General Thinking & Meta-Models

5 Whys

Sakichi Toyoda

Ask why five times to find the systemic root cause.

All Models Are Wrong

George Box

Every model simplifies reality; the question is whether it is useful.

Amara's Law

Roy Amara

Overestimate technology short-term, underestimate it long-term.

Eisenhower Decision Matrix

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Sort tasks by urgency and importance to focus on what truly matters.

First Principles Thinking

Aristotle / Elon Musk

Strip a problem to its fundamental truths and reason up from there — the antidote to reasoning by analogy.

Goodhart's Law

Charles Goodhart

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Law of Triviality

C. Northcote Parkinson / Poul-Henning Kamp

Groups spend disproportionate time on trivial issues they understand.

Map vs Territory

Alfred Korzybski

Models are not reality; confusing the two leads to systematic errors.

Occam's Razor

Among competing explanations, prefer the simplest one.

Paradigm Shift

Thomas Kuhn

The old framework is replaced by an entirely new way of seeing.

Parkinson's Law

C. Northcote Parkinson

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Principle of Falsification

Karl Popper

A claim is only useful if it can be proven wrong.

Regret Minimization Framework

Jeff Bezos

Decide by asking which choice you would regret least at age 80.

Scientific Method

Observation, hypothesis, experiment, and revision produce reliable knowledge.

Second-Order Thinking

Howard Marks

Think past the immediate effect to the second and third-order consequences.

Domain Dependence

Charlie Munger

Expertise in one field does not automatically transfer to another. Domain dependence is the tendency to apply reasoning, heuristics, and judgment effectively within a familiar...

Efficiency vs Effectiveness

Peter Drucker

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. The distinction is operational: efficiency minimises waste for a given goal (cost per unit, time per...

Epidemic Models

Epidemic models describe how something — a pathogen, a behaviour, a product, an idea — spreads through a population. The core mechanics: contact rate (how often people interact),...

False Cause

False cause is the error of inferring that A caused B when the evidence supports only that A and B are associated. Correlation is not causation: two things can co-occur or move...

False Positives & False Negatives

A test or decision has four outcomes: true positive (correctly say "yes" when the state is yes), true negative (correctly say "no" when the state is no), false positive (say "yes"...

Hanlon's Razor

Robert J. Hanlon

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence or ignorance. Most bad outcomes come from stupidity, not conspiracy — and assuming malice causes you to misdiagnose the problem.

Hofstadter's Law

Douglas Hofstadter

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." Douglas Hofstadter stated this in Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). The formulation is...

Hypothesis

A hypothesis is a testable claim about the world. Not a wish, not a vision — a proposition that can be disproved by evidence. "If we cut price 10%, volume will rise at least 15%."...

ICE Framework

Sean Ellis

ICE is a prioritisation score: Impact × Confidence × Ease. Rate each dimension (e.g. 1–10), multiply, and rank. High-ICE items get done first. The framework forces you to separate...

Law of Narrative Gravity

Stories pull. Once a narrative takes hold, it attracts evidence, attention, and belief. Facts that fit the story get amplified; facts that don't get discounted or ignored. The law...

Lindy Effect

The longer something has survived, the longer it's likely to survive. That's the Lindy effect. A book that's been in print for 40 years has a longer expected future than a book...

Miles's Law

Rufus Miles

"Where you stand depends on where you sit." Rufus Miles, a federal budget official, said it in the 1940s. Your position — role, department, incentives — shapes your view. The same...

Minimum Effective Dose

The minimum effective dose (MED) is the smallest input that produces the desired outcome. Borrowed from medicine — the lowest dose of a drug that achieves the therapeutic effect —...

Motte and Bailey

Nicholas Shackel

The motte-and-bailey is a rhetorical move: defend an indefensible claim (the bailey) by retreating, when challenged, to a related defensible claim (the motte). The motte is the...

Murphy's Law

Edward Murphy Jr.

Murphy's Law — "anything that can go wrong will go wrong" — is a heuristic for risk and design. Treat it as a design constraint: assume that whatever can fail will fail, and build...

Necessity & Sufficiency

Necessity and sufficiency are the two ways a condition can relate to an outcome. A condition is necessary for an outcome if the outcome cannot occur without it: no A, no B. A...

Observer Effect

The observer effect is the change in a system caused by the act of observing or measuring it. In physics, measuring a particle disturbs it. In human systems, being watched or...

