An Astronaut’s Guide to Mental Models
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Ah, just realized the applicable Mental Model according to TFA. They're blurring the distinction between the map (mental models) and territory (actual thinking).
Ed: first paragraph was largely superfluous.
Ed2: "building a pyramid on a mole hill" describes so many things. Did I just invent a Mental Model? I think I did.
1. Frameworks — 'mental model' is often used as a synonym for 'framework', which (as any competent practitioner knows) come with its own set of problems.
2. Thinking Tools — so, things like 'reasoning from first principles'.
3. Mental models, as defined by Piaget & Papert — the original definition of the term, as in 'tacit mental representations of expertise'.
Because mental model writing conflates the three, it can be very difficult to get anything useful out of it. Each of these three categories come with their own strengths and caveats. It is important to separate them.
That said, I think the fad has its benefits: it's led to a resurgence of systems thinking. Which is net good, I think.
A more nuanced, comprehensive summary of my criticisms may be found here: https://commoncog.com/blog/the-mental-model-faq/
One value of models is that they reduce the need for memorization, but blog posts like this ask you to memorize more! The person below who said they have 100s of mental models written down makes me go "?????".
Second-order thinking isn't a mental model, it's a way to draw more conclusions out of your models (and therefore conduct more, better experiments).
This "Map is not the territory" one in particular is more of a word of wisdom or admonition against oversimplification than a process simplification that allows quick decision making.
Second-order-thinking is not a mental model. It is a way of constructing mental models about things. You can add second-order-thinking to your mental model of how stones roll down hills or how people will react to your speech. They must be interrogated as you contemplate actions to determine the best outcome, and therefore the best action[3].
TFA is clickbait.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphorism
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_model
3. http://www.modeltheory.org/papers/2005HistoryMentalModels.pd...
"Don't trust your unvetted models" is a better way of saying this.
Otherwise the novelty of the most recent proliferation of the term is pushing critics to decide "good or bad" regarding _mental models in general_, which is, to be frank, pretty dumb. Certainly such a dichotomy is much worse by itself than a broad field in which some poor models, applied poorly, are mixed in with a lot of really great examples.
And I guess this doesn't even get into the value proposition of a task like cataloging mental models and/or quantifying them via simple lists...mental models are a core aspect of human psychology and there's really an impressive amount of depth to the topic. Ramming a bunch of them together for quantity seems like a good way to make readers feel either over-confident or overwhelmed.
The objective-leaning perspective may reel a bit from the "think for yourself" critique by the subjective side, but it counters with "don't reinvent the wheel" and tends to be hyper-efficient at integrating outside thought into the current context.
(BTW thank you for your comment, this gets into the good stuff)
We've come so far in our measurement that there has begun a stringent internal critique of our time-tested models for measurement of those criteria.
Furthermore, I think you've touched on something interesting with the point about cataloging or listing Mental Models. Part of it is the aforementioned point about inviting judgment on the group as a whole, but that's not all. It's a really odd collection of entities to put in one basket. Mostly all they have in common is that they exist in the mind, so what gets included in practice seems kind of arbitrary. In particular, putting them all on (even superficially) equal footing is dangerous.
[0] Please forgive me if I'm inventing or misusing this term. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Whether a mental model ends up with a name on a list is largely down to it's utility in aiding that for a wide audience.
In my experience they have been extremely useful.
Our senses are filtering machines (i.e. reality tunnels). We only perceive what is deemed useful, or is available according to our capacities. Thus in essence, we are just creatures of models.
Mental models are just a more precise awareness of that phenomenon. It also sounds cool and sticks with people because mental models are focused on actually being seen (mentally). As you say, mental models rise from the insight that map is not territory, and that we have no territories in our minds, only maps.
It's a frequent topic of philosophical discourse, and a major component of cognitive psychology.
Sometimes the word "fine" is spelt differently.
If you want to learn habits from people who make on-the-fly life-or-death decisions, there are much bigger pools of people who do that, who have experience much more relevant to what ever it is you're doing, than people who managed to survive in a space-can[1].
More applicably, the most common life-or-death decision made by people reading this is how much attention they pay while driving. Modeling that in a way that makes you better at it would likely provide substantially more, er, lack of bang for your buck than worrying how Armstrong made particular choices.
