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Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

mdp2021·

I just finished reading pages from Charlie Munger about the importance of putting disincentives to undesirable behaviour.

What one finds excessive is, of course, cultural. The pages ended remembering the tribe of two millennia ago who killed the last warrior to show at the assembly, or the use of George Washington to hang farm-boy deserters forty feet high as an example.

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Watched the most recent Berkshire Hathaway meeting which was really fascinating. However, Munger seems like he doesn't challenge his assumptions very often and also builds anecdotes whole cloth without alot of true historical facts to back up the claims.

Which book/essay are you referring to?

"The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment"

Text accessible e.g. at fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/

> However

He is having fun trying to transmit wisdom of his to the interested. That is the scope.

Did Munger have any citations for these two claims? There seems to be plenty of discussion around on what executions did or didn't happen during the American revolutionary war, but I couldn't find anything even close to hanging farm-boy deserters "forty feet high". On the 2000 year old tribe, I couldn't find anything at all.

If Native Americans displayed undesirable behavior such as not accepting his "fair price" for their land George did have them "extirpated".

Somehow I doubt that this tribe had a lot of successful wars...

> two millennia ago who killed the last warrior to show at the assembly

Given Shaka Zulu, you don't have to go back that far.

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