Charlie Munger: Practical Thought About Practical Thought?

Talk 4 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. See The Eleven Talks of Poor Charlie’s Almanack for the full collection.

Key Takeaways

Self-Criticism is a critical skill; the ability to disagree with yourself in order to better understand yourself. #Self

Highlights & Notes

Kyle’s reading layer from Poor Charlie’s Almanack, preserved verbatim. Munger’s text and pulled-in source quotes appear as bullets; Kyle’s own annotations appear as Kyle: callouts.

• First Notion: The first helpful notion is that it is usually best to simplify problems by deciding big “no-brainer” questions first.
• Second Notion: The second helpful notion mimics Galileo’s conclusion that scientific reality is often revealed only by math as if math was the language of God. Galileo’s attitude also works well in messy, practical life. Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhabit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. #God is a Scientist
• Third Notion: Carl Jacobi so often said, “Invert, always invert.” #Inversion
• Fourth Notion: The fourth helpful notion is that the best and most practical wisdom is elementary academic wisdom. But there is one extremely important qualification: You must think in a multidisciplinary manner. You must routinely use all the easy-to-learn concepts from the freshman course in every basic subject. Where elementary ideas will serve, your problem solving must not be limited, as academia and many business bureaucracies are limited, by extreme balkanization into disciplines and subdisciplines, with strong taboos against any venture outside assigned territory. Instead, you must do your multidisciplinary thinking in accord with Benjamin Franklin’s prescription in Poor Richard: “If you want it done, go. If not, send.”
• If, in your thinking, you rely entirely on others, often through purchase of professional advice, whenever outside a small territory of your own, you will suffer much calamity.

  Kyle: Decentralized Brain: it’s fine to have nodes, but constantly work to expand your own sphere of knowledge (e.g. a bigger territory)

• Fifth Notion: The fifth helpful notion is that really big effects, lollapalooza effects, will often come only from large combinations of factors.
• “If you get to thinking you’re a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else’s dog around.” (Will Rogers) #Spirit of Humility
• Third, with so much success coming, we must avoid bad effects from Envy, which is given a prominent place in the Ten Commandments because envy is so much a part of human nature. The best way to avoid envy, recognized by Aristotle, is to plainly deserve the success we get. We will be fanatic about product quality, quality of product presentation, and reasonableness of prices, considering the harmless pleasure we will provide.
• Academic psychology, while it is admirable and useful as a list of ingenious and important experiments, lacks intradisciplinary synthesis. #Multidisciplinary Thinking
• Academic psychology departments are immensely more important and useful than other academic departments think. And, at the same time, the psychology departments are immensely worse than most of their inhabitants think. It is, of course, normal for self-appraisal to be more positive than external appraisal. Indeed, a problem of this sort may have given you your speaker today.
• In so behaving, the University of Chicago is imitating Charles Darwin, who spent much of his long life thinking in reverse as he tried to disprove his own hardest-won and best-loved ideas. And so long as there are parts of academia that keep alive its best values by thinking in reverse like Darwin, we can confidently expect that silly educational practices will eventually be replaced by better ones, exactly as Carl Jacobi might have predicted. #Self-Criticism

  Kyle: Not “killing your babies.” Thinking through the inverse of your beliefs doesn’t mean you believe them less. It means you’re more prepared to believe them strongly. #Inversion

• This will happen because the Darwinian approach, with its habitual objectivity taken on as a sort of hair shirt, is a mighty approach, indeed. No less a figure than Albert Einstein said that one of the four causes of his achievement was Self-Criticism, ranking right up there alongside curiosity, concentration, and perseverance.
• As matters worked out, my 1996 talk failed to get through to almost all people hearing it. Then later, between 1996 and 2006, even when the talk’s written version was slowly read twice by very intelligent people who admired me, its message likewise failed. In almost all cases the message did not get through in any constructive way. On the other hand, no one said to me that the talk was wrong. Instead, people were puzzled briefly, then moved on. Thus my failure as a communicator was even more extreme than the cognitive failure I was trying to explain. Why? The best explanation, I now think, is that I displayed gross folly as an amateur teacher. I attempted too much. #Teaching #Simplify and Intensify
• Readers of the Second and Third Edition, if they wish, can correct somewhat for the teaching defects that I have stubbornly retained. That is, they can re-read Talk Four after mastering the final Talk. If they are willing to endure this ordeal, I predict that at least some of them will find the result worth the effort.
• “Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.” (Chinese Proverb)

  Kyle: INVITE others to come unto Christ; that’s all we can do #Preach My Gospel