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Mental Models
72 courses / 508 lessons / ~109h of learning / 0 prerequisites

Learn it the way you'd learn to ride a bike .

Not by memorising definitions — by grabbing the thing and feeling how it moves. Start from zero; finish an expert, one rung of the ladder at a time.

  • Free forever
  • No account
  • No ads
  • Open source
  • English + Español
01

Start from absolute zero

No jargon assumed. Course one assumes you have never met the subject before — and every later course only leans on the ones before it.

02

You poke it, not read it

Sliders, step-throughs, quizzes in every lesson. The idea moves when you move it, which is the difference between "I read that" and "I get that".

03

It doesn’t stop at “intro”

Most explainers tap out right after the basics. These keep climbing, all the way to expert depth, until the advanced stuff is just stuff you know.

One ladder, no gaps

Every course stands on the one below it.

Most sites give you scattered explainers. This is a single dependency graph: each course only assumes the ones before it, from the very first idea all the way to expert depth. You are never expected to know something you weren't taught.

  1. Beginner 1/4
    12 courses

    The absolute basics — no prior knowledge assumed, every term defined on first use.

  2. Intermediate 2/4
    12 courses

    The working vocabulary and the ideas the rest of the path leans on.

  3. Advanced 3/4
    20 courses

    Real depth, assuming the earlier rungs are behind you.

  4. Expert 4/4
    28 courses

    The deepest, most rigorous tier — practitioner-grade, all the way to the edge.

The full map lives in the catalog — a real dependency graph you can follow course by course.

The whole map

72 courses. This is all of them.

From the very first idea to the deep end — every chip below is a full course you can open right now.

What Are Mental Models? The No Free Lunch Theorem Lateral Thinking: Walk Around the Problem Compounding The Map Is Not the Territory Incentives: Follow the Reward Second-Order Thinking: And Then What? Thinking in Probabilities: How Likely, Not Whether Confirmation Bias: The Mind's Lawyer Tragedy of the Commons The Availability Heuristic: What Comes to Mind Survivorship Bias: The Evidence That Never Shows Up Game Theory: Thinking in Moves The Red Queen Effect Fat Tails & Black Swans: When the Rare Runs the Show Stocks & Flows Moats & Durable Advantage Leverage Points: Where to Push a System Regression to the Mean: Why Extremes Don't Last Nash Equilibrium Fitness Landscapes Influence & Persuasion: The Levers That Move a Yes Calibration: Knowing What You Know Deciding Under Deep Uncertainty: Choosing Well When You Can't Know the Odds Path Dependence & Lock-In Cumulative Advantage & Power Laws Signalling & Costly Signals Antifragility & Via Negativa Common Knowledge & Coordination Evolutionarily Stable Strategies Information Cascades & Herding Creative Destruction Preference Falsification Entropy & the Second Law Optimal Stopping & the Secretary Problem The Kelly Criterion
First-Principles Thinking Inversion: Think Backwards Natural Selection Occam’s & Hanlon’s Razors Circle of Competence Supply & Demand Opportunity Cost & Trade-offs Margin of Safety: Build for More Than You Expect Comparative Advantage Emergence Bottlenecks & the Theory of Constraints Anchoring & Adjustment Feedback Loops & Systems Thinking Bayesian Updating: Change Your Mind by Degrees Loss Aversion & Prospect Theory Externalities Ecosystems & Niches The Lollapalooza Effect: When Biases Multiply Critical Mass & Tipping Points Asymmetry & Optionality: Lopsided Bets and the Right to Win Big Mechanism Design The Evolution of Cooperation Combining Models: The Latticework Credible Commitment & Deterrence The Principal–Agent Problem Debiasing & the Bias Blind Spot Reflexivity & Self-Fulfilling Dynamics Ergodicity & the Time Average Spontaneous Order & the Knowledge Problem Goodhart's Law The Value of Information Punctuated Equilibrium The Winner's Curse Hormesis & the Dose-Response Curve Adverse Selection & the Lemons Problem Bounded Rationality & Satisficing
How a lesson works

Built on how memory actually works.

Reading feels like learning; it mostly isn't. Every lesson here forces the three things that do work: predict, interact, retrieve.

  1. 1

    Guess before you’re told

    Lessons open with a question you can’t answer yet. Committing to a guess first is what makes the real answer stick — it’s the testing effect, and it’s built into every lesson.

  2. 2

    Grab the idea

    Every core concept ships with a slider, animation or step-through. The idea isn’t a paragraph here — it’s something you bend with your own hands.

  3. 3

    Prove you got it

    Quizzes, concept matchers, fill-in-the-blanks and spot-the-trap questions — varied on purpose, spaced through the lesson, never a wall of MCQs at the end.

  4. 4

    Pass the final

    Each course ends in a graded final exam: one shot per question, no retries, score at the end. Progress saves on your device — no account, ever.

Learning Paths

Curated tracks, not one giant list.

Pick the area you care about and follow the graph from beginner to expert — or jump straight to the course you need.

🧱

Foundations

Start here. What a mental model is, the latticework idea, and the base models everything else builds on — map vs. territory, first principles.

5 courses Beginner → Expert
⚖️

Decision-Making & Judgment

Choosing well under uncertainty: inversion, second-order thinking, opportunity cost, margin of safety and expected value.

23 courses Beginner → Expert
🎲

Probability & Uncertainty

Thinking in odds: base rates, Bayesian updating, regression to the mean, fat tails and sample size.

15 courses Intermediate → Expert
🧠

Human Nature & Bias

How minds misfire: the major cognitive biases, incentives, social proof and commitment & consistency.

17 courses Beginner → Expert
🔄

Systems & Feedback

Wholes over parts: feedback loops, stocks & flows, bottlenecks, emergence and leverage points.

17 courses Intermediate → Expert
📈

Economics & Markets

Incentives at scale: supply & demand, comparative advantage, externalities and the tragedy of the commons.

19 courses Beginner → Expert
🧩

Problem-Solving

Cracking hard problems: first principles, inversion, thought experiments and Occam’s & Hanlon’s razors.

7 courses Beginner → Beginner
⚙️

Science & Engineering

Borrowed from the hard sciences: critical mass, equilibrium, leverage, compounding and algorithms.

7 courses Beginner → Expert
🧬

Biology & Evolution

Models from life itself: natural selection, adaptation, ecosystems and niches, and the Red Queen effect of constant co-evolution.

10 courses Beginner → Expert
♟️

Strategy & Competition

Winning repeated games: game theory, moats, comparative advantage and the Red Queen effect.

15 courses Intermediate → Expert

Start at zero. Finish an expert.

72 courses, 508 lessons, one ladder — free, no account, in English and Spanish. It takes about ten seconds to start.