Economics at times gets dismissed as pseudo-science. The criticism isn't 100% wrong - macro models fail to predict recessions, policy prescriptions conflict, economists famously disagree about everything. When people hate economics, they're hating the outputs - the semi-working modelling of complex reality, but not engaging with the tools that economists actually use. Opportunity cost isn't a model as such, it's a thinking tool: "What's the next-best use of this resource?" That operation remains valuable whether or not any particular economic model works. Comparative advantage, marginal thinking, stock-flow distinctions, mechanism design - all of these are lenses to look at reality that transfer to problems far outside economics.

So I used Claude to extract the tools from economics domain and then realized the pattern applied everywhere. This became a project: 32 domains, 450+ reasoning tools. Bayesian statistics, system dynamics, operations research, evolutionary biology, classical rhetoric, military strategy and 26 others.

The extraction principle: separate the mental operations from the domain-specific content. Keep the moves that survive even when the specific models fail.

Each tool follows the same structure: what it is, why it matters, the key mental move, where it originated, where it surprisingly transfers, how it fails when misapplied, and where to go deeper.

These tools are now published on GitHub: https://github.com/dvdarkin/reasoning-tools packaged and ready for use as a knowledgebase with metadata, original extraction prompt and navigational structure.

There are more domains in the pipeline, which hold their own thinking primitives, not as easily transferrable perhaps, but maybe worth doing later.

Pls let me know if you find this useful, share your criticism, or submit a PR.