Vocabulary as a Meta Mental Model

This is what mental models are: ideas from diverse fields that can aid your life. In this sense, improving vocabulary is a meta mental model. It’s a way of finding and organising new mental models.

Don’t learn a new language. You’ve covered what regular people talk about.5 Instead, dive deep into fields you know nothing about. Economics, Psychology, Philosophy, Physics, or applied rationality.

Names are excellent for creating larger chunks, since when done right, they pack lots of information into a single sentence.

The better your vocabulary, the more aware you become about possible categorization errors.

The collection of names is a dictionary. It helps you map different experiences to the same name. Not knowing which name to pin an experience with is a sign of confusion - you’re missing a category. If lots of different names fit, it’s a sign of nuance and complexity. Perhaps, it’s a lollapaloza effect.

The better your vocabulary, the more things you can name, the richer your base of raw materials to hang new ideas and experiences on.

Mastering these categories and where they apply will take time and experience. However, knowing the contradictions in each category helps master the category better. We’re using inversion to define the limits of the category.

"Knowing where an idea doesn’t fit can be just as valuable as knowing where it fits."

Improve your vocabulary.