<story><title>Mental Model Fallacy (2018)</title><url>https://commoncog.com/blog/the-mental-model-fallacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gloryless</author><text>This is a great example of bad writing. I think you have an inkling of a premise, but spread it weakly across three paragraphs while muddling through your feelings and misunderstandings about models. You never actually define or defend a position. Couple times you&amp;#x27;ve come close to contradicting yourself, but the premise is so weak I can&amp;#x27;t say for sure.&lt;p&gt;I do think you successfully communicate that you struggle with some of the concepts you&amp;#x27;re trying to refute.&lt;p&gt;Just looking at your highlighted statements:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The most valuable mental models do not survive codification. They cannot be expressed through words alone.&lt;p&gt;Close to stating a premise but you&amp;#x27;ve gone and blown away the the subject of models. I think you&amp;#x27;re trying to say farnam street is selling snake oil, but you&amp;#x27;re now arguing experience can&amp;#x27;t be taught, which is tangential and generally uninteresting&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; When Warren Buffett studies a company, he doesn’t see a checklist of mental models he has to apply.&lt;p&gt;1) You don&amp;#x27;t know that and 2) &amp;quot;warren buffet studies a company by running through a checklist of mental models&amp;quot; is a claim you&amp;#x27;ve just come up with to refute (strawmen seem to make up the majority of this post)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; How do you know if a computer program is badly designed? You don’t go through a mental checklist; instead, you feel disgust, coloured by your experience.&lt;p&gt;No. You&amp;#x27;ve indicated you don&amp;#x27;t understand design, and again that a model = mental checklist, which is your own assertion</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shadowsun7</author><text>Author here. You&amp;#x27;re right, this was an initial attempt at criticism.  Shane Parrish of Farnam Street reached out to me a few weeks after I published this, and then I spent the next year as a member of Farnam Street&amp;#x27;s learning community, executing a research program around this criticism so as to make it more constructive. A crisp version of that series may be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;commoncog.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;the-mental-model-faq&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;commoncog.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;the-mental-model-faq&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The core of this series stems from the observation that &lt;i&gt;all expertise is tacit&lt;/i&gt;. Polanyi and Papert has the best articulated expression of these ideas, and they match up to my experience in actually pursuing expertise.</text></comment>
<story><title>Mental Model Fallacy (2018)</title><url>https://commoncog.com/blog/the-mental-model-fallacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gloryless</author><text>This is a great example of bad writing. I think you have an inkling of a premise, but spread it weakly across three paragraphs while muddling through your feelings and misunderstandings about models. You never actually define or defend a position. Couple times you&amp;#x27;ve come close to contradicting yourself, but the premise is so weak I can&amp;#x27;t say for sure.&lt;p&gt;I do think you successfully communicate that you struggle with some of the concepts you&amp;#x27;re trying to refute.&lt;p&gt;Just looking at your highlighted statements:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The most valuable mental models do not survive codification. They cannot be expressed through words alone.&lt;p&gt;Close to stating a premise but you&amp;#x27;ve gone and blown away the the subject of models. I think you&amp;#x27;re trying to say farnam street is selling snake oil, but you&amp;#x27;re now arguing experience can&amp;#x27;t be taught, which is tangential and generally uninteresting&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; When Warren Buffett studies a company, he doesn’t see a checklist of mental models he has to apply.&lt;p&gt;1) You don&amp;#x27;t know that and 2) &amp;quot;warren buffet studies a company by running through a checklist of mental models&amp;quot; is a claim you&amp;#x27;ve just come up with to refute (strawmen seem to make up the majority of this post)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; How do you know if a computer program is badly designed? You don’t go through a mental checklist; instead, you feel disgust, coloured by your experience.&lt;p&gt;No. You&amp;#x27;ve indicated you don&amp;#x27;t understand design, and again that a model = mental checklist, which is your own assertion</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jturpin</author><text>Yeah this is a fairly weak article - calling something a _fallacy_ is exceptionally bold, as if it&amp;#x27;s logically inconsistent in some kind of provable way, and it&amp;#x27;s only barely backed up by the rest of the content. Sure, I guess taking people&amp;#x27;s word on a subject that they don&amp;#x27;t have personal experience themselves isn&amp;#x27;t the wisest decision. It would be hard to prove that there&amp;#x27;s _nothing_ to offer from listening to them like the article suggests.</text></comment>