michael-dean-k/

Every online creator these days has a proprietary framework—they are catchy, dead-simple, sometimes flimsy, and often wrong. Somewhere exists a marketplace of mental models. Maybe Farnam Street. Is a mental model a framework? What even is a framework, and what makes a good one?

Consider the "frame-" prefix. A frame is a vantage point, a particular angle, a way of looking at something. Imagine holding out a picture frame that gives you a little glimpse of a vast national park. You can't hold an entire hyperobject in your mind, and so a frame compresses noise and gives you a shortcut for understanding. You can't see the whole park, but you can see a map. A framework is a system of lenses to decipher complexity. It lets you leapfrog in understanding.

By creator-economy logic, a framework is a valuable asset. Unlike a vague mush of regurgitated ideas, a framework is discernible, seemingly original, and something you can call your own—you can coin it as a phrase and repeat it over and over until you're known by it. This is a useful tactic! The evolutionary pressures of Internet feeds have forced conceptual ideas to become salient, simple, and tangible. Unlike the abstract frameworks of a physicist, these are fit for a TED talk, primed to leak into the memeplex and anchor your name in the annals of Internet-niche-celebrity history. This is, overall, good—it democratizes conceptual knowledge; the problem is when, beyond the positioning, it's intellectually flaccid.

You've probably seen frameworks pitched as "The Six Types of X," or "The Y Method." These are pseudo-frameworks; they are more like sets or lists. They assemble things within a domain, and increase their memorability through alliteration and metaphor. Maybe this helps with recall, but it doesn't reveal the inner structure of a domain. A real framework would give you a schema to classify incoming data in an unfamiliar field; but a set/list only refers to itself ... Compare this to something like "POP Writing," a simple concept that classifies writing as personal, observational, or playful; this acts a lens to help you analyze any piece of writing.

For something to be a framework, it need generalizability: the ability to explain things beyond itself. The earlier examples are merely "collections"—things are presented, but we don't understand what Aristotle calls "the four causes": what it's made of, how it's arranged and interconnected, why it exists, and what's it's purpose? When Plato writes about conceptual forms, he says there are collections and divisions. Making frameworks are a matter of dividing; a framework's goal is to divide an incomprehensible whole into human-sized parts.

I spent some time this morning thinking through a "framework of frameworks." The first thing to grok about this meta-architecture is that it's broken into three levels of escalating sophistication. After that I'll explain how levels have shapes, and how any shape can be evaluated through a set of qualities.

So it's level, shapes, and qualities—that's the gist.

To expand on levels: a framework can be a heuristic, a model, or a paradigm. Now that I think about, I suppose HMP (not quite meme-ready) is an attempt at making a "paradigm for frameworks," which will soon make more sense, and sound less like bashed buzzwords.

The three levels of frameworks:

Heuristics—mental-shortcuts that lets you decipher complexity through a single property. When Aristotle was classifying animals, he'd offer differentiate them across single properties: blood or bloodless, horned or hornless. A heuristic is something you derive a posteriori, from experience, from empirical facts. You might observe a bunch of essays, or companies, or girlfriends, and notice that you can compare and contrast items in a set based on single attributes. There are many shapes a heuristic can take: it can be a classifier (type A, B, or C), a boolean (on/off), a spectrum (A<>B), a rubric (I, II, III, IV, V), a score (1-100).

The benefit of a heuristic is that, since it's often anchored on a single property, it's simple and easy to learn. The downside is that it's a very limited frame on the scope and purpose of your domain. For example, if you're trying teach craft (purpose) for online nonfiction writers (scope), then POP writing is an excellent heuristic to classify writing voice, but it doesn't teach you how to scope ideas or structure an essay. A heuristic is a shortcut to understand one facet of a domain, but it's not an attempt to model the whole domain. 

