I like to collect rules of thumb: little heuristics that help me think better. One source that collects a lot of great ones is Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, and statistician Lauren McCann. The book rounds up more than 300 mental models pulled from psychology, physics, economics, and other fields, and explains each one in plain English.
Some you’ve probably heard of, like Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity (one of my favorites!). You’ll find ones you’ve never heard of either. I’ve turned to it a couple of times over the years.
It’s just a good rundown of things to help you think better and make better decisions. I’ve really been enjoying FX’s crime noir show The Lowdown, created by Tulsa-based director and writer Sterlin Harjo. It’s set in my fair city and has all these crazy, spot-on references to Tulsa and Oklahoma.
Ethan Hawke plays Lee Raybon, a “truthstorian” (i.e., a muckraking journalist for a local magazine) trying to solve a murder in a prominent family, using clues the victim hid in the novels of Oklahoma native Jim Thompson (he wrote The Killer Inside Me, a brutal, brutal book). The acting’s top-notch, and a lot of the cast is from Tulsa, including Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tim Blake Nelson, and Pulitzer-winning playwright Tracy Letts. Harjo has done an amazing job making a TV show that feels like reading a classic noir novel.
One storyline hit close to my family: Lee steals a Fish and Wildlife Service jacket to do some snooping on a boat at Lake Keystone (I’ve been there lots of times!) and ends up coming across a paddlefish poaching operation. That was a real thing here. Back in the ’90s, Russians were coming to Oklahoma to poach paddlefish for their caviar, and my dad, a game warden and the senior agent for the Fish and Wildlife Service in the region, headed up a lot of those cases.
Heads up: there’s a lot of foul language and violence (befitting the noir ethos) in this show. Inside the unconventional college that blends classical building trades with liberal arts education. The American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, SC, is an accredited college where students major in one of six traditional building trades (blacksmithing, timber framing, and plastering among them) while taking liberal arts classes built around their craft.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
