Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
press.stripe.com
press.stripe.com
At the beginning he felt the job to be difficult and stressful, he had to know how to assist planes fly safely and it wasn't always clear what had the highest priority.
So he inversed the problem: what could he do to make the planes crash?
It was easier to do his job by focusing on the things he could do wrong and just avoid those.
It's a powerful framework I use consistently in my life.
I really like Munger. I also love how unfiltered he is.
But in general this is how I've always learned. And some of my best teachers and mentors over the years have been laser focused on what not to do. This really resonates with me, though I find most people aren't built this way. It comes across as a "negative" mindset.
Just about every decision a team considers involves tradeoffs; if not, then it would be a no-brainer and there would be no need to convene a team to discuss it. Getting to the point now, some people will, no matter which alternative is under consideration, do nothing but point out the downside of choosing every option, even if that downside is obvious and known to everyone. Such people aren't insightful contrarians, they are a drag on problem solving. It is also politically safe: no matter which decision is arrived at, if things go wrong they can tsk tsk and say I told you so.
Usually the quickest way to shut them up it to ask them: OK what is your suggestion for what we should do?
1) Often it’s much easier to point out potential issues than it is to properly address them. It can end up as a Gish gallop of low effort criticisms which must be countered on the spot or the initial idea is deemed entirely wrong.
2) If roles aren’t rotated regularly, some people settle into the “problem finder” role and start to prioritise finding problems over the success of the overall project, and now you have a saboteur on the team.
https://www.dezeen.com/2021/11/02/architect-resigns-grotesqu...
https://www.independent.com/2022/07/27/mixed-reviews-ucsb-mu...
It's no puff piece, and students aren't uniformly positive, but it's a reminder that there are many trade-offs in life, and some are pretty open to it
It does have positive quotes from a number of people on the UCSB payroll who would never live there.
> . “On the one hand, it’s really nice,” said McCarthy, who lived in the “funky” Santa Rosa Residence Hall his freshman year. “It’s indisputable. There are all sorts of features — air conditioning, game rooms, balconies, flat-screen TVs in every suite — that would make it the nicest dorm on campus.” He also appreciated the project’s bike-friendly infrastructure
The common retort is that it's the rich people's money so that they should be able to impose whatever living conditions they want on the deprived.
In this case, Munger proposed an efficient donation (in his mind) to help the most students possible with his donation and the university accepted.
Since only billionaires are likely to donate buildings, I think it’s going to be common to have donors influence the design.
I think that forcing unreasonable actions as a condition of charity is bad.
Being forced to live without windows because it makes a billionaire happy seems pretty demeaning (and unreasonable) to me.
If it's so obvious to every random joe with exactly zero experience designing buildings, why did Charlie ignore it?
Have you actually considered his design, or is this just a kneejerk reaction?
I don't know where you're getting random Joes. The bulk of criticism for this design is from architects. Why did Charlie ignore it? Great question. Anyway, they cancelled the building a few months ago.
No, the bulk of the criticism has come from uninformed joes like yourself. Some architects have spoken out against it, and some have spoken for it.
[...]
“We are grateful to Architect Dennis McFadden for his service on the University Design Review Committee and for standing up against this project,” the letter says. “AIASB strongly agrees with Mr. McFadden and the many other voices of opposition and urges the University to take immediately action to halt and reconsider this project in its entirety.”
- Open letter from the the Santa Barbara chapter of the American Institute of Architects
Your strength of feeling on the matter is literally incredible.
In any case, how much or little I care about it is irrelevant to whether it is an uninformed kneejerk reaction.
But hey, however strong I feel, it must be less than how much pg does, since he wrote an entire essay on middlebrow dismissal
Speaking as someone who's done similar things many times. There is some kind of adverse selection process in internet discussions, where we respond when we've had our buttons pushed and it never seems to go well. Even when we had a substantive point to make.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, we all have a common enemy, and it's the way the Internet exploits our humanity to create drama. Let's try to remember that and be charitable to one another.
You can find at least one of <almost any profession> in America who will happily sign off on dubious work in exchange for $$$.
That's capitalism for you.
Yes, there are people with high standards and ethics, but it'd be hard work to find a professional niche that was solely made up of people that couldn't be influenced by a chequebook.
