Ideas

Career moats are inspired by Warren Buffett's conception of a business's 'economic moat'. Here we take a look at a particular type of economic moat, to see what we can take from it when applied to an individual career.

"There is no such thing as a stupid question" is a laudable aphorism. In practice, it's often also wrong.

If our brains are built to generate and process narrative, then how can we use this insight to grapple with company politics?

This is the final part of a series of posts [https://commoncog.com/a-framework-for-putting-mental-models-to-practice/] on…

Last week we covered a model for expertise called recognition-primed decision making. This week, we talk about how to use that model to build expertise of your own.

Experts make decisions in ways that are very, very different from conventional decision science models. This makes expertise a lot more important to good decision making than you might think.

Instrumental rationality is the sort of thinking that allows you to achieve your goals. We take a closer look at what decision science says is the 'best' way to pursue this purpose.

Any discussion of practicing mental models must begin with a discussion of rationality. We look at what the research tells us about it.

There has been an uptick in self-help books and blogs about mental models. But, there's a problem when putting it in practice.

Perceptual exposure is the rare learning technique that allows you to learn tacit knowledge — that is, knowledge that can't be communicated. And it begins with a simple question: how do you tell if a chick is male or female?