Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
The beginning of any complex or challenging endeavor is always the hardest part. Not all of us wake up and jump out of bed ready for the day. Some of us, like me, need a little extra energy to transition out of sleep and into the day. Once …
The Basics For an accurate definition of counterinsurgency (and the flipside, insurgency), we can look to one of the definitive texts on the topic. In Counterinsurgency, David Kilcullen writes: An insurgency, according to the current US …
How is your journey towards understanding Farnam Street’s latticework of mental models going? Is it proving useful? Changing your view of the world? If the answer is that it’s going well that’s good. There’s just one tiny hitch. All models …
Mutually assured destruction is a military mental model with powerful applications in life and business. It refers to a situation where two parties are in a stalemate, and neither can make a move without causing their own destruction. …
“Colonel Graff: You have a habit of upsetting your commander. Ender Wiggin: I find it hard to respect someone just because they outrank me, sir.” — Orson Scott Card *** Many leaders confuse necessary conditions for leadership …
“It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract *** The …
Maps are flawed but useful. For instance, we can leverage the experiences of others to help us navigate through territories that are, to us, new and unknown. We just have to understand and respect the inherent limitations of maps whose …
“Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.” — Arthur Schopenhauer *** The Basics One of the first principles we learn as babies is that of cause and effect. Infants …
Confirmation bias is our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas. Confirmation bias explains why two people with opposing views on a topic can see the same evidence and come away feeling validated by …
A few centuries ago, when Galileo (1564-1642) was trying to make a couple of points about how our world really works, one of the arguments that frequently came up in response to his ‘the earth orbits the sun’ theory was “if the earth is …
“For the last time in two thousand years Cleopatra VII stands offstage. In a matter of days she will launch herself into history, which is to say that faced with the inevitable, she will counter with the improbable. It is 48 BC.” — Stacy …
“[S]ome systems … are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial push you give them causes a big difference in where they end up, and there is feedback, so that what a system does affects its …
Hanlon’s Razor teaches us not to assume the worst intention in the actions of others. Understanding Hanlon’s Razor helps us see the world in a more positive light, stop negative assumptions, and improve relationships. Let’s take a …
Our desire to justify our actions and believe we’ve always done the right thing can lead us to distort our view of reality. We prefer preserving our self-image to seeing the truth. Here’s how to let go of self-justification. *** It can be …
Have you ever wondered about internal organization dynamics and why some groups of people (who aren’t on the same team) are more successful than others? Why different “tribes” inside the organization seem to be at war with …
Equilibrium is an important concept that permeates many disciplines. In chemistry we think about the point where the rate of forward reaction is equal to the rate of backward reaction. In economics we think of the point where supply equals …
One of our first interview guests for The Knowledge Project was the former NFL executive Michael Lombardi. In our interview, we discussed topics ranging from the nature of leadership to decision making in a football context. Mike is one of …
“All that glitters is not gold,” the saying goes. The aesthetics of things often fool us. People we call ignorant might not be ignorant. People we call smart might not be smart. The Green Lumber Fallacy teaches us that the real …
Complex outcomes in human systems are a tough nut to crack when it comes to deciding what’s really true. Any phenomena we might try to explain will have a host of competing theories, many of them seemingly plausible. So how do we know …
One of the most impactful books we’ve ever come across is the wonderful Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger, written by the Swedish investor Peter Bevelin. In the spirit of multidisciplinary learning, Seeking Wisdom is a compendium …
The mental models approach is very intellectually appealing, almost seductive to a certain type of person. (It certainly is for us.) The whole idea is to take the world’s greatest, most useful ideas and make them work for you! How …
(This is a follow-up to our post on the Bias from Liking/Loving, which you can find here.) Think of a cat snarling and spitting, lashing with its tail and standing with its back curved. Her pulse is elevated, blood vessels constricted and …
The decisions that we make are rarely impartial. Most of us already know that we prefer to take advice from people that we like. We also tend to more easily agree with opinions formed by people we like. The tendency to judge in favor of …
The bias from conjunction fallacy is a common reasoning error in which we believe that two events happening in conjunction is more probable than one of those events happening alone. Here’s why this happens and how we can overcome the …