Latticework of Mental Models
The latticework of mental models is Charlie Munger's term for the practice of collecting frameworks from many disciplines and weaving them together into a coherent way of thinking. The metaphor is deliberate: a lattice is stronger than any single beam.
Munger argues that most people are trained in one discipline and try to solve every problem with that discipline's tools. The result is the Man with a Hammer problem. The antidote is breadth — learning the big ideas from psychology, physics, biology, economics, mathematics, and history, and letting them reinforce each other.
How It Works
You don't need to be an expert in every field. You need the core ideas — the 80/20 of each discipline. When you have models from multiple domains, you can triangulate. A problem that looks intractable from one angle often yields when you bring a second or third model to bear.
Connections
The Mental Models Overview on this site is an attempt to sketch part of such a lattice. Each model — First Principles Thinking, Inversion, Probabilistic Thinking, Margin of Safety — is one node in the lattice. The power comes from the connections between them.
Circle of Competence provides a healthy check: your lattice is only as strong as your understanding of each model within it. Better to have ten models you truly grasp than fifty you can only name.