[1] I don't mean to belittle astronauts - they're clearly exceptional in their own way. I'm questioning how relevant their unique experience is to others' lives, and what other relevant experience they far have that bigger pools of other people don't.
It's not an "angle" and it's definitely not clickbait -- they're excerpts from a book written by an astronaut.
> the most common life-or-death decision made by people reading this is how much attention they pay while driving.
Yes, sure, they should pay attention while driving, but why can't they also learn lessons from astronauts?
> managed to survive in a space-can[1] > [1] I don't mean to belittle astronauts
Sorry, it feels like you are. There's a lot of interesting and useful lessons in the article and the book, and you're kinda dismissing it just because it's from an astronaut.
But I'm not taking an astronauts advice on literally anything because they are or were an astronaut. Doing that ends up in the realms of spoon bending. If an astronaut has an idea it stands or falls on the merit of the idea. If you want a heuristic, most astronaut's ideas aren't worth your time. It's a sad conclusion to come to and I'm sure it's unpopular because we love having glamorous heroes but there it is.
It's still dangerous, but our success rate with rockets is far, far better than it was in the 1960's. Complex systems, as Hadfield notes, succeed because of diligence and cooperation, not luck and cowboyism. Most astronauts in the 21st century don't have 1-in-4 of their colleagues killed on the job.
Head of space flight engineering or whatever at NASA - yeah? Heuristic would be listen to them, they might know something. Monkey in the can on top of the fire-cracker? If they do know something it's more coincidence with their usefulness in PR than anything else. Sad but true. If NASA abandoned human flight tomorrow they'd probably get a lot more bang for buck - other than in PR because we love us a person to fuel our imagination and I am no different there. How flippin' cool is it ride the fireball into space?!?
In general modern astronauts have many roles -- flight managers, technicians (doing and evaluating repairs), scientists, experimental subjects, and finally yes communicators to an extent (frankly great to inspire people). Obvious Hadfield isn't a perfect human being and I'm sure he doesn't like adulation, but his vast set of skills, including communication effectiveness is quite impressive (and music ability -- check out his space video clip!). I assure you he's no crank (perhaps you're biased by early space program people that were test pilots). I recommend checking out his and other ISS youtube videos to get an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hj3GnPRsJ4
Yeah I know it sucks when someone poo-poos on your (and my) heroes. I know. "For a successful technology... " etc. Feynman wasn't perfect either. Astronauts continue to be selected according to an ideal of how they will come accross to the public, from Alan Shephard on. And there was something very impressive about all of them that played well in the media. It took 30 years to find out so many of them are also pretty weird and not people you'd take scientific advice from.
Experiments on humans in space are mostly interesting in research for space life-support. You do different, arguably vastly more bang for buck experiments if you're not using humans to do them.
The space race was literally cold war propaganda (and wonderful, beautiful stuff at that - vastly better than most propaganda). NASA continues to put PR front and centre. You can disagree, that's fine, decide to what extent the PR is influencing you and if you're sure it's minimal I can't ask for much more, right?
The ideal would be if NASA had basic science front and centre rather than the incredible waste frittering away vast wealth on the pretence of children's astronaut dreams. And I want a flying car too but reality should win out.
- Humans are actually fantastic space exploration hardware.
We already have robotic vehicles exploring other planets. They are not autonomous, and have glorified Arduinos in them. Not for lack of money or development, but because it is extremely difficult to do autonomous exploration, and the hardware is essentially currently impossible because there's nothing good enough, and not even remotely close to good enough that can survive radiation and space environment. Exploration currently is extremely slow, done through remote control, with up to 24 minute delays (Mars).
- Humans can self-reproduce with low-tech inputs
We are perhaps from >50 to >>100s years away from machine compact self-reproduction, then imagine self-reproduction with human-like intelligence. Only humans can make colonies for the near future.
- AGI (or just good enough scientist AI, explorer AI, etc) is uncertainly distant
It could be 20, or it could be 100 years or more away (if our civilization even survives that long before wars/climate change/etc), economically viable AGI is uncertain, economically viable compact radiation-resistant AGI is vastly uncertain.
