Spanning problem-space

Determining how best to improve one’s own suite of mental models & thinking tools is a hard problem: we can’t easily see ideas beyond the horizon, and ideas we haven’t yet invested effort in developing are distorted at best, but determining the value of ideas is necessary because of the scarcity of time & other resources. This is further complicated by the fact that knowledge-seeking is not a single-player game: everyone is constantly refining their suite of mental models, making decisions based on them, and producing material that makes certain ideas more or less accessible, and the value of a mental model is…