tut comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: elharo 02 September 2015 09:25AM

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Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 16 September 2015 07:57:24AM *  5 points [-]

I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes... I became so avid a collector of instances of bad judgment that I paid no attention to boundaries between professional territories. After all, why should I search for some tiny, unimportant, hard-to-find new stupidity in my own field when some large, important, easy-to-find stupidity was just over the fence in the other fellow's professional territory? Besides, I could already see that real-world problems didn't neatly lie within territorial boundaries. They jumped right across. And I was dubious of any approach that, when two things were inextricably intertwined and interconnected, would try and think about one thing but not the other. I was afraid, if I tried any such restricted approach, that I would end up, in the immortal words of John L. Lewis, "with no brain at all, just a neck that had haired over."

- Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet's partner) in Poor Charlie's Almanack (The Psychology of Human Misjudgment section)

Comment author: tut 16 September 2015 10:35:35AM 4 points [-]

This feels very much like a setup for saying "But I was wrong, you need experience and other background knowledge to even understand these things" or something like that. Is that the continuation in the book?

Comment author: Vaniver 16 September 2015 03:33:27PM 1 point [-]

No. Munger and Buffet both claim that a huge part of their success has simply been avoiding failures, especially of the type caused by poor rationality. Munger in particular was very taken with the same Heuristics and Biases literature that informed much of the Sequences.