**Related:** [[Mental Models]] | [[Mental Model Atomicity]] ### General Thinking Concepts 1. **Circle of Competence**: Focus on what you know and expand it cautiously. 2. **First Principles Thinking**: Break down problems into basic elements and reassemble them. 3. **Thought Experiment**: Imagining scenarios to explore potential outcomes or explain complex ideas. ### Decision Making & Biases 4. **Occam's Razor**: The simplest explanation is often the best. 5. **Hanlon's Razor**: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. 6. **Confirmation Bias**: The tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. 7. **Hindsight Bias**: The inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place. 8. **Anchoring Effect**: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information offered when making decisions. 9. **Overconfidence Bias**: The tendency for someone to be more confident in their own abilities than is objectively justified. 10. **Sunk Cost Fallacy**: Continuing a project or consumption because of previously invested resources (time, money, or effort). ### Economics & Finance 11. **Supply and Demand**: The amount of a commodity, product, or service available and the desire of buyers for it. 12. **Marginal Utility**: The additional satisfaction or utility that a person receives from consuming an additional unit of a good or service. 13. **Opportunity Cost**: The cost of an alternative that must be forgone to pursue a certain action. 14. **Incentives**: How rewards and punishments shape our actions. 15. **Scarcity**: Limited availability of a resource can lead to increased value and competition. ### Systems & Models 16. **Systems Thinking**: Understanding how parts interrelate and how systems work over time within the context of larger systems. 17. **Feedback Loops**: When outputs of a system are fed back as inputs, potentially influencing future outputs. 18. **Network Effects**: The effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. 19. **Scale Economies**: The cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to size, output, or scale of operation. 20. **Complex Adaptive Systems**: Systems that adapt and evolve in the process of interacting with dynamic environments. ### Human Nature & Judgment 21. **Reciprocity**: Responding to a positive action with another positive action. 22. **Commitment and Consistency**: The desire to be consistent with what we have previously said or done. 23. **Social Proof**: The reliance on the feedback and actions of others to determine what is right and what is wrong in a given situation. 24. **Authority**: The influence that is given to perceived leaders or experts. 25. **Liking/Loving Tendency**: The tendency to agree with and follow those we like or love. ### Mathematics & Statistics 26. **Probability**: The measure of the likelihood that an event will occur. 27. **Permutations and Combinations**: Different ways of arranging or grouping objects. 28. **Regression to the Mean**: The phenomenon that arises if a variable is extreme on its first measurement but closer to the average on its second measurement. 29. **Bayesian Updating**: The process of adjusting probabilities based on new evidence. 30. **Law of Large Numbers**: The principle that the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value. ### Psychology & Behavior 31. **Cognitive Dissonance**: The mental discomfort experienced by a person who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. 32. **Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs**: A theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation". 33. **Halo Effect**: The tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another area. 34. **Self-Serving Bias**: The common habit of a person taking credit for positive events or outcomes, but blaming outside factors for negative events. 35. **Dunning-Kruger Effect**: A cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. ### Philosophy & Ethics 36. **Stoicism**: A philosophy of personal ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world. 37. **Utilitarianism**: The doctrine that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority. 38. **Kantian Ethics**: A deontological ethical theory by Immanuel Kant, where the morality of an action is determined by whether or not it is done in accordance with a moral rule. 39. **Aristotelian Ethics**: Focuses on finding the practical means to achieve the good life for humans, defined as a life in accordance with reason and virtue. 40. **Social Contract Theory**: The view that persons' moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live. ### Science & Engineering 41. **Scientific Method**: A method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting of systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. 42. **Critical Mass**: The minimum amount of fissile material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction. 43. **Thermodynamics**: The branch of physics that deals with the relationships between heat and other forms of energy. 44. **Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)**: For many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. 45. **Leverage**: The use of various financial instruments or borrowed capital to increase the potential return of an investment. ### Strategy & Competition 46. **Game Theory**: The study of mathematical models of strategic interaction among rational decision-makers. 47. **Competitive Advantage**: A condition or circumstance that puts a company in a favorable or superior business position. 48. **SWOT Analysis**: A framework used to evaluate a company's competitive position by identifying its Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. 49. **Five Forces Analysis**: A tool to analyze the competition of a business, involving five forces: competitive rivalry, supplier power, buyer power, threat of substitution, and threat of new entry. 50. **Blue Ocean Strategy**: The simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. ### Learning & Education 51. **Growth Mindset**: The belief that one's abilities and intelligence can be developed with time, effort, and dedication. 52. **Bloom's Taxonomy**: A set of three hierarchical models used to classify educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. 53. **Deliberate Practice**: A highly structured activity engaged in with the specific goal of improving performance. 54. **The Feynman Technique**: A method of learning that involves teaching a concept you want to understand better to someone else, using simple language and starting from scratch. 55. **Spaced Repetition**: A learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material to exploit the psychological spacing effect