An ugly building is a no brainer .. it's not like it's teetering on the verge of collapse and about to kill all the residents.
And 80% of students who toured a demo space were positive or neutral on it.
No, Munger didn't say they would get no dorms at all if they didn't build it. He said he would not give them $200M if they didn't follow his plans. I'm not aware of his ability to unilaterally prevent the building of dorms on any campus.
What this has to do with architects is that architects don't sign off on unlivable spaces.
They generally don't care that much. If they care a lot about windows in the dorms should they be able to decide?
> And 80% of students who toured a demo space were positive or neutral on it.
Are they deciding if they get windows or not?
> He said he would not give them $200M if they didn't follow his plans.
Right, they needed dorms, Munger said I will give you dorms but I will make you live without windows because it pleases me. As far as I know they didn't have any alternatives.
> What this has to do with architects is that architects don't sign off on unlivable spaces.
The issue isn't whether the space is unlivable, it's whether the students are deciding on what spaces they are living in or are the subject to the depravities of a billionaire. By your logic why can't Munger mandate that full sized murals of himself be painted in every room, or that they have to eat gruel or whatever else entertains him?
I lived in dorms that were, to put it as a roommate did, designed in the same tradition as the Albuquerque jail.
No filter Charlie tends to get cringey at some point.
Less than $25 with taxes on Amazon.
I am in Brazil though, so the shipping adds more $25,53
But holy moly, this book has been a drag for me to read. I actually stopped about half way through. This is 100% on me, of course. I highly recommend reading a sample before buying.
Talk One: Harvard School Commencement Speech (aka Prescription for Guaranteed Misery in life)
Talk Eleven: The Psychology of Human Misjudgement which is the most important talk in the book. Interestingly enough it doesn't have any illustrations or sidebar notes like the other talks.
Then go from there.
It’s reflexive and a tautology - Munger’s best point is actually the point of the existence of the book it is contained within.
Turtles all the way down.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Poor-Charlies-Almanack-Charles-Expand...
Taleb does this exact thought experiment in "Fooled By Randomness." He imagines a pool of investors who are weeded out purely by random luck each iteration of some process. You still end up with people that get some insane track records, purely by chance. In fact, he spends quite a bit of the book talking about barely fictionalized people he knew in the trading world whose strategies made money for long periods of time before blowing up simply because they happened to be in the market at the right time.
I suspect the nuance we need to add to OP's comment was "they were there at the right time AND won the iteration game purely by luck." So they were the tippy top of a cohort in a generally advantaged time where their strategy happened to be optimal. Again I don't personally think that's the case (I believe there's something more fundamentally correct in their approach), but it's a totally reasonable thing to argue even in the absence of other examples.
In a discussion thread [1] on this same book, on this same website back in 2016 I was able to find a citation that the book does not give, for a book Munger did not specify, only described, when I quoted the bit from the book [2] someone was able to come up with what was almost certainly the book Munger had in mind [3].
Reproducing the essential bits of that thread to save the click throughs:
In section 17, Stress-Influence Tendency (p21-22), he mentions some final work by Pavlov, but doesn't provide a citation. I spent some time trying to find it when I first read this years ago, but was unable to. I'm wondering whether it's even reliable: I'd think that work by Pavlov could be found with him as an author, rather than in a "popular paperback" written by an un-named psychiatrist. If anyone knows what book he must have been talking about, or can point to the particular papers by Pavlov, I'd like to know. [1]
""...popular paperback, written by some Rockefeller-financed psychiatrist, when I was trying to figure out..""
Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing - How Evangelists, Psychiatrists, Politicians, and Medicine Men Can Change Your Beliefs and Behavior - William Sargant [4]
"In 1938 Sargant was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship" says author's wiki. I think this book fits the bill." [2]
It does indeed seem to be the book. Thanks.
The author seems to be controversial. The Wikipedia entry on him [1] says things like "his reliance on dogma rather than clinical evidence have confirmed his reputation as a controversial figure whose work is seldom cited in modern psychiatric texts.", and others "described him as 'autocratic, a danger, a disaster' and spoke about 'the damage he did'". [3]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12159242
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12159503
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12159809
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Brainwashing-Evangelists-...