Everything Charlie Munger has said about avoiding stupidity
Munger holds that extraordinary results come less from brilliance than from systematically dodging standard stupidities: invert problems to see how they fail, respect the outsized power of incentives, and guard against the poisons of envy, self-pity, ideological anger, and the lollapalooza effects that arise when several biases combine.
6 points · 4 appearances · 2007–2020
How the view evolved
Combined biases create lollapalooza effects → Just try to avoid being stupid
In the 1995 Harvard speech the defense against misjudgment is maximal: master a 24-item checklist and analyze how biases combine into lollapalooza effects. By the 2020 Caltech interview the same project is stated as radical simplification — rub your nose in your own mistakes, keep a margin of safety, park hard problems on a 'too hard pile', 'I just try and avoid being stupid' — the elaborate taxonomy internalized into a few blunt heuristics.
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6 points · 4 appearances · 2007–2020 · changed view
“I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with when I saw this patterned irrationality which was so extreme. And I had no theory or anything to deal with it. But I could see that it was extreme and I could see that it was patterned. I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life.”
8 points · 7 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view
“Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out — although that's probably a lower use of productivity — but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”
5 points · 5 appearances · 2024–2026 · changed view
“The observation is that don't die is the most played game by everyone all over the world every day. You and I breathe every few seconds, we look both ways before we cross the street, we all play don't die. So it's played more than capitalism, it's played more than any religion. It's the most played game in the world.”
6 points · 4 appearances · 2015–2026 · changed view
“It turns out it's not that important to be smart; it's much, much more important to be determined. If you imagine this hypothetical person who's like a hundred out of a hundred for smart and a hundred out of a hundred for determination, and then you start taking away determination, it doesn't take very long before you have this sort of ineffectual but brilliant person. Whereas if you take someone who's super, super determined and you start taking away smartness bit by bit, eventually you get to some guy who owns a lot of taxi medallions — but he's still rich. Or like a trash hauling business or something like that.”