Related: Fake explanation, Guessing the teachers password, Understanding your understanding, many more
The mental model concept gets used so frequently and seems so intuitively obvious that I debated whether to bother writing this. But beyond the basic value that comes from unpacking our intuitions, it turns out that the concept allows a pretty impressive integration and streamlining of a wide range of mental phenomena.
Thanks for the helpful comment.
As for the writing style, I was very deliberately trying to express my exact state of knowledge (since if I don't do this I tend to get myself into trouble), but it seems like I might have let this lead me to a somewhat uninteresting place.
You did that well. It is perhaps unfortunate that people respond more positively to confident assertions than well calibrated ones!
Sometimes the trick is to do things that might get yourself in trouble. You may get in trouble because confident assertions from a (not yet) dominant individual feel like a status incursion that needs to be beaten down. In those cases doing things that push the limits of the status people assign you even though you may experience trou... (read more)