A “framework for understanding” is a meme my friend came up with for a mental model that helps you understand the world and/or act upon it.
Frameworks aren’t “real” in the way physics and chemistry are real. They haven’t been verified to Objectively Exist through rigorous experimentation. They’re usually just categories, labels, or modes of thinking which help to reduce the effectively infinite complexity of the universe down to something that can be parsed and managed.
I promise that you’re already using them.1
Here are a few examples:
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Cognitive biases, like confirmation bias and survivorship bias, help us catch when people (including ourselves) might be making errors of judgement. Again, these aren’t “real”, but they are useful categories of behavior, which help us pattern match when we observe people making similar errors.
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Ezra Klein’s theory of political polarization, which proposes that we are “dividing over fundamental identities that tend to generate intolerance and hostility”.
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The three status games—success, virtue, and dominance—proposed by Will Storr are useful for understanding the underlying drives behind vast swaths of human behavior.
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Astrology, which may not be “real” in the way that astronomy is (don’t @ me), but like a tarot card reading, it can be a useful framework for introspection.
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The Diátaxis approach to technical writing is a great example of a framework that helps inform action.
And some examples from pieces I’ve written:
- A proposed ontology of labor orientations.
- Patterns in how we think about death.
- Two common methods of narrativizing failure.
Footnotes
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“Frameworks for understanding” are themselves a framework for understanding the non-objective but still-very-useful ideas that we use in our everyday lives. ↩