try and preserve the status quo.

• The printing press acted as a catalyst to accelerate the process of obtaining knowledge.

• Developments in technology often acts as catalysts for social changes.

• Medicine is one field where the concept of alloying comes in to play. Sometimes, a combination of two or more drugs can have a greater benefit than each drug individually.

• Theory and experience together create knowledge, and both serve to augment and advance the capabilities of the other. Experience can trigger the updating of theory, and the validation or application of theory can trigger new experiences.

• To confuse matters, extinctions don’t occur in isolation. Ecosystems are full of complex, nonlinear interdependencies.

• while the best-adapted organisms may be the strongest during normal conditions, they may struggle to survive volatility. Generalist species are far more resilient than specialists.

• The Red Queen tells Alice, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”  [[Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - Read by John Gielgud - 1989]]

• Success is measured by persistence.

• Running as fast as you can to stay in place is not a euphemism for 16-hour workdays. It should not be the reason you don’t see your children or used to justify ignoring the needs of your body or soul.

• Inventions are almost never solitary, isolated creatures; they depend on other inventions that complete them or endow them with new applications that their original inventors never considered. »

• Species that can’t handle an environmental makeover have three options: move, die, or change.

• “When things are working well, a conductor and orchestra are in this state of absolute coordination where the music is speaking the way it needs to speak.”

• Conductor Mariss Jansons defines that moment of success for an orchestra as “when a good performance becomes a great one, a coming together of the piece, the performers, and the audience that creates a positive feedback loop of continuous enrichment and enchantment.”

• Conductor Mariss Jansons defines that moment of success for an orchestra as “when a good performance becomes a great one, a coming together of the piece, the performers, and the audience that creates a positive feedback loop of continuous enrichment and enchantment.”

• To cooperate fully as a group, they have to trust each other, and they have to understand how their individual part contributes to what the rest of the orchestra is doing.

• One of the drawbacks of hierarchies is the lack of perceived value of those who are at the bottom. “An efficient new gathering strategy devised by a low-ranking chimpanzee, for example, might not get replicated just because of her status in society.”

• If we can’t avoid hierarchies, we need to recognize their presence and focus on structuring them in the most beneficial way for everyone involved, like having prestige associated with belonging to the group rather than being conferred on individuals.

• The easiest way to lead, it turns out, is to serve.

• The darker side of incentives is that sometimes pursuing our wants can rewire the brain so that these wants become requirements.

• This is a problem in democracies, politicians have no choice but to respond to the incentives to think short-term; otherwise, they won’t gain voter support.

• Humans can also be heavily motivated by uncertainty.

• Winning is fun. Guaranteed winning is not.

• The way people solve problems is first by having an enormous amount of common-sense knowledge, like maybe 50 million anecdotes or entries, and then having some unknown system for finding among those 50 million old stories the 5 or 10 that seem most relevant to the situation. This is reasoning by analogy.