[HN Gopher] On Charlie Munger (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
On Charlie Munger (2019)
Author : yarapavan
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-01-01 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jasonzweig.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jasonzweig.com)
| xg15 wrote:
| So far I had mostly heard of him due to the infamous Munger Hall
| student dorm project.
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I'm not necessarily the biggest Charlie Munger fan, but I think
| he's got some wisdom and found his 1995 speech he gave on human
| biases at Harvard to be insightful and interesting:
|
| "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY
| seydor wrote:
| Happy birthday to him. But given that the world is already
| dominated by boomer power, maybe it's best to get over this
| status quo
|
| (you should flag opinions that break the rules, not ones you dont
| like)
| d23 wrote:
| It doesn't fit this community for a number of reasons and is
| rightly flagged. It also happens to make no sense, since he's
| not even a baby boomer.
| [deleted]
| jstx1 wrote:
| Kind of mindblowing that you can speak to someone who was already
| in their 20s during WWII.
| tinco wrote:
| It's sort of mindblowing that there's adults now that have
| never talked to someone who was in their 20s during WW2. It
| makes it something akin to ancient history. Even though I'm
| "only" 35, WW2 never felt like something that happened a very
| long time ago, it was something that happened to my
| grandparents and that influenced the circumstances and
| upbringing of my parents.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Met someone the other day who showed me pictures of their
| grandparents who were kids in the 1980s.
| sebmellen wrote:
| My grandfather was born in 1902, and I'm in my early
| twenties now. It's wild -- I know people my age whose
| grandparents were born in the early 70s.
| akgerber wrote:
| It was very good to be able visit my 98-year-old grandmother at
| Christmastime (and I did a lot to be able to do so safely last
| year) -- at this age, there can't be many left.
| mjklin wrote:
| "I literally couldn't talk to any one. There was nobody. I just
| walked off by myself... I could never talk to anyone about it
| and never understood anyone's reaction." - Noam Chomsky the day
| of the Hiroshima bombing
| melling wrote:
| Kissinger will be 100 this year.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger
|
| President Carter turns 99 too:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
|
| At some point over the next 50 years, science gets a few wins
| and a lot more people will reach 100.
| drewcoo wrote:
| US life expectancy is dropping.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/.
| ..
|
| And if life expectancy for a few elites is increasing, that
| means it's decreasing even more for the rest of us, given the
| trends.
| [deleted]
| maxerickson wrote:
| It isn't the same statistic, but middle age mortality seems
| likely enough to be correlated with life expectancy. A
| bachelors is enough to signal "elite":
|
| https://twitter.com/paulnovosad/status/1603895646565634049
| bumby wrote:
| > _A bachelors is enough_
|
| This is still only about 1/3 of the US population. If
| we're generous to the OP's point, it still supports it
| (granted the tone of "a few elites" may be read
| differently)
| yuliyp wrote:
| It dropped over the past 2 years due to COVID. In general
| it's on an upward trend.
| random314 wrote:
| It has been on a downward trend before covid19. For
| example, American life expectancy is lower than Cuban
| life expectancy.
| yuliyp wrote:
| What? It's been steady at around 78.5 - 78.9 between 2010
| and 2019 [1]. I'm not sure what the point of mentioning
| Cuba was or its relevance to trends in the US life
| expectancy is; its life expectancy has been within a year
| of the US for the past 40 years[2].
|
| [1]
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2020-2021/LExpMort.pdf
|
| [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?l
| ocation...
| recuter wrote:
| > And if life expectancy for a few elites is increasing,
| that means it's decreasing even more for the rest of us,
| given the trends.
|
| I don't see how that follows, please, show your work.
| wsetchell wrote:
| Average life expectancy is down. Life expectancy for rich
| people is up, so non-rich life expectancy is dropping
| faster than the average.
| recuter wrote:
| Cool. I repeat my previous statement.
| random314 wrote:
| It's basic math at this point!
