This is my post for day 6 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

I think a lot about models. Mental models. The world is too big and complicated for us to memorize everything we experience, and it would take far too long to think through all the implications of everything that we do remember. So what we do instead is build lots of smaller models, small enough to remember, and simple enough to use for predicting and decision making.

We conditionally deploy these models largely based on bottom-up sensations. I haven’t memorized exactly which aisle or shelf my favorite bread is on, nor which breads are immediately to the left and right of it. But I know that when I run out of bread, that will trigger an action for me to decide when to go to the store, and that when I get to the store, the visuals around me will match up enough to a remembered template that I will just skim a bit and then find the bread more or less right away.

All of this will happen automatically, involuntarily, because it is required for navigating the world. But you can also do it intentionally. You can think about whether a given model is failing a bit too often, and whether you should look for a better model. You can try to merge two models into one. You can take a model that’s complicated to use, and see if you can find one that is much more elegant while still being sufficiently accurate.

You can also build models of content that you’ll never personally experience. You can try to understand what went so wrong in 18th century France, or how what’s up with Uranus being sideways.

All these models live in our heads. They are little bits of software that we programmed inside our brains by going around living. So they are written in brain language. This is ultimately mathematical, but when you are the math, it doesn’t feel like math.

It turns out that there are other entities in the world, doing the same thing. And they’re pretty cool! We like to interact. But they think in terms of their mental models, and we think in terms of our mental models. Fortunately, there is substantial overlap between how these models work. It turns out that reality has joints, along which any functional agent will have delineated some concepts used in their mental models. We can point at an apple and say “apple”, and then the other entity will know to assign the word “apple” to the mental model that is activated inside their mind when they look at what we pointed at. Language is the means by which we bridge across our individual mental models.

Many people have a craft. They spend their careers paying deep attention to something and practicing it. I am a craftsman of mental models. Unfortunately, you cannot just hand someone a mental model in the same way that you can hand them a sword or fresh vegetables. By default, all my work is stuck inside my head. To invite someone into the shop of a mental model craftsman, you have to communicate the models. If we’re using language, then I have to move around the structure of the model and linearize it. (Models do not like being linearized.)

Fortunately I do enjoy the process of communicating models. It can make the models better, but it’s also just a blast to give people the same experience I had while making it. But it’s still much, much more natural for me to just keep on crafting. So by this point I feel as though I’m sitting in a shop filled with thousands of little gadgets. And the gadgets themselves could be put to better use if other people could use them.

I want to get better at sharing my models. That’s why I’m at Inkhaven.