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The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (2005) [pdf]
- kelukelugames 10y agoThank you for posting this. I've read dozens of psychology books and articles. Even though they repeat the same principles, they are always a fun read. But I never apply them. Do people have guidance on how to start using this knowledge?
- rini17 10y agoBest by taking failures honestly. Almost always psychological stuff can be discerned. Any failure will do, but bigger ones tend to be more edifying.
- EdwardCoffin 10y agoIn 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.
- dfsegoat 10y agoNot sure if it is the case here at all. But sometimes those old Soviet-bloc "original research" documents can be hard to find. An example of this elsewhere is the Levenshtein distance -- everybody knows what this is, but the actual original document was a Soviet-era journal: Влади́мир И. Левенштейн (1965). Двоичные коды с исправлением выпадений, вставок и замещений символов [Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals]. Доклады Академий Наук СCCP (in Russian) 163 (4): 845–8. Appeared in English as: Levenshtein, Vladimir I. (February 1966). "Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals". Soviet Physics Doklady 10 (8): 707–710.
- niftich 10y agoGiven the productivity of Russian academics and the difficulty in obtaining a lot of these journals, has there been a concentrated effort to make these available for a modern, web-enabled audience?
- dfsegoat 10y agoThat would be quite interesting to know actually.
- EdwardCoffin 10y agoAnother possibility that occurred to me is that the subject matter of this particular paper is pretty unpleasant, perhaps any potential translators simply shied away from it.
- Enzolangellotti 10y agoRom Harre's Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat (Oxford University Press) covers some of his experiments. Daniel Todes' Biography of Pavlov presents some of the material as well.
- treme 10y ago""...popular paperback, written by some Rockefeller-financed psychiatrist, when I was trying to figure out.."" https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Brainwashing-Evangelists-Psychiatrists/dp/1883536065 https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Brainwashing-Evangelists-... "In 1938 Sargant was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship" says author's wiki. I think this book fits the bill.
- EdwardCoffin 10y agoIt 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'". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant
- whack 10y agoI realize this is going to make me sound rather dull-minded, but despite the pdf sounding very interesting, I don't have much inclination to read 27 pages of it without knowing more. Can someone summarize the author's main thesis, and whether he's able to robustly justify that thesis with supporting evidence?
- angersock 10y agoSure, they totally did! (And because you didn't read it, you'll never know if I'm bullshitting you or not. Don't outsource your thinking.)
- euyyn 10y agoThat's like not reading reviews before going to a restaurant.
- athenot 10y agoAnd there are good reasons to not read them, either. I happen to like many ethnic foods and like exploring restaurants that I believe might be authentic. Those restaurants often have poor reviews because of customers who were there more for the dining experience than the food quality. Or they are expecting something that doesn't jive with the cuisine (eg. "that Filet Mignon was totally undercooked, and when they brought it back well done, it was so tough I couldn't eat it."). So in many cases, restaurant reviews are useless to me. Papers are similar in that I may be evaluating them under different criteria than those giving me the summary.
- euyyn 10y agoI mean, that's why you read them reviews, instead of just looking at the overall score. For the cases when the thing reviewed is actually shitty according to criteria you share, saving you the time and money.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago> Don't outsource your thinking Should he believe you or not? I'm baffled.
- eigenvalue 10y agoYou can also listen to him giving this speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws I revisit this material every couple years. It's so easy to fall into these traps in your thinking.
- sivers 10y agoThis is by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's less-public partner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger There are two great books collecting his thoughts: https://sivers.org/book/SeekingWisdom https://sivers.org/book/SeekingWisdom https://www.poorcharliesalmanack.com/pca.php https://www.poorcharliesalmanack.com/pca.php His main quip is, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there." It's meant metaphorically, in that his approach to success is mainly to just avoid mistakes. (He's my hero.)
- danvoell 10y agoInteresting. I've read quite a few of Buffett's year-end reports, I wonder how much of these are written by Munger? Their writing style seems to overlap a little.
- dforrestwilson 10y agoCharlie influences Warren's style for sure. He edits the rough drafts and gives feedback to Warren.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- johnwheeler 10y agoThanks Derek. Here's more information about Charlie Munger: He lost his three year old son to cancer. He has a glass eye due to a botched surgery. He didn't start accumulating wealth until his late thirties. He owns a huge catamaran boat: http://sbsail.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/011-IMG_0019.jpg http://sbsail.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/011-IMG_0019.jp... Also, Charlie frequently mentions inversion as one of the most powerful mental models. Another powerful model says the models themselves can combine to have a multiplicative, "lollapalooza" effects. In that, he stresses being multidisciplinary. To the man with a hammer, everything's a nail. Combining ideas from philosophy, psychology, economics, finance, and even chaos theory--rationality is Charlie's highest virtue. Here's a list of books Charlie recommends you read to gain insight into the Munger System. http://www.mymentalmodels.info/charlie-munger-reading-list/ http://www.mymentalmodels.info/charlie-munger-reading-list/ Poor Charlie's Almanac is fantastic. There's a story about Coca-Cola being a 2 trillion dollar company one day that will raise your eyebrows and give you insight into how they think about investments. If you're like me and you can't get enough, kill a few hours with these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ibabROYccs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ibabROYccs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEBX5z56WPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEBX5z56WPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6RS_PqudxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6RS_PqudxU
- zafka 10y agoThis article was updated in 2005 according to end notes.
- mmaunder 10y agoAlong the same vein, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow does a comprehensive job of explaining why humans are really bad intuitive statisticians and how the systems in our brain make decisions. He's the authority on the subject and the book is revered by many in the psychology field and outside.
- ableal 10y agoAlthough this scan is quite readable, I did a cursory search for a cleaner PDF. Failed, but the first hit was a nice transcript of the original talk: http://www.rbcpa.com/mungerspeech_june_95.pdf http://www.rbcpa.com/mungerspeech_june_95.pdf It's interesting that the material was heavily rearranged for 2005 version (submitted PDF scan), which is acknowledged at the end to be a combination and enhancement of three talks.
- spoinkaroo 10y agoIs this speech available in a plaintext format for ease of reading? I couldn't seem to locate it.
- t27 10y agoHere's a web article version of this PDF, which I had converted some time back. There are some minor hyphenation issues, but otherwise I have fixed the formatting so that it shows up good on web and mobile displays. Obviously, all credit goes to Charlie Munger. https://t27.github.io/to-read/MungerMisjudgement.html https://t27.github.io/to-read/MungerMisjudgement.html I'll be glad to take PR's on the github repo for fixes to any errors that may have come up in the conversion of the PDF article
- egd 10y agoOh that's much better. How'd you do the conversion?
- t27 10y agoI found a pdf version which, unlike the link above, was not a scanned copy. It had the proper text. Used a web based pdf to doc converter, fixed some formatting and converted the .doc to html using libre office. To fix artifacts, fonts and other extra html, I used plain old regex based find and replace on Atom. Finally used the stackedit css for the fonts and styles.