| recuter wrote:
| Mos def. ([?]#_#)
|
| (Still gotta show your work tho)
| random314 wrote:
| If you can't do 5th grade math, why are you in this
| forum? This isn't a 5th grade class and you should
| pretend play supervisor elsewhere.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would like to know life expectancy trends for non
| overweight adults, by income/wealth decile or quintile.
| recuter wrote:
| Turns out regardless of wealth generally healthy adults
| who make it to old age typically die from various cancers
| (or falling in the shower) at around the same age as the
| rest of the cohort.
|
| Having large families, lots of friends, and a sunny
| disposition (as opposed to being an edgy communist for
| example), minorly but measurably increases your life
| expectancy.
| random314 wrote:
| Citations please. Especially for the stats on edgy
| communists. Or do you perceive this thread as "pro-
| Communist", hence all the edgy comments by you in this
| thread?
| parthianshotgun wrote:
| Does edgy communism track with a less than sunny
| disposition, asking for a friend
| recuter wrote:
| Assuming your diet is sane and your weight is under
| control, you don't smoke/drink and you didn't get into an
| accident, the next thing to watch out for would be
| depression and suicide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis
| t_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...
|
| Social isolation and loneliness amongst the elderly are
| widely known to lead to adverse health outcomes and
| shorter life expectancies.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/aging/publications/features/lonely-
| older...
|
| Cancers and terminal illnesses of all sorts eventually
| come for everybody, luck of the draw. But in so far as
| you can control anything being less stressed and having
| more friends correlates very well to living a tad longer.
|
| You are most welcome to compare life expectancy stats
| between communist countries and none communist countries
| and make your own conclusions about life of course ;)
| xg15 wrote:
| Do you have an actual source for this in addition to "it
| turns out that"?
| deltree7 wrote:
| Average life expectancy doesn't say anything.
|
| Covid and drug ODs really isn't a life expectancy issue
| paulpauper wrote:
| yes. average life expectancy tells you very little about
| how long YOU will live
| spfzero wrote:
| You might look at something like the median life
| expectancy of a 65-year-old. That skips over a lot of
| early deaths that really bias the "average life
| expectancy".
|
| For instance, you might find that in 1980 the median life
| expectancy at 65 was 25 years, and today that number
| might be higher. You'd still be getting a lot of
| lifestyle disease deaths though. Obesity and diabetes
| really grew after 1980.
|
| https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-
| statisti...
|
| It might be even better to look at median life expectancy
| at 70 or 75, if your idea is to gauge whether modern
| medicine is keeping people alive longer. Start with the
| group of people that at least made it that far. 70 or 75
| is still probably too early for "died of old age" to
| happen, and those people are past most of the "died of
| something else" deaths.
| Gare wrote:
| It's also a game of numbers. Back then, the world population
| was only 2 billion people. And a lot of their generation have
| died during WW2.
| melling wrote:
| More Americans died during the Civil War. Life expectancy
| has increased, and will continue to increase, because of
| science.
|
| Antibiotics only started appearing in the 1940s, for
| example.
|
| Jimmy Carter survived cancer in his 90's. That likely would
| not have happened a few decades ago.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| What surprised me was learning only 6,800 colonials died
| in battle during the American Revolutionary War, but
| 130,000 died from smallpox.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_Wa
| r
| bumby wrote:
| There seems to be a relatively large amount of
| uncertainty in those estimates. One source claims 17k
| "disease dead" while another claims 130k just from
| smallpox. The war dead estimates have a wide range too.
| jgilias wrote:
| It seems that the science has already gained a few wins in
| the last twenty years when it comes to understanding (and
| slowing down) aging. It will take time for that to trickle
| down to the medical system. I mean, there are good reasons
| why we have the processes in place before we start
| recommending stuff to the general population.
|
| That being said, the first people who are going to live to
| 150 (most of that in good health) are likely already among
| us.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| Pardon me, I haven't been actively following the science of
| aging.
|
| Would you share some credible sources ( books, links ) that
| explain the new discoveries in slowing down human aging?