- It is worthwhile to bet on long term space exploration and habitation
This is the most difficult case. I think it's worthwhile to devote resources on long term space exploration and habitation. In particular research since it is so expensive right now and we still experiencing rapid technological change. We want to eventually live on other planets (and even other star systems). The other aspects are complementary, like inspiring people to work in engineering and science; the main thing is giving hope for the future, even if it's a future you won't live.
Most of the research anyways finds applications in terrestrial systems (remember that we still do pure Mathematics, whose research value tends to crop decades later or more).
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It is expensive, yes (ISS costs about $3 billion per year for NASA apparently), but overall I think it's a tiny investment for great returns (at varying levels of risk).
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Finally, to expand on hope: hope is great things many things, but one of them is simply the way people act on expectations of the future. If they don't expect to live long, or a long term future worth living for other generations, you expect we will act more selfishly and greedily, a self-fulfilling prophetical aspect. Thus it's extremely important not to neglect sustainability and somewhat distant dreams.
Modern astronauts are many things, monkeys in a can is not one of them. They have many roles and skills ranging form engineering to teaching and many things in between.
They perform engineering and procedural review. Carry out public outreach that inspires scientists and engineers of the future. Manage operations during launch and in space operations. and are involved in most parts of approval of new equipment they will be using.
Yes they have a PR role, but getting photographed on the top of a rocket is a very small part of that.
Apollo 11: Had to make a visual adjustment because the pre-mission selected landing area was a boulder field. We didn't have computers that could do visual field processing in 1969. Without the humans, we could have lost the lander.
One of the Apollos (13?): The guidance system was all messed up (maybe had reset after the explosion, and reset to being on the pad?) One of the astronauts manually shot the stars to get correct current position data to input into the guidance system. Without this human intervention, the mission would have been (literally) lost.
So... yeah. Not exactly monkeys in a can, just there for PR.
NASA also employs a confidential psychological evaluation process for astronauts. I have heard some argue that the process has been biased, in the past, toward outcomes that may produce astronauts who, for example, struggle--relative to their other strengths, that is--to keep a handle on the emergence of emotion or complex experiential outcomes. (And I would mention that many of us humans down here on earth fall into this boat as well)
There really should be a list of every BBC doco somewhere. Not turning that up either.
For a child "I pictured it in my head" is equivalent to an adult saying "I have a mental model of it"
There are many hueristics that are not mental models. There are many things that are frameworks that are not mental models.
Labelling something a "mental model" as used in this context serves the purpose to communicate "here is an abstraction with unusually good power-to-weight ratio that you can leverage to aide your thinking/reasoning about situations that meet a given set of criteria".
It's actually a very specific thing.
One interesting thing about heuristics is that it's important to learn when they _don't_ apply. If a heuristic is true 80% of the time, it's also untrue 20% of the time.
And the obverse to that thought is that you shouldn't let that 20% fail rate discourage you from using the heuristic the other 80% of times.
- Don't be selfish
- Learn from your mistakes
- Expect the unexpected
- Etc.
An interesting part of leadership can be repetition, so this feels reasonable.
Now, is this ideal? No, we are a strange-strange species.
It is rare indeed to find a non-obvious, useful mental model that can be boiled down to 5-10 words without losing significant leverage. However the _reason_ why they are boiled down to anything at all is due to a communications burden, such as that confronted while compiling mental models for publishing. That the author offers links to find out more is, I think, a reasonable effort at dealing with that problem.
Let's say your friend asks you to summarize the value of _Jane Austen's_ works while you drive them home from the bookstore. You have been asked by your friend to build a mental model. How much reduction of your experience with the books is reasonable, and where does it lose leverage as a result of the reduction? Yet you have an opportunity to help someone make a great new discovery. This process can be very frustrating for the builder of the model.
So while I appreciate a high-quality critique of a bad example of something, I have to say it seems like those examples are a bit reductionist and possibly unfair given the sheer number of mental models out there for examination, and the reasons for, or conditions under which they were selected for publishing or communication.
The way the term is used in the article, I would rather call a thinking style, or simply a way to think.
I think there is value in them, but often they are pretty bloody obvious and not in anyway new.
Circle of Competence is just playing to your strengths.
Second Order Thinking is just imagining consequences.
Generally they can be boiled down to a few question we can ask about a situation.
What about this problem am I uncertain about? What assumptions am I making? How might I increase confidence in my solution?
Anyway...they are here for a while.