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I've been more interested in checklists after hearing Charlie Munger repeatedly espouse them: "...You’ve got all the tools. And you’ve got to have one more tri

I've been more interested in checklists after hearing Charlie Munger repeatedly espouse them: "...You’ve got all the tools. And you’ve got to have one more trick. You’ve got to use those tools checklist-style, because you’ll miss a lot if you just hope that the right tool is going to pop up unaided whenever you need it. But if you’ve got a full list of tools, and go through them in your mind, checklist-style, you will find a lot of answers that you won’t find any other way." http://www.tilsonfunds.com/MungerUCSBspeech.pdf http://www.tilsonfunds.com/MungerUCSBspeech.pdf

zb 17y ago
That's a great talk, but I sort of took away the opposite from it. Munger mentions checklists and algorithms a couple of times, but it's clear that what he is really talking about are heuristics ("I was using some rough algorithms that work pretty well in a great many complex systems"). The problem with checklists is that they don't allow the possibility that the checklist may be wrong. Heuristics are in this sense the opposite of algorithms. It's the reliance on algorithms that leads to the sort of false precision that Munger is complaining about: When I talk about this false precision, this great hope for reliable, precise formulas, I am reminded of Arthur Laffer.... His trouble is his craving for false precision, which is not an adult way of dealing with his subject matter.