When you've used a mental model that worked brilliantly once, it starts to feel like a law rather than a lens. The 11th-century Tibetan logician Dharmakīrti called this 'apoha gone rigid' — the moment a concept that was built to carve reality at its joints begins instead to wall you inside a particular slice of it. His logic of exclusion showed that every concept we form works by ruling things out, not by capturing essence. The model isn't the territory; it's a strategic elimination. The practical danger for anyone who builds and deploys mental models professionally is what we might call model capture: the framework that once sharpened your vision quietly becomes the boundary of what you can see. The concrete move is this — periodically ask what your favorite model is designed to exclude, and check whether that exclusion still serves you or has simply become invisible.

Pick the mental model you reach for most automatically in your work. What class of situation does it structurally cannot see — and when did you last encounter exactly that situation?

Drawing from Buddhist Epistemology / Tibetan Logic (Dharmakīrtian tradition) — Dharmakīrti (Pramāṇavārttika, c. 7th century CE)