Models—a series of interlocking properties, all organized with a larger frame. Write of Passage was set up like a cabinet of heuristics (POP writing, Shiny Dime, Write from Conversation, etc.), but they weren't organized within a single higher-order framework. Think of a model as a group of heuristics organized in hierarchy, where each one is named (what is it's essence?), labeled (what other concepts is it similar to?), located (what is it's parent concept?), interlinked (who are it's cousins?), and excavated (if we go infinitely deep, what are the variations?). Models can take many shapes: an XY graph, a taxonomy, a multi-step recursive workflow (like an OODA loop).

Models cover far more than any heuristic can, but it risks collapsing into complexity. Conceptual schemas can bloom, sprawl, and contradict—becoming illegible or incoherent. To solve this, you have to shift from empiricism to rationality; you can notice infinite ways to subdivide a thing, but to make an elegant model, you need to shift to abstraction and question the fundamental truths behind it. Why might one set of properties be more elegant than another? Ultimately you have to make a hypothesis, test it across dozens of examples, and see if it holds. If some foreign object can't be reconciled into the schema, you have an issue. Consider how the taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus was able to classify the animal world into kingdom, class, order, genus, and species, but it wasn't unable to find a home for the platypus. Even though it works across thousands of animals, the original assumptions aren't able to handle edge-cases.

Paradigms—comprehensive systems that can explain or predict any phenomenon within a domain. How is this possible? I think you achieve this when (1) you find enough instances to represent the domain; (2) you analyze them deeply enough to understand their underlying nature; and (3) you can arrange all your findings into a coherent architecture with maximum explainability. Consider how Darwin improved over Linnaeus: he shifted us from a static taxonomy to a dynamic model, a new paradigm that explains the origin of species, and even the potential future of a species. Paradigms can also take on many shapes, from living systems, to digital networks, to compositional pattern languages.

A good paradigm often finds simple root causes underneath complexity. For example, even though Essay Architecture has 27 patterns (3 patterns within the 3 elements of 3 dimensions), every tier is explained through the rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos, pathos—the whole thing can be summarized as "Aristotle all the way down." Maximum compression has a degree of a recursion: a single heuristic works as a fractal and organizes complexity at multiple scales.

Regardless of how you simplify and package a paradigm, it's still as hard to learn as a language; it's the least accessible, but it's the level that enables mastery of a domain, and the level most suitable to build a school around.¹

No matter how confident you are around a paradigm, it's always fragile. It's explainability is limited by the data set you test it against. As society develops new tools, it brings new data that eventually breaks a paradigm, even if it's held true for centuries. The telescope cracked the geocentric paradigm. A shattered paradigm is disorienting, but fundamentally good—it means you've discovered some new heuristic of reality, and humanity has to restart from new axioms.

So that's a first attempt to map the three levels, and it might help to think of them as geometric dimensions. A heuristic is like a one-dimensional line, a ray of insight that you perceive in a field. A model is a two-dimensional plane to understand a multi-property condition within a domain. But a paradigm is the three-dimensional totality of a field. A paradigm contains all possible heuristics and models, and so when you can think in 3D, you're able to match any circumstance with the correct solution.

But a paradigm isn't necessarily a great framework! It might be the most successful in compressing reality into a particular shape, but it might fail along other qualities. (To reiterate, levels are about  "compression sophistication," where shape is the particular form of compression...) Qualities capture how a compression framework interacts with society as a whole (the point of a framework is, in the end, to spread understanding).

Regardless of the level or shape, some qualities to consider:

• Tangibility: have you made it graspable through metaphor and lexicality?
• Salience: is it rewarding or effective to understand?
• Transferability: does it explain things in other domains?
• Correctness: is it actually right?
• Approachability: how would you walk someone through it via curriculum?

Are these the right qualities? Are these all the qualities? Can I reduce these into more fundamental qualities? I don't know. Realistically, this isn't a "paradigm of framework" yet; it's more so a "model of frameworks." I only conceived of this today, and so naturally it's sprawled into a series of properties:

A framework compresses complexity in a domain, exists at a level of explainability, taking on a particular shape to achieve a purpose within a scope, and can be judged along a set of qualities on how well it's memed.

