Philosophy
“You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”
— Charlie Munger, A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom
Having an "inner scorecard" can be liberating and foster independent thinking, but ultimately human beings must also subject themselves to the judgment of key people in their lives.
It makes no sense to engage in short term relationships with investments, but it is also hazardous to fall in love with a company or its management.
Passive consumption of information is not enough to earn true wisdom. Leo Tolstoy advocated serious efforts to leverage what we learn from others. There are no shortcuts.
In 1796, George Washington left his countrymen with insights on factionalism, respect for the constitution, separation of powers, debt, taxes, and foreign policy.
Blind rage manifested as hatred is one of the least productive emotions and is almost guaranteed to impair your decision making capabilities and cause serious errors.
During a long lifetime, human beings witness many changes in the world that seem to progress slowly but have massive cumulative effects.
Charlie Munger has said that one should never think about anything else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives. Poorly thought out incentive systems cause harm.
As much as we would like to believe that we are in full control of our lives, the reality is that much is out of our hands. Stoicism helps us deal with life's inevitable uncertainties.
Human beings feel the pain of loss much more intensely than the pleasure of an equivalent gain and there are important consequences stemming from this tendency.
Without a baseline level of trust, society will cease to function effectively. How can we decide how trusting to be without exposing ourselves to excessive risk?
Seneca said that "life is long if you know how to use it." But modernity presents us with a nearly infinite number of ways to waste time and fall short of our human potential.
In complex or confusing situations, our brains tend to overweight information that is easily available even if there are more important factors that we are less cognizant of.
Never before has information been so readily available to people due to constant connectivity, but this has come at a cost. It is harder to reach a "flow state" amid the constant noise.
Modern life encourages us to seek wisdom by adding new sources to our information diet. But "Via Negativa" suggests that true wisdom often comes through subtraction.
Charlie Munger distilled his study of the psychology of human misjudgment into twenty-five common thinking errors that we all should vigilantly guard against.