This book is a consolidation of important mental models that Farnam Street has learned over the years from its highly distinguished guests. The cover image does a perfect TL;DR on what the book really is - it is an assortment of essential thinking concepts (frameworks) that you want:
a) to be aware of, and
b) keep handy to apply
whenever you are thinking deeply about a problem or a life decision. It seems Shane Parrish has right motivations to assemble this because probably he is probably trying to teach all these models to his kids.
Note, I use the word assemble (with intention) because it is undoubtedly an assembly book. The book does not introduce some extensive new research, or offer a brand new concept/model per se but rather is a nice consolidation of many important ideas in one single place – the content is by no means author’s original findings and they don’t claim so either. Having said that, getting everything organized cohesively isn’t easy at all, so kudos to them in my opinion.
What I found most interesting personally is — when I look at my notes & highlights of the whole book after finishing it – it feels like a super handy pocket reference guide. But at the same time, I can do deep into a rabbit hole with on a particular topic based on my thoughts/experience coupled with Google search. For instance, if you find an excellent blog about Occam’s Razor online, you might want to pull that chapter back up from this book or use your notes to compare, contrast and/or complement the blog.
Each chapter unpacks a mental model with description, advantages, gotchas, and a general guideline on when it could be applicable. The recursive theme of each chapter is to take a particular mental model e.g., first principles thinking and then use some real examples from either history or specific individuals to describe it. Some chapters are much more well written than others. Also, based on your personal situations/experiences, you might be able to relate to ideas better than others in terms of “Ok, how do you I apply this in my day to day life?”. I would have liked more examples or real case-studies on how someone used a mental model in multiple scenarios to get a better imprint on my brain.
The mental models covered in this book are:
1.Map is not the Territory
2.Circle of Competence
3.First Principles Thinking
4.Thought Experiments
5.Second-Order Thinking
6.Probabilistic Thinking
7.Idea Inversion
8.Occam’s Razor
9.Hanlon’s Razor
10.Falsifiability
11.Causation v/s Correlation
12.Necessity & Sufficiency
This is the first of the series. Book #2 is going to come out in Feb 2020 as per Shane. If you like to discuss some of the ideas in this book, feel free to reach out to me.