Mental Model

Many people treat mental models as hocus pocus knowledge. They confuse mental models with just models, check out this sentence:

Entropy is a mental model that helps you understand how disorder and decay work.

Or this list of mental models.

I honestly believe this people don't understand what thinking means, nor what the mind does. We have developed models to understand and predict how nature behaves. The predictive power of a model is what allowed humanity to design an airplane, a nuclear power station or vaccines.

However, mental models are completely different, they relate to how we internalize and build on the stimuli to which we are exposed. Entropy is not a mental model, but a quantity that was carefully defined in order to predict how order and decay work.

This has nothing to do with how our minds actually perceive disorder. In fact, there is even a chance that our brains compress so much the information they receive that disorder will be averaged out (for example non-symmetrical buildings are sometimes not even perceived as non-symmetrical), or that the only misplaced element is the one that grabs our attention.