Today I came across Sam Harris's podcast with Shane Parrish about mental models. It's is also available in podcast format. This is a topic I am super interested in.
I'm sure my blog comes across as very scatterbrained. The thing is, I am trying to work on my writing. My writing skills has never been really good. When I was in Asia, the focus was on getting kids to produce standard essays. When I was about to start school, my mother bought me a set of books which contained standard essays written by children aged 6-10. Since I had amazing memory when I was a kid, I internalized the essays quickly. I then found out the teachers at school gave out essay assignments with the exact same topics as the ones in these books, so I just wrote my essays based on these internalized templates and got top marks. This practice was one of the single most horrific thing that was really detrimental to my creativity (if I had any creativity to begin with).
When I moved to North America, for unknown reasons I found it much more difficult to learn English well enough to write fluently. I actually majored in biology because the major only required me to regurgitate what I learned from lecture notes and textbooks and involved minimal essay writing. It took me until grad school with lots of practice on rewriting the same project proposal into many different lengths and formats (proposal, abstract summary, longer summary, Ph.D. thesis summary) to be able to become a little bit better at the generation writing that's somewhat coherent.
While the purpose of my blog is to practice writing, I have difficulties to focus on a single topic. Initially I did manage to focus on writing about yoga-related topics. I quickly found out I could only generate a blog post was right after a practice. A physical practice gives me a lot of experiential data that make me want to express in writing form. Since I have been doing more climbing than yoga, the blog has shifted into writing about climbing.
The act of meditation also generates ideas for me to write about. The practice allows me to realize the stuff that I ruminate about (eg. relationship issues with mother etc.), but it also gives space for more interesting (more rare) ideas to pop up in my head that warrants further expansion in writing form.
So what does this have to do with mental models?
I have known for sometime that how I think and operate is quite different from how majority of people think. This gives me great disadvantage at work and in relationships because of mismatched expectations and roadmaps to goals.
The podcast mentioned that while we would like to think we are rational beings, humans are deep down, ego-based thinking beings who make a ton of cognitive biases while making decisions. It doesn't matter how smart you are. Actually, the smarter you are, the more creative you are at coming up with convincing justifications of how you arrived at your (likely irrational) decisions. This is how most people operate. However, since I was brought up to follow templates and defer to teachers and elders, I have a bad habit of not taking responsibility for my decisions. I generate work, then I give my results to my boss, letting them judge the quality. Normal people would generate results, then defend the quality of their results when presenting it to the boss. Without the step of taking responsibility and defending/promoting my work, people don't think highly of it. My problem was that I assumed that all bosses knew better than I did and could make better decisions than I could. This is of course not true, and has been the source of my misery for many years of my life, since my work on its own, is not strong enough to speak for itself. I was also disappointed at the decision making processes I observed at the managerial and institutional levels. I was expecting people in charge of important positions to be responsible, rational thinkers who can take everything into account and can make the best decisions that can benefit everybody. Instead, the ones who get promoted to the highest positions are the ones who care the least about excellence, can speak in a way that makes the organization sound amazing and inspirational, and are best at doing incremental changes while maintain the status quo.
If I would like to get a few ideas out of my head into the world in interpretable form, I need to focus better, lower my expectations, and in the mean time continue to understand better my mental models and how it can fit better with other mental models in the world.
I'm sure my blog comes across as very scatterbrained. The thing is, I am trying to work on my writing. My writing skills has never been really good. When I was in Asia, the focus was on getting kids to produce standard essays. When I was about to start school, my mother bought me a set of books which contained standard essays written by children aged 6-10. Since I had amazing memory when I was a kid, I internalized the essays quickly. I then found out the teachers at school gave out essay assignments with the exact same topics as the ones in these books, so I just wrote my essays based on these internalized templates and got top marks. This practice was one of the single most horrific thing that was really detrimental to my creativity (if I had any creativity to begin with).
When I moved to North America, for unknown reasons I found it much more difficult to learn English well enough to write fluently. I actually majored in biology because the major only required me to regurgitate what I learned from lecture notes and textbooks and involved minimal essay writing. It took me until grad school with lots of practice on rewriting the same project proposal into many different lengths and formats (proposal, abstract summary, longer summary, Ph.D. thesis summary) to be able to become a little bit better at the generation writing that's somewhat coherent.
While the purpose of my blog is to practice writing, I have difficulties to focus on a single topic. Initially I did manage to focus on writing about yoga-related topics. I quickly found out I could only generate a blog post was right after a practice. A physical practice gives me a lot of experiential data that make me want to express in writing form. Since I have been doing more climbing than yoga, the blog has shifted into writing about climbing.
The act of meditation also generates ideas for me to write about. The practice allows me to realize the stuff that I ruminate about (eg. relationship issues with mother etc.), but it also gives space for more interesting (more rare) ideas to pop up in my head that warrants further expansion in writing form.
So what does this have to do with mental models?
I have known for sometime that how I think and operate is quite different from how majority of people think. This gives me great disadvantage at work and in relationships because of mismatched expectations and roadmaps to goals.
The podcast mentioned that while we would like to think we are rational beings, humans are deep down, ego-based thinking beings who make a ton of cognitive biases while making decisions. It doesn't matter how smart you are. Actually, the smarter you are, the more creative you are at coming up with convincing justifications of how you arrived at your (likely irrational) decisions. This is how most people operate. However, since I was brought up to follow templates and defer to teachers and elders, I have a bad habit of not taking responsibility for my decisions. I generate work, then I give my results to my boss, letting them judge the quality. Normal people would generate results, then defend the quality of their results when presenting it to the boss. Without the step of taking responsibility and defending/promoting my work, people don't think highly of it. My problem was that I assumed that all bosses knew better than I did and could make better decisions than I could. This is of course not true, and has been the source of my misery for many years of my life, since my work on its own, is not strong enough to speak for itself. I was also disappointed at the decision making processes I observed at the managerial and institutional levels. I was expecting people in charge of important positions to be responsible, rational thinkers who can take everything into account and can make the best decisions that can benefit everybody. Instead, the ones who get promoted to the highest positions are the ones who care the least about excellence, can speak in a way that makes the organization sound amazing and inspirational, and are best at doing incremental changes while maintain the status quo.
If I would like to get a few ideas out of my head into the world in interpretable form, I need to focus better, lower my expectations, and in the mean time continue to understand better my mental models and how it can fit better with other mental models in the world.
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