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.