| nradov wrote:
| Life expectancy is stagnant or declining. The oldest person
| died in 1997 at age 122. No one has surpassed that record
| since. There is zero scientific basis to expect that anyone
| alive today will live to 150. It's not _impossible_ , but
| it would depend on multiple breakthrough scientific
| advances akin to miracles.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| The sample size there is also really small, the average
| age of the top 10 oldest people ever is 118
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people
| paulpauper wrote:
| Shows how important genes are. I think having a huge legacy
| sorta imbues a will to live.
| habosa wrote:
| Fun (maybe?) fact for the HN crowd: Charlie Munger III was/is a
| software engineer at Google.
| mustafabisic1 wrote:
| This reminds me of a concept that you'll _almost_ never see a
| scholar and intellectual go senile or have problems with the
| mind.
|
| I guess it's because the brain is used so intensely it's the last
| thing to fall.
| dingusdew wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| You can't post like this to HN. Maybe you don't owe elderly
| billionaires better, but you owe this community better if
| you're participating in it.
|
| I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned,
| you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason
| to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're
| here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| [flagged]
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| a literal answer to your question would be "investors holding
| berkshire hathaway shares care".
| paulpauper wrote:
| This guy is the embodiment of what not to do if you want to live
| a long time: bad diet, no exercise. Same for warren buffet .
| Shows how important genes are
| paxys wrote:
| Also shows how important being able to buy the best medical
| care in the world is
| throwthere wrote:
| I mean, he went blind in one eye after a botched medical
| procedure and can hardly see at all with the other one. I
| don't think he's been getting some amazing life preserving
| treatment or something.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| what medical care do you refer to? (i don't know this story)
| robocat wrote:
| Sure, medical interventions could obviously help life
| expectancy, but I expect spending "elite" amounts of money
| has relatively little impact on average life expectancy. The
| USA has elite income compared to the rest of the world, yet
| some poor countries have better longevity figures, so that
| kinda argues that point.
|
| And prevention is surely more influential on life expectancy:
| exercise, food, and environment help a lot and are available
| to most people with median income.
|
| Charlie clearly had some stressors at 31: "divorced, broke,
| and burying his 9 year old son".
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| What exactly is his diet?
| randerson wrote:
| There is a high correlation between wealth and life expectancy.
| Stress is the real killer.
| xenospn wrote:
| I would argue their jobs ( managing many billions of dollars
| under extreme public scrutiny) are highly stressful.
| random314 wrote:
| Not as stressful as reporting to bosses all your life and
| waiting for the annual review and promotions.
| highwaylights wrote:
| I dunno.
|
| It's an _easier_ life for sure, but less stressful?
| Really?
|
| If you or I mess up at our job the worst thing that
| happens is we have to look for another job. If someone
| like him messes up bad enough it's jail terms and death
| threats. Obviously that's less threatening when you're
| already pushing 100 and we'll into what most of us would
| call bonus years but I'm sure he was aware of the cost of
| screwing up during his younger years too.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Listening to both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger
| speak, it sounds like they've been living relatively
| stress-free lives for decades.
|
| That's not to say other billionaires aren't under
| constant stress, but they don't seem to be personally.
| xenospn wrote:
| They're just very good at managing it.
| majani wrote:
| They've been playing with house money since they got into
| insurance in the 70s. They can't be THAT stressed
| ultrasounder wrote:
| GEM!.
| britneybitch wrote:
| Charlie Munger applied to Harvard Law School and was rejected
| because he didn't have an undergraduate degree. But then his
| dad's friend called the dean of admissions, and suddenly they
| changed their mind.[1]
|
| The rules don't apply to the wealthy. It's their world, you're
| just living in it.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Early_life_and_...
| majani wrote:
| The Ivies only recently became places for the smartest students
| to go. In the beginning they were openly just rich kid schools,
| like Le Rosey and Eton today.
| scottyah wrote:
| Taking capable youth, imprinting them with love for you while
| enabling them to become rich is a lot better business model
| than taking in kids whose parents have generational money and
| asking for some of it.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No it isnt. It's what you want and little else
| paulpauper wrote:
| _The rules don 't apply to the wealthy. It's their world,
| you're just living in it._
|
| By that logic SBF should be chilling still in the Bahamas ,
| having paid off the authorities
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| He robbed other rich people, cancels it out.
