[PacifyFish]

I love Michael Nielsen. He's so earnest and thoughtful.

His recent forays into spaced repetition have been an interesting glimpse into his thought process. I am a bit of a spaced rep fanatic, but use it to internalize more general "Mental Models" (a la Farnam Street), useful tidbits e.g. how to horizontally align using flexbox, or surface-level concepts like product management frameworks.

I love the effort Michael puts into grappling with ideas to strengthen his intuition. This is something I'd like to do more of, but feel that few of the ideas in my day-to-day are sufficiently complex (I don't have any use for linear algebra proofs, for example).

Anyways, that's my word salad on Michael Nielsen and spaced repetition.

[mxstbr]

How do you form flashcards out of mental models you encounter and want to remember and use? Could you post an example?

[PacifyFish]

Sure thing.

I’ll typically make a few cards at first trying to test different aspects of the MM (general concept, example applications, given definition identify the MM, quiz any internal associations I have with it like if I learned it in a specific context, etc.) then I can delete ones that aren’t useful and/or add others later.

Let’s use the mental model of inversion as an example. I found this one in a Farnam Street blog post about Charlie Munger. Here are some cards I might create:

Front - what is the principle of inversion?

Back - when you want to try to maximize something, instead try minimizing its converse. Or vice-versa.

Front - what mental model might help if you’ve unsuccessfully tried implementing programs to increase innovation in your company?

Back - inversion. Rather than thinking of ways to increase innovation, can you instead think of things that are decreasing innovation and eliminate those?

Front - what’s another way to think about reducing time spent on work tasks?

Back - invert the problem. Try to increase time saved on nonessentials (e.g. laundry service, meal prep, outsourcing)

Front - what’s it called when you work backwards through a problem you’ve already tried to work through forwards?

Back - inversion

Front - what would Charlie Munger ask you if you came to him with a tough optimization problem?

Back - “have you tried inverting it?”

This is a bit contrived, but I hope this gives you a sense of how I think about creating cards for mental models.