More on Coderacy and Mental Models

Francis Fukuyama speaks of mental models.

His latest book, The Origins of Political Order¹, delves into prehuman history and attempts to explain the increasing growth and complexity of human social structure and organization. In its earliest chapters, I was excited to see the book engage in a brief discussion of human cognitive architecture — including cognitive biases — which Fukuyama leverages against his understanding of human social practice. But Fukuyama also suggests something that, while obvious, I hadn’t fully considered.

He says that language is the machinery by which mental models are constructed. As human language evolved, our species developed more complex and predictive models, which we then applied successfully to our environment. It’s a rather obvious point, but also a powerful one when you acknowledge it explicitly.

Once you accept that humans use language to model their environment, it becomes very hard to disagree with the point I make in Programming, Education, and Rationality. Coderacy² encourages rational thought because a programming language, like mathematical formalism, is just a different kind of language. Codearcy augments the mental language we use to build models of the world, and does so quite powerfully.

Human languages are ambiguous. This is a great strength when it comes to artistic expression, but not one without tradeoffs. Ambiguous models are bad models³ — in fact, they aren’t really models at all, in the scientific sense. So the rationalist is well-served by a mental framework which allows them to construct unambiguous and consistent mental models. Coderacy helps provide this framework.

One you’re coderate, you begin to think in terms of code, algorithms and processes. Code doesn’t allow for ambiguity, or sanction those wonderful cracks which render the English language open to interpretation and modern literary criticism. Coderacy enables the sort of unambiguous language that a truly predictive model requires. So here’s the three step plan:

Become coderate, build a better mental model, and rule the world⁴.