One of the most brilliant pieces of wisdom I got from Munger comes from his early years when he was a flight operator at some navy or air force base.
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.
Yeah, I like this and I think the same way. Except it's not popular at work, where everything has to be polite and pleasant and delivered gently. I'm constantly thinking about what could go wrong, poking holes in plans, trying to minimize bad outcomes. People don't like this.
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.
Obviously, I don't know the specifics about you. However, one thing I have witnessed many times is the following.
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?
This kind of adversarial design work is great if you can get the right people involved. The problems I’ve seen when you get the wrong people, though, are:
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.
I don't have a horse in the race, but maybe before jumping to conclusions people should read the reactions of students themselves? They're very easy to find:
Every student quote in that piece is either overt criticism, or qualified praise (“I personally would not want to live there,” he said. “I would feel trapped”).
It does have positive quotes from a number of people on the UCSB payroll who would never live there.
Yes, no one praises the lack of windows, because it'll be weird to be thankful for something normal that is missing. But the lack of windows aren't just a middle finger to the students, their absence allows for greater freedom in design of the building. So you have students praising the relatively large private rooms. Which would not be possible without the lack of windows.
No one said there was praise about the lack of windows. I said there are no positive comments from students quoted in that piece other than the guy who would feel trapped living there.
> Many students expressed enthusiasm over the privacy the single rooms would offer, Reyes said, as well as a promise from the university that Munger Hall housing costs would remain 20-30 percent below the market rate of nearby Isla Vista.
> . “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 question isn't whether windowless dorms are good or bad, it's whether the students who live in dorms should decide or should it be dictated by the richest people in the world.
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.
Yes by this logic if a poor person doesn't have food it's okay for a billionaire to make him dance a jig for them to in order to eat. If a school doesn't have funds for buildings a billionaire should be able to mandate that they teach Charlie-Munger thought for one hour a day in order to stay open.
I don’t think this building is the equivalent of either of those things. More like it’s the equivalent of a billionaire is a pescatarian and they only offer to provide sushi meals to people and refuse to buy hamburgers.
UCSB is notoriously sparse on housing, so it sounds like a lot of students do prefer the privacy and quiet of Munger's dorm to the more fratty atmosphere of IV. But if options were better...
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.
“Our collective response to this proposal is not a critique of style, rather this is a critique of the unacceptable, inhumane living conditions that will no doubt have a psychological impact on its inhabitants and the community at large,” the letter reads. “This project shows complete disregard to the building’s scale and proportion in relationship to its immediate surroundings and the negative impact it will have to the community in which it’s located.”
[...]
“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
Munger is not a trained architect. Just as I would not want to undergo surgery by someone without a medical degree, I wouldn't want to live in a building not designed by an actual architect. Being rich doesn't suddenly make you an expert in all fields.
Large buildings cannot be built in America without the sign off of licensed architect. No architect would sign off on the building of it was an unlivable monstrosity.
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.
I can't believe there are many architects signing off for money on dubious designs, since they wouldn't be architects for long as soon as one thing went wrong with the building.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make. Normally students would be able to say that they don't want windowless dorms. In this case Munger said that if they didn't build windowless dorms they wouldn't get dorms at all. What does this have to do with architects?
Students generally don't have much say over the design of their dorms.
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.
Love Charlie, love his insights, love listening to the little nuggets he has to say in the shareholder meetings.
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.
I've read it a few times. I would recommend reading:
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.
I have the unwieldy hardcover version [1] published by Walsworth in 2005. It's a great read. It's hard for me to hate a guy who ascribes his success to being fiercely curious about everything.
It will be interesting if it repeats. He may just be a guy that existed in one of the most privileged eras in human history for making money like that, like a colonist writing a book about how easy it is to get free land in America.
Not necessarily. For the record I'm in the camp "they didn't just get lucky," but it's totally plausible to argue that they did.
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.
I wish I could find it again but I can’t, but there was a fascinating applet kind of thing that showed even with perfectly equal odds starting out after it runs for a while you see some of the bars start accumulating wealth and it does not end up evenly distributed. It’s actually quite skewed at the end with a top class that accumulated most of the wealth. It taught me a lot about the rich and how they got there and how much I should listen to their advice. Now I’m not saying the rich don’t make smart moves, because some certainly do, but even in a completely equal world we would still have some people that didn’t do anything at all except be lucky get to that tier. I do think there are things you can massively do to increase your odds such as saving, investing intelligently using compound interest, not buying crap you don’t need, not get divorced, invest in your health, work hard, etc.
Decades-long buy and hold investing. Buy once then sit on your ass for 40 years. This works quite well but is actually surprisingly hard to do for most people.
I read this book fairly carefully a number of years ago, found a lot of good stuff worth taking notes on. I'm glad to see it becoming more easily available. Stripe is also good. I have their printing of Hamming's The Art of Doing Science and Engineering and am quite happy with the quality of the printing and binding.
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]
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.