Putting Mental Models to Practice Part 5: Skill Extraction

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This is Part 5 of a series of posts on putting mental models to practice. In Part 1 I described my problem with Munger's latticework of mental models in service of decision-making after I applied it to my life. In Part 2 I argued that the study of rationality is a good place to start for a framework of practice. We learnt that Farnam Street's list of mental models consists of three types of models: descriptive models, thinking models concerned with judgment (epistemic rationality), and thinking models concerned with decision making (instrumental rationality).

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/putting-mental-models-to-practice-part-5-skill-extraction/
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I’m revisiting this article with the context of GenAI being what it is in 2025. Some important questions I’m rumintating on I’d love to discuss with the brilliant minds here:

  • Can CDM/skill extraction/other TBD methods be viable foundation for capturing, organizing, and storing all the knowledge held in an organization?
  • How can we use LLMs to extract knowledge from individuals of an organization at scale?
  • Do any current enterprise data models support knowledge extraction and management, or do we need to invent something new?
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