Outcome Blind

Outcome-blind evaluation is judging a decision by the quality of the process and the information available at the time, not by the outcome that followed. A good decision can lead...

Poliheuristic Decision Theory

Alex Mintz

Poliheuristic decision theory describes how people actually choose when stakes are high: a two-stage process. First, they apply a non-compensatory screen — they eliminate any...

Pre-Mortem Analysis

Gary Klein

A pre-mortem is a decision exercise: assume the project or decision has already failed, then work backward to list why. The team imagines it is twelve months later and the launch...

Proxy

A proxy is a stand-in: you use one thing to represent another when the thing you care about is hard to observe or measure directly. Revenue is a proxy for value created; NPS is a...

Punctuated Equilibrium

Eldredge & Gould

Punctuated equilibrium, from evolutionary biology, describes change that is not smooth: long periods of stability are interrupted by short bursts of rapid transformation. Eldredge...

Randomized Controlled Experiment

A randomized controlled experiment (RCT) is the gold standard for learning whether something causes an outcome. You take a population, randomly assign units to treatment (get the...

Replication Crisis

The replication crisis is the discovery that many published research findings do not hold when other researchers try to repeat the same study. In psychology, medicine, economics,...

Revealed Preference

Paul Samuelson

What people say they want and what they actually choose are often different. Revealed preference is the principle that you learn someone's true preferences from their choices, not...

Steelmanning

Steelmanning is the practice of strengthening an opposing argument before engaging it. Instead of attacking the weakest version — the strawman — you build the strongest plausible...

Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas Kuhn

Science does not advance by steady accumulation. It advances in fits: long periods of normal science under a dominant paradigm, then crisis, then revolution. Thomas Kuhn's The...

Sturgeon's Law

Theodore Sturgeon

Ninety percent of everything is crap. Theodore Sturgeon, the science-fiction writer, said it when defending his genre: when people said "90% of science fiction is crud," he...

Systems vs Goals

Scott Adams

Goals are outcomes you want to hit. Systems are the processes you run that make outcomes more likely. The systems-vs-goals frame says: focus on the system. If you run the right...

Thinking Gray

Thinking gray is the discipline of not choosing a side too early. Instead of deciding quickly whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, you hold the possibility that it's...

Tight Coupling

Charles Perrow

Tight coupling means components in a system depend on each other in rigid, time-sensitive ways. When one part fails or lags, the rest cannot adapt; failure propagates quickly and...

Unforced Error

An unforced error is a mistake that was not caused by the opponent or by external pressure — you had the initiative, the information, and the time, and you still failed. The term...

Via Negativa

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Improvement often comes from subtraction, not addition. Knowing what to remove — bad habits, unnecessary complexity, toxic relationships — is frequently more powerful than knowing what to add.

Wright's Law

Theodore Paul Wright

Wright's Law says that the cost of a unit declines by a consistent percentage every time cumulative production doubles. Theodore Paul Wright formalised it in 1936 for aircraft...

Agenda-Setting Theory

Maxwell McCombs / Donald Shaw

Agenda-setting theory (Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, 1972) holds that media may not tell people what to think, but it powerfully shapes what they think about. By choosing which...

Backwards Law

Alan Watts

The "backwards law" (often associated with Alan Watts and popularised in modern writing) is the idea that the more you pursue something directly — happiness, status, approval —...

Bias Against Null Results

Bias against null results is the systematic tendency to undervalue, ignore, or suppress findings that show no effect. Journals prefer "positive" results (something happened);...

Brandolini's Law

Giovanni Brandolini

Brandolini's Law (the "bullshit asymmetry principle") states that the amount of energy needed to refute nonsense is an order of magnitude larger than the energy needed to produce...

Chimpanzee Test

The Chimpanzee Test is a simplicity heuristic: if you can't explain a concept clearly enough that someone with no domain knowledge could grasp it, you probably don't understand it...

Controlled Placebo

A controlled placebo is the practice of comparing an intervention against an inert baseline (the placebo) to isolate the actual effect from the expected effect. Without a control,...

Cunningham's Law

Ward Cunningham

Cunningham's Law (attributed to Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki) states that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question — it's to post the...

Elon Musk's Law

Elon Musk

Elon Musk's Law (informal) is the principle that physics is the law, everything else is a recommendation. If something is physically possible, the only barriers are engineering,...

