Charlie Munger on Avoiding Computers
An anecdote found in Seeking Wisdom, that reminds me of a funny story from university and the use of calculators. First, the excerpt. When someone asked Charlie Munger if he used a computer, he …
Explore Farnam Street Articles
The Two Types of Knowledge: The Max Planck/Chauffeur Test
Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett, frequently tells the story below to illustrate how to distinguish between the two types of knowledge: real knowledge and pretend …
Henry David Thoreau on Reading Deliberately
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) remains best-known for Civil Disobedience and for Walden, a beautiful ode to simplicity and self-sufficiency. Thoreau moved into a cabin he built by Walden Pond to …
Meditation: Why Bother?
Meditation can seem like a lot of time and work for no obvious pay-off. Yet the benefits are dramatic. Meditation can help us truly experience life, rather than just letting it pass us by. Here’s a …
Bias from Association: Why We Shoot the Messenger
We automatically connect a stimulus (thing/person) with pain (fear) or pleasure (hope). As pleasure seeking animals, we seek out positive associations and attempt to remove negative ones. This happens …
Making Decisions in a Complex Adaptive System
In Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, Mauboussin does a good job adding to the work we’ve already done on complex adaptive systems: You can think of a complex adaptive system …
Three Lessons of Biological History
Human history is a fragment of biological history. If we are to learn enduring lessons it is best to go back in time Our view of the world is fairly shallow. We look backward but rarely to a time …
In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
We live in a world scarce of understanding and abundant with information. We complain that we never have any free time yet we seek distraction. If work can’t distract us, we distract ourselves. …
The Busy Person’s Guide to Thinking
No skill is more valuable or harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems. Thinking better than others means you’ll have more free time and fewer problems. If you …
A Meditation on Reading
One of the most timeless and beautiful meditations on reading comes from the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). For me, reading has always been about our tagline: …
Mental Model: Misconceptions of Chance
We expect the immediate outcome of events to represent the broader outcomes expected from a large number of trials. We believe that chance events will immediately self-correct and that small sample …
Reads for the Curious Mind
Out of the 44 books I read from January to June, here are the 7 that resonated with me the most. (For the curious see the 2012, 2013, I can’t find the 2014 edition.) Pebbles of Perception: How a …
The Wisdom of Seneca: A Lawyer’s Advice For Life In The Fast Lane
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (around 4 B.C.—A.D. 65) was an insightful lawyer, senator, philosopher, and playwright best known for his pithy wisdom that still helps understand how to deal with anger, …
Attentional Blink
Despite my experiments with meditation, I have difficulty focusing on my breath if I take a few days off meditating or yoga. The world is distracting, there are texts coming in, fire trucks going by, …
Books Everyone Should Read on Psychology and Behavioral Economics
Earlier this year, a prominent friend of mine was tasked with coming up with a list of behavioral economics book recommendations for the military leaders of a G7 country and I was on the limited email …
The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership: Classical Wisdom for Modern Leaders
How many of today’s problems are the result of leadership? What’s lacking, the author of The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership argues, is the lack of real leadership. Here the problem may lie …