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)
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?
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.
There’s some usefulness to it; but the thing is, if it’s an easy to find stupidity, then it’s a stupidity that you already know to be a stupidity. It teaches you comparatively little about good or bad judgment.
A hard-to-find stupidity is one that’s subtle and difficult to recognise. It’s one that is not obviously a stupidity, one that you do not easily recognise on sight. Therefore, a hard-to-find stupidity will teach you more about the difference between good and bad judgment than an easy-to-find one...
Also, the importance of the stupidities is largely irrelevant to the stated goal—the importance of the consequences has little effect on how good or bad the judgment behind the decision was.
(Now, if you’re trying to fix stupidities, instead of learning from them, then the large, important, easy-to-find ones are the ones to look at...)
if it’s an easy to find stupidity, then it’s a stupidity that you already know to be a stupidity. It teaches you comparatively little about good or bad judgment
Eh, I don’t know about that. Many similar stupidities look radically different in different contexts. It’s hard to overstate the effect of formulations, frameworks, and angles of view on the perception of basically the same things. I think what Charlie Munger was doing was looking for patterns which he could then discern in unexpected places.
Easy-to-find vs hard -to-find is mostly a difference in context. Put Waldo into a picture of a night sky and, well...
Hmmm. You are right that an easy-to-find stupidity in one case may be hard to find in another. But finding it in the easy case does not always make it all that much easier to find in the hard case—finding Waldo in a picture of the night sky does not make a Where’s Waldo book any easier.
...of course, knowing what Waldo looks like does make it easier to know when you have found him.
Unless the other fellow isn’t an idiot, so that “large, important, easy-to-find stupidity in the other fellow’s professional territory” is correspondingly more likely to be imaginary.
That sounds clever, but is it actually anywhere near true?
I went to the Wikipedia “timeline of science” page and sampled a bunch of 20th-century advances. Maybe about 10. Not one of them had anything to do with anyone being forced to change fields.
I have no idea who Peter Borden is (nor for that matter any idea whether he actually said it: “Most quotations on the internet are made up”—Abraham Lincoln) but I would at this point suspect him of being too ready to believe things merely because they sound good.
I don’t think it’s remotely true. Only Newton comes to mind as a possible example, and only if we accept the claim that he wouldn’t have written so much about physics if he could have published his critique of the divinity of Jesus.
That sounds clever, but is it actually anywhere near true?
It was a convenient quote, but I admit it overstates its case. A more defensible version would probably sound like “A disproportionate amount of advances in science comes from outsiders to the field”.
The three names which pop into my head without going to Google are Schliemann (and Calvert), Wegener, and Sokal :-)
So, Schliemann and Calvert were indeed amateurs. Wegener seems to have been as much polymath as field-switcher (aside from continental drift, he worked in meteorology and astronomy). Sokal’s work in mathematics and physics seems (1) not particularly, ah, boundary-transgressing and (2) not especially notable, so I guess you are referring to his foray into bullshit-hunting; that was indeed successful but I don’t see that it was a major advance in science.
This doesn’t seem like a disproportionate amount. In fact, I would naively expect quite a lot of major advances to come from that sort of cross-fertilization, and I was rather surprised to find no field-switchers in my sample. So perhaps we can amend it to “Somewhat fewer scientific advances than one would expect come from people switching fields for any reason”?
As I said, this was just off the top of my head without any Google assists. I suspect at least part of this idea goes back to Popper and his necessity of periodic revolutions to clear out the deadwood and establish the new base for advancing further.
I don’t expect that trying to make a hard fact out of my observation is going to be useful. For one, to make it at least falsifiable we’d need hard definitions of “disproportionate” and “advances”, plus we’re already talking of expectations, so it’s going to be either a mess or a pedantic slog. If you think the observation is misleading, well, it’s not the first time we disagree on fuzzy things :-)
I also don’t expect that trying to make a hard fact out of the observation is going to be useful; but not because some of the words in it are fuzzy, but because any halfway reasonable definition of them is going to make it flatly wrong. At any rate, I hope we can agree that the original claim in the original quotation is flatly wrong.
- Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet’s partner) in Poor Charlie’s Almanack (The Psychology of Human Misjudgment section)
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?
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.
