Mental Models Archives - Inverted Passion

What domains will be the last ones to get automated from AI?

April 26, 2026April 26, 2026Paras ChopraMental Models

The most useful way to think about AI capabilities is to think of target domains in terms of 3 orthogonal axis:

Ease of building a verifier (coding is easy, lab equipment manipulation is hard)
Causal complexity in terms of number of confounds (math problems is low as answers don’t depend on external factors, startup success is high complexity as it depends on many random factors)
Economic attractiveness (high for coding, low for many domains)

What we’ve seen the first to be automated are domains where building verifiers is easy, causal complexity is less and economic attractiveness is high.

No wonder coding is the first one to see big jump.

But inflated valuations of AI companies need to be justified, so I fully expect that these companies will keep attacking the next best domain they can until they exhaust the economic attractiveness constraint. ... Read the entire post →

How to coach someone

April 5, 2026April 8, 2026Paras ChopraMental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ... Read the entire post →

How does behavior change happen

March 22, 2026April 5, 2026Paras ChopraMental Models, Psychology

The two views of rationality

March 1, 2026April 5, 2026Paras ChopraMental Models, Psychology

Making a product that Marl loves

February 15, 2026April 5, 2026Paras ChopraMental Models, Psychology

Science of habit building

January 25, 2026April 5, 2026Paras ChopraMental Models, Psychology

Usefulness grounds truth

July 7, 2024July 10, 2024Paras ChopraMental Models, Philosophy

Are LLMs intelligent?

Debates on this question often, but not always, devolve into debates on what LLMs can or cannot do. To a limited extent, the original question is useful because it creates an opening for people to go into specifics. But, beyond that initial use, the question quickly empties itself because (obviously) the answer to the question if X is intelligence depends on how you define intelligence (and how you define X).

Even though it is clear that words are inherently empty, internet is full of such debates. People focus on syntax, when semantics is what runs the world. ... Read the entire post →

Games are problems people pay to solve

April 22, 2023April 22, 2023Paras ChopraBook Summary, Mental Models

Good definitions are powerful. Lately, while reading The Art of Game Design, it became clear to me that the author’s definition of games makes a lot of sense. He defines games as problems that people pay to solve with either their time or money.

Unlike movies or books, games are not passive: they require an active participation and in that sense, they’re problems to be solved. And the fact that we willingly pay (with time or money) to solve those problems is fascinating.

Even though I’m not a gamer, I’m building a consumer startup in the behavior change domain and that’s pushing me to study games. Specifically, I’m interested in exploring what is that about great games that people will spend many hundreds of hours trying to master them, while most consumer experiences (including courses purchased or apps installed) have a ~90% churn of users on day 1 itself. ... Read the entire post →

Wealth is not money, it’s the things we use money for

March 4, 2023March 4, 2023Paras ChopraMental Models

As an entrepreneur, money is obviously a massive motivation for why you’re doing what you’re doing. However, it’s essential to understand that money is not wealth.

Wealth is stuff we want and by that logic, people can be wealthy even if they don’t have a lot of money. In fact, because wealth is anything that is directly desired and attained, even animals and insects can be wealthy.

The reason money is so popular because it allows us to acquire (certain types of) wealth. Money will be worthless if what you desire cannot be bought, or if there’s nothing you desire. Because most of what we desire can be had for cheap in modern society, the importance of money in our society is reinforced by people who are excessively driven by status. ... Read the entire post →

You can only succeed if you know how you can fail

February 18, 2023February 18, 2023Paras ChopraMental Models

We want to be successful with our decisions. Even though failure is often glamorized, nobody wants it on purpose. Everyone wishes to be successful when they’re starting a company, launching a product, hiring a leader or even while buying a house.

It may sound obvious, but the bedrock of good decisions is defining what good means before you execute on a decision.

*Success criteria has to be defined before a project starts, not after it ends*

Here’s why it’s important to define a clear, objective and unambiguous criteria before making any decision. First, without a commitment to an objective criterion, your brain will latch onto your how you’re feeling to decide whether the outcome of the project is good or bad. These emotions are influenced by all sorts of subconscious cognitive biases. In the end, you will end up picking data points that support your emotional inclination while ignoring the other data points. ... Read the entire post →