“The first challenge a teacher has is getting their students to realize what they know—to come to terms with their knowledge, and therefore, know the limits of their knowledge. That’s where you begin to think. You don’t think about what you know; you think about the edge of what you know.” - James Carse

As George Box said, "All models are false, some are useful." Understanding the importance and value of mental models is vital, but it must be balanced with an understanding that they are, at best, an approximate representation of reality, not reality itself - the map is not the terrain

In economics, this same concept is known as the J Curve (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/J_curve)

The core of what constitutes a mental model (https://ltcwrk.com/worldly-wisdom/mental-models/)

Not surprisingly, nature is a great teacher. Not until the 1950s and Johnny von Neumann did game theory get developed, but it was found that tit for tat with forgiveness is the optimal model. In other words, altruism or as Henry Ford called it, enlightened self-interest (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Game_theory)

What other books would you recommend adding for this idea?

If you haven't read PG's essays, stop now and do so (http://paulgraham.com/articles.html). You can find my summary of his stuff here (https://blas.com/on-paul-graham/) but be warned that it's still nearly 200 pages. His writings contain an incredible amount of wisdom and have hugely influenced my own thinking and you will see that throughout The Latticework

Another analogy is thinking of the latticework as a skeleton. The skeleton serves as a strong framework which our muscles, ligaments, and tendons hang and attach. Weak skeleton = weak body and, similarly, weak latticework = weak understanding. Just like our body, we need to train in order to make our skeleton strong, flexible, robust. The Latticework requires the same dedication but will result in a robust method of thinking and understanding.

“I was never a prisoner of any theory. What guided me were reason and reality. The acid test I applied to every theory or scheme was, would it work?” - LKY (https://blas.com/the-wit-and-wisdom-of-LKY)

Check out our public roadmap to see what initiatives we're working on and let us know what we're missing! (https://trello.com/b/0zjvwBM5/the-latticework-public-roadmap)

An invariant strategy is a strategy which is always useful regardless of circumstance or context (win/win, reciprocation, trust, etc.). One of the best "invariant strategies", a true "shortcut to life" is an intense, continuous focus on possessing good habits.

Current community forums are terrible. They happen out of context and are ugly and ineffective. As Edward Tufte beautifully demonstrates, that type of context switching impairs learning. So, we’ve built our social and collaborative tools so that they are embedded into the resource – enhancing learning and retention. (https://blas.com/on-edward-tufte/)

I also have a sister site, The Rabbit Hole (https://blas.com/), that you might find interesting. Many of the ideas were derived from the books I've read and summarized here

We have adopted “BaaS” from Salesforce and other SaaS companies. This business model has become widely adopted since it serves customers well. It does away with the customer’s need for large, upfront capital investments, allows customers to cancel at any time, allows for fast deployment, lowers initial acquisition costs, and increases scalability and reliability. We thought the same concept could be applied to books because many of these same benefits would accrue to the book’s partners.

(PS – the “Book-Like-a-Service” moniker was also considered, which I thought was quite clever (BLAS), but my wife and friends would (rightfully) never let me live that down. It was a fun thought while it lasted though… 😊)

I love physical books and my home is overflowing with them. In many ways, they are superior since they are tactile, helping to improve associations and recall. However, I think there is a place for both, and this experiment will help us find out. I also hope to produce a quality physical book at some point, if the demand is there.

The ideas included here are just a start. The hope is that the community helps add, refine, even remove ideas that don't meet our bar. If you see some ideas or disciplines that you think are missing, let us know! https://ltcwrk.com/contact/

What I noted since the really big ideas carry 95% of the freight, it wasn’t at all hard for me to pick up all the big ideas from all the big disciplines and make them a standard part of my mental routines. Once you have the ideas, of course, they are no good if you don’t practice – if you don’t practice you lose it. So, I went through life constantly practicing this model of the multidisciplinary approach. Well, I can’t tell you what that’s done for me. It’s made life more fun, it’s made me more constructive, it’s made me more helpful to others, it’s made me enormously rich, you name it, that attitude really helps. It doesn’t help you just to know them enough just so you can give them back on an exam and get an A. You have to learn these things in such a way that they’re in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life. – Charlie Munger, 2007 USC Gould School of Law Commencement Speech (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U0TE4oqj24)

Richard Hamming's Learning to Learn has been one of the most impactful books I've ever read. He argues that becoming multidisciplinary also helps one acquire the "jargon" one needs to be able to communicate effectively with others. He says, "One major step you must do, and I want to emphasize this, is to make the effort to master their jargon. Every field seems to have its special jargon, one which tends to obscure what is going on from the outsider-and also, at times, from the insiders!" (https://blas.com/learning-to-learn/)

Syntonic learning is a term that made an impression on me. It means "it goes together with" and suggests that learning is made up of connections, such as connecting new ideas to old. That's why we need to start with something concrete, something we already understand well, before we can build upon it and learn more.