Surely that’s precisely the sort that’s most useful to find, categorise, and note down as an example to avoid later...
I don’t know about hard to find, but surely searching for large and important stupidities is more useful..?
There’s some usefulness to it; but the thing is, if it’s an easy to find stupidity, then it’s a stupidity that you already know to be a stupidity. It teaches you comparatively little about good or bad judgment.
A hard-to-find stupidity is one that’s subtle and difficult to recognise. It’s one that is not obviously a stupidity, one that you do not easily recognise on sight. Therefore, a hard-to-find stupidity will teach you more about the difference between good and bad judgment than an easy-to-find one...
Also, the importance of the stupidities is largely irrelevant to the stated goal—the importance of the consequences has little effect on how good or bad the judgment behind the decision was.
(Now, if you’re trying to fix stupidities, instead of learning from them, then the large, important, easy-to-find ones are the ones to look at...)
Eh, I don’t know about that. Many similar stupidities look radically different in different contexts. It’s hard to overstate the effect of formulations, frameworks, and angles of view on the perception of basically the same things. I think what Charlie Munger was doing was looking for patterns which he could then discern in unexpected places.
Easy-to-find vs hard -to-find is mostly a difference in context. Put Waldo into a picture of a night sky and, well...
Hmmm. You are right that an easy-to-find stupidity in one case may be hard to find in another. But finding it in the easy case does not always make it all that much easier to find in the hard case—finding Waldo in a picture of the night sky does not make a Where’s Waldo book any easier.
...of course, knowing what Waldo looks like does make it easier to know when you have found him.
Unless the other fellow isn’t an idiot, so that “large, important, easy-to-find stupidity in the other fellow’s professional territory” is correspondingly more likely to be imaginary.
On the other hand, the other fellow didn’t get the advantage of hindsight!
That is a potentially valid reason, assuming you can point to what specifically the other fellow failed to foresee.
“Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields”—Peter Borden
That sounds clever, but is it actually anywhere near true?
I went to the Wikipedia “timeline of science” page and sampled a bunch of 20th-century advances. Maybe about 10. Not one of them had anything to do with anyone being forced to change fields.
I have no idea who Peter Borden is (nor for that matter any idea whether he actually said it: “Most quotations on the internet are made up”—Abraham Lincoln) but I would at this point suspect him of being too ready to believe things merely because they sound good.
I don’t think it’s remotely true. Only Newton comes to mind as a possible example, and only if we accept the claim that he wouldn’t have written so much about physics if he could have published his critique of the divinity of Jesus.
It was a convenient quote, but I admit it overstates its case. A more defensible version would probably sound like “A disproportionate amount of advances in science comes from outsiders to the field”.
The three names which pop into my head without going to Google are Schliemann (and Calvert), Wegener, and Sokal :-)
So, Schliemann and Calvert were indeed amateurs. Wegener seems to have been as much polymath as field-switcher (aside from continental drift, he worked in meteorology and astronomy). Sokal’s work in mathematics and physics seems (1) not particularly, ah, boundary-transgressing and (2) not especially notable, so I guess you are referring to his foray into bullshit-hunting; that was indeed successful but I don’t see that it was a major advance in science.
This doesn’t seem like a disproportionate amount. In fact, I would naively expect quite a lot of major advances to come from that sort of cross-fertilization, and I was rather surprised to find no field-switchers in my sample. So perhaps we can amend it to “Somewhat fewer scientific advances than one would expect come from people switching fields for any reason”?
As I said, this was just off the top of my head without any Google assists. I suspect at least part of this idea goes back to Popper and his necessity of periodic revolutions to clear out the deadwood and establish the new base for advancing further.
I don’t expect that trying to make a hard fact out of my observation is going to be useful. For one, to make it at least falsifiable we’d need hard definitions of “disproportionate” and “advances”, plus we’re already talking of expectations, so it’s going to be either a mess or a pedantic slog. If you think the observation is misleading, well, it’s not the first time we disagree on fuzzy things :-)
I also don’t expect that trying to make a hard fact out of the observation is going to be useful; but not because some of the words in it are fuzzy, but because any halfway reasonable definition of them is going to make it flatly wrong. At any rate, I hope we can agree that the original claim in the original quotation is flatly wrong.
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.