you yourself are not going to sort of solve the obesity and anemic. You yourself are not going to sort of create world peace. You yourself are not going to sort of, you know, solve climate issues.

Your brain just just can be big enough of collections of people, be creating a larger ensemble model, actually have a hope of addressing this problem.

Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and this is another episode of the Knowledge Project, which is a podcast exploring the ideas, methods and mental models that hope you learn from the best of what other people have already figured out.

You can learn more and stay up to date at fs.blog slash podcast. Before we get to today's guest, I get emails all the time from people saying I never knew you had a newsletter.

We do. It's called Brain Food and it comes out every Sunday morning, usually 5.30 am Eastern time. It's short, contains our recommendations for articles we found online, books, quotes and more.

It's become one of the most popular things we've ever done. There's hundreds of thousands of subscribers and it's free and you can learn more at fs.blog slash newsletter. That's fs.blog slash newsletter.

Most of the guests on this podcast, the Knowledge Project, are subscribers to the weekly email, so make sure you check it out.

On today's show is Scott Page, professor of complex systems, political science and economics, the University of Michigan. I reshowed to Scott because over Christmas, I read a book that he wrote called The Model Thinker, which is all about how mental models can help you think better.

And as you can imagine, this podcast is a deep dive into mental models, thinking tools and developing your cognitive ability. It's time to listen and learn.

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Scott, I'm so happy to have you on the show here.

It's great to be on. It's a thrill for me. You just wrote a book called the model thinker. And I want to explore that with you. What are mental models?

So what a mental model is is really just a framework that you use to make sense of the world. So what the model thinker is, the book, it's a book that contains really three things.

One is sort of a general philosophy of models. One is with a collection of models that you can sort of play with and understand.

And then a third thing is sort of this to examples of how one in practice would apply a variety of models to a problem.

So when I think about a mental model, as opposed to maybe a standard mathematical model, is in a mental model, what you have to do is you have to sort of map reality to the mathematics.

So I may say, this would be one thing if someone would say, well, you should use a linear model here to decide who to hire.

Take your data and just put it on a linear model. What the thing is, you have to decide what are the variables.

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