Daniel_Burfoot comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (482)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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: Daniel_Burfoot 26 September 2015 09:26:04PM 2 points [-]

I would love to see Munger's list of Bad Judgment Episodes. Or maybe we could have a LW thread enumerating historical examples of bad judgment.