5 Mental Models to Remove (Some of) the Confusion from Parenting
Farnam Street (Shane Parrish) · 2022
"Rather than adopting rigid parenting tactics that may not fit your specific child, five underlying principles — adaptation, velocity, algebraic equivalence, seizing the middle, and inversion — generalize across any family, situation, or child, because they're principles rather than one-size-fits-all scripts."
The five models are: adaptation (parenting rules can differ by context — home vs. public, child vs. child — without being 'inconsistent,' just as species adapt differently to different environments); velocity (are you spending time with direction toward a goal, or just moving fast without purpose); algebraic equivalence (two things can be different yet equal, e.g., different amounts of attention to different children can still represent equal love, the way x+y=5 has many valid solutions); seizing the middle (like chess, control the central territory — mutual trust and respect — rather than fighting every minor battle); and inversion (sometimes progress comes from removing an obstacle, not adding a new tactic).
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Mental Models for Career Changes
"A career change is best approached with a stack of specific mental models — velocity (direction, not just motion), inversion (working backward from the desired end-state), exaptation (repurposing existing skills for new uses), map-vs-territory (getting real information, not just impressions), and the 'Bayesian casino' (quantifying your actual confidence with a hypothetical bet) — rather than by pure gut feeling."