To properly turn this into a paradigm, I'd have to test this hypothesis against hundreds of frameworks—ie: creator economy memes, among other disciplines—to see if it holds up. I imagine the concepts would melt and reform several times until it's simpler, sharper, and better at explaining a wide range of frameworks. A paradigm isn't solid until it's a domain has run through its pipes. A paradigm is really just a reflection of a domain's dataset and the mind making sense of it.

Lidlicker's model of communication is about synchronizing internal cognitive models. When writers talk about “expression,” that’s an act of making your interiority legible. A valid and real thing to do. Communication, though, is the additional step of doing some work to understand the cognitive models of others. Through feedback, you build a theory on how translations are succeeding or failing.

Social media notes are so weird because you’re blind to the models of others. I guess you figure out after the fact. But cancel culture might come down to a communication breakdown from rapidly colliding subgroups (TBC)….

Pretentious > pre-tense > context (I realize this is a stretch, but...). Artists are pretentious when they’re frustrated that others don’t have the context to understand what they’ve made. They’re upstream of culture, and so others don’t have the framing to pick up on it yet. There are two reactions, 1) not caring if they get it, and 2) making work for mass contexts (meeting the culture where the OS currently is)—and maybe both are wrong.

Instead, progressive ideas come with the responsibility to make sure anyone is equipped to download the context to get it. The trick is doing this implicitly without being too on the nose. The bootloader has to be secretly encoded. Deconstructing your own lyrics feels too desperate. Maybe it’s something about building an on-ramp for those who care to try to pierce into something.

Regardless of which side you're on, I don’t think one-sided pleas will work anymore. You can’t just say “here are 7 solid points on Trump’s insane corruption.” A flurry of comments will come in, “but what about DOGE?”

Communication is impossible when bias is baked in, unless you immediately identify how a POV is in a unique position. Such as: “what if corruption exposers are in a position to shield their own corruption?” It frames the question in a way that DOGE is doing good work, and yet also, perpetrating the same thing it’s exposing.

Only by immediately identifying with your opponent (both with who they favor & how they critique), will you be able to slide in a nuanced, synthesized point of view that can help them around their bias.

Relatedly, I think there’s a lot of spin/distortion around RFK/republicans. Of course, Elon/Trump are doing the same (or worse) media distortions. That’s just the environment we're in. Both extremes are wrong (American golden age vs. devastating coup). I’d say overall though, there are more good than bad things happening, and RFK is (potentially) one of the good things.

Reality is more like a paradox than a simple narrative.

For example: Elon can simultaneously be a hero for American democracy (on par with George Washington) and the worst dictator ever. I have to assume both can be true. The second you cling to either/or, your vision gets clouded to make sense of all future information.

By clinging to either, I get a false optimism or a false doomerism — both of which are definitely wrong. The reality is somewhere in the middle, and so by stretching across the spectrum, I have a worldview that’s likely more attuned to reality than either side.

I've spent the day in a semi-modern hospital in what seems like my father-in-law’s last days. Communication is barely possible. Some yes’s and no’s come through, but maybe not for long. He left some signed notes from his past self about not wanting to live off feeding tubes. But there are all sorts of decisions (ie: who does he want visiting or not?) that he can’t communicate because he’s too weak to speak. People don’t like writing, let alone writing about the ideal conditions for their death, but considering it must be the most disorienting and climactic of experiences, it could be worth doing a lot of writing to help you and your caretakers in the future.

There's a challenge in writing for two audiences at once. How can something make sense to someone with no technical knowledge without boring an expert in the field? You have to innovate in how you communicate. Metaphors serve a dual role: they give the novice a bridge, and they give the expert a new lens to the familiar.

You know that phrase, “show, don’t tell”? — It’s all about making things concrete instead of abstract, but coding is the opposite. You’re turning ideas into a network of abstractions.

Coding is about mechanizing ideas into generalized abstractions so users can spawn specific instances. Essays are about expressing ideas as concrete thoughtscapes so readers can inuit the universal.

Coding is telling, essays are about showing.