Основатель RethinkDB Слава Ахмечет делится списком идей, полезных при обдумывании сложных вопросов. Некоторые из них:

Efficient market hypothesis – the state of any given issue in the world is roughly as close to optimal as is currently possible.
Corollary: It’s unlikely that the status quo can be easily improved without significant resources.
Example: Cucumber juice probably doesn’t cure cancer.
Example: The iPhone app you wrote in a weekend probably doesn’t double the phone’s battery life.

Statistical mechanics – probabalistic systems that follow certain laws in the long run can have perturbations that diverge from these laws in the short run.
Corollary: Occasionally the status quo can be easily improved without significant resources (but it is unlikely that you found such an occassion).
Idiom: In the short run the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
Idiom: If an economist saw a $100 bill on a sidewalk they wouldn’t pick it up (because if it were real, it would have been picked up already).

Bias for action – in daily life many important decisions are easily reversible. It’s not enough to have information – it’s crucial to move quickly and recover if you were wrong, than to deliberate indefinitely.
Idiom: One test is worth a thousand expert opinions.
Idiom: The best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
Note: The best people do this naturally, without brooding, and with a light touch.

Mere-exposure effect – an observation that humans tend to develop a preference for things, people, and processes merely because they are familiar with them. This effect is much stronger than it initially seems.
Corollary: Merely putting people in a room together repeatedly, giving them a shared direction, symbology, and competition will create a group with very strong bonds.

Internal press release – you start developing a product by writing an internal press release first, explaining to target customers why the product is useful and how it blows away the competition. You then test it against potential users (it’s much easier to iterate on the press release than the product).
Corollary: If the press release is hard to write, then the product is probably going to suck.

Дополнительно:

1. Еще один список ментальных моделей от основателя DuckDuckGo.
2. Репозиторий полезных концепций на lesswrong.

Кэти Сьерра приводит результаты психологических экспериментов, которые показали, что у людей есть «пул когнитивных ресурсов». Когда человеку надо принять решение, выполнить сложную задачу или применить силу воли, он берет ресурсы из этого пула — и их становится меньше. Поэтому участники эксперимента, которым дали более тяжелое задание, позволяют себе съесть больше сладкого.

Эту особенность мышления должны понимать разработчики приложений. Если пользователь вынужден продираться сквозь неудобный интерфейс и ненужные возможности, принимать необязательные решения и искать ответы в непонятной документации, он расходует мыслительные ресуры. Хотя он мог бы потратить их на что-то важное для него — научиться играть на гитаре, пообщаться с родными или всё-таки отказаться от этого куска торта.

Сет Годин рассказывает анекдот о фокус-группах:

The story is told of a focus group for a new $100 electronic gadget. The response in the focus group was fabulous, people all talked about the features of the new device with excitement.

At the end of the session, the moderator said, "thanks for coming. As our gift to you, you can have your choice of the device or $25."

Everyone took the cash.