Agreed. This is basically folk cognitive science, slapping together random post-hoc explanations from popularized cog-sci terms and other domains from a few generations ago. I believe the target market is people who want to feel smart as they acquire the propositional knowledge of these so-called mental models.

Moden research demonstates wisdom, which is very roughly a measure of being a good, relevant general problem solver, doesn’t seem to work that way. There is no correlation of number of mental models in ones “head” (their words, embodied cognition weeps) with being a good general problem solver. At the very least, the problem of knowing which mental model to apply to what problem is still required and there is no meta-algorithm that can be developed for that.

Additionally, as you point out, tacit knowledge comes with participating in an activity, carrying out a procedure, acquiring a specific percpetive, all of which constitute different types of knowledge, which memorizing a random menu of “mental models” can’t ever substitute for.

But I applaud their ability to squeeze 2 volumes of 10$ books out of this material. Apparently their money making heuristic is working just fine, and I bet they haven’t used any of their own models for that because it actually seems to work.