Gate's Law

Bill Gates

Gate's Law (often attributed to Bill Gates, closely related to Amara's Law) holds that we overestimate what we can achieve in two years and underestimate what we can achieve in...

Hotel Bathroom Principle

The Hotel Bathroom Principle is a heuristic: if the visible details are wrong, the hidden ones are likely worse. If a hotel bathroom is dirty, the kitchen is probably filthy. If...

Law of (Truly) Large Numbers

The Law of Truly Large Numbers states that with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. Given millions of events, million-to-one coincidences occur daily....

Meta-Analysis

Meta-analysis is the practice of combining results from multiple independent studies to find stronger, more reliable patterns than any single study can provide. Individual studies...

Necessary Repeatability

Necessary repeatability is the principle that a result must be reproducible to be trusted. If an experiment, process, or outcome can't be repeated under similar conditions, it may...

Okrent's Law

Daniel Okrent

Okrent's Law (attributed to journalist Daniel Okrent) states that the pursuit of balance can create imbalance. When media or organisations try to present "both sides" of an issue...

P-hacking

P-hacking is the practice of manipulating statistical analysis — testing multiple hypotheses, adjusting variables, cherry-picking subgroups — until a result crosses the p < 0.05...

Peer Review

Peer review is the process of subjecting work — research, strategy, product decisions — to scrutiny by qualified, independent evaluators before it is accepted. In science, it is...

Planck's Principle

Max Planck

Planck's principle — often paraphrased as "science advances one funeral at a time" — holds that new ideas rarely win by converting their opponents. Instead, the old guard retires...

Reproducibility

Reproducibility is the requirement that a result can be independently obtained using the same methods. If you run the experiment again — different lab, different team — and get...

Reverse Engineer

Reverse engineering is the practice of taking an existing outcome — a product, a strategy, a competitor's success — and working backward to understand how it was built. Instead of...

Ribot's Law

Théodule Ribot

Ribot's law (Théodule Ribot, 1881) states that memory loss follows an inverse temporal gradient: recent memories are destroyed first, while older memories are the most resistant....

Schrodinger's Cat

Erwin Schrödinger

Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment: a cat in a sealed box is simultaneously alive and dead until someone opens the box and observes. The point isn't about cats — it's about...

Skinner's Law

B.F. Skinner

Skinner's law — derived from B.F. Skinner's work in operant conditioning — holds that behaviour is a function of its consequences. Actions that are reinforced (rewarded) increase...

Systematic Review

A systematic review is a structured method for synthesising all available evidence on a question using pre-defined, transparent criteria. Unlike a casual literature scan or an...

The Gatekeepers

Gatekeepers are the individuals, institutions, or systems that control access to a resource, audience, or market. In media, editors decide what gets published. In venture,...

The Great Temptation

The great temptation is the pull toward expansion, diversification, or new opportunities at the expense of deepening what already works. It hits hardest after initial success —...

Veirordt's Law

Karl von Vierordt

Veirordt's law (Karl von Vierordt, 1868) describes a systematic error in human time perception: short durations are overestimated (they feel longer than they are), and long...

Weber-Fechner Law

Weber / Fechner

The Weber-Fechner law states that human perception of change is proportional to the relative magnitude of the stimulus, not the absolute magnitude. Adding one candle to a dark...

Worm's Eye View

A worm's eye view is the perspective from the ground — the lowest level of a system, closest to the actual work, the actual customer, the actual process. It is the opposite of the...

Pathos

Pathos is the appeal to emotion — one of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion alongside ethos (credibility) and logos (logic). Pathos works by creating an emotional connection between the speaker and the audience: empathy, fear, hope, anger, or joy. It is the most powerful short-term persuasion tool because decisions are made emotionally before they are justified logically. In business, great storytelling, brand identity, and crisis communication all rely heavily on pathos. Steve Jobs's product launches were masterclasses in pathos — he made you feel the problem before he revealed the solution. The risk of pathos is manipulation: appealing to emotion without substance erodes trust over time. The best communicators use pathos to open the door, then walk through it with logos.

Thought Experiment

A disciplined imaginative exercise used to explore the consequences of principles, test the limits of theories, and reason about scenarios that cannot be physically tested. From Galileo's falling bodies to Einstein's light beam to Schrödinger's cat, thought experiments have driven some of the most important breakthroughs in science, philosophy, and strategy.