| lefrenchy wrote:
| He made other rich people lose money, that's a no no.
| [deleted]
| largepeepee wrote:
| Well SBF pissed off too many wealthier people and was too
| obvious in his infinite money scam.
|
| Munger at least has proved himself many times and has the
| history to show it.
|
| Poor comparison.
| britneybitch wrote:
| SBF only had paper wealth. His political donations totaled
| tens of millions (iirc). On this scale that's a rounding
| error.
|
| To paraphrase Chris Rock, SBF was rich, but Charlie Munger is
| wealthy.
| ideamotor wrote:
| This debate makes zero sense. You are both arguing where
| some extremely binary line is placed in society. If this
| how you all think about everything?
| hinkley wrote:
| A really cynical view of the world is that the rags to
| riches story is something the power structure tolerates
| because it 1) brings in a little fresh blood to replace
| families that self destruct and to give them something else
| to gossip about and 2) the token successes are an opiate
| for the masses. The moment they lose all hope head will
| roll. Most days I try not to think this way but some days
| it's difficult to avoid.
|
| Someone else said the problem was that SBF stole from his
| customers. And while it's true that this is often
| sufficient to bring you down, it's often only when you
| steal from the powerful that the wheels of justice turn so
| swiftly. He's being made an example.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _only when you steal from the powerful that the wheels
| of justice turn so swiftly_
|
| SBF stole nothing meaningful from anyone powerful.
| leereeves wrote:
| He did something worse: he embarrassed them.
| hinkley wrote:
| Drawing the attention of the masses to the game also
| makes them nervous, even if not embarrassed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _he embarrassed them_
|
| Who is "them"? There is no serious power embarrassed by
| FTX. The seriously powerful never got close enough to be
| tarnished.
| leereeves wrote:
| That may be true, but perception matters, and a lot of
| virtual ink has been spent on his political ties,
| donations, contributions to regulation, and meetings with
| government officials, all the way up to the White House.
|
| Powerful people are acting quickly to publicly distance
| themselves from him.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _acting quickly to publicly distance themselves from
| him_
|
| The point being they're making and keeping that distance.
| This conspiracy theory, that SBF is facing consequences
| only because he sort of maybe embarrassed Ricchetti, has
| no legs to stand on.
| leereeves wrote:
| That's a strawman. The quote you disputed was:
|
| > only when you steal from the powerful that the wheels
| of justice turn so swiftly
|
| Not:
|
| > only when you steal from the powerful that the wheels
| of justice turn [at all]
|
| And certainly not:
|
| > SBF is facing consequences only because ...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Sure, I'll dispute that, too. Crypto is a hated industry.
| FTX blew up loudly, fascinatingly, and then SBF basically
| admitted guilt in multiple public forums. None of this
| went unexpectedly quickly. Many of the people proposing
| the current conspiracy were, weeks ago, claiming he would
| skate away free.
|
| To the degree powerful people were embarrassed by him, it
| was in the Bahamas. Not here. Not at all.
| leereeves wrote:
| I don't want to argue over the semantics of the word
| "embarrassed". Perhaps we can both agree that, whatever
| your (or their) personal feelings about the issue, it has
| objectively resulted in a lot of negative press coverage.
|
| And that (even if only because of the negative coverage)
| powerful people are taking steps (like returning millions
| of dollars) to distance themselves from him.
|
| And finally that, whether it's the motive or not, swift
| prosecution is an effective way for officials to distance
| themselves.
|
| The rest is speculation, but not crazy.
| richbell wrote:
| I think the closest you'd get is Larry David, Kevin
| O'Leary, and Tom Brady. Wealthy but definitely not anyone
| of serious power or consequence.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| He was a highly privileged kid, son of Stanford professors
| / attorneys, worked for Jane Street, raised a couple
| billion in capital and would have stayed a billionaire if
| he just hadn't stolen from his customers. FTX by itself was
| worth billions without the degenerate Alameda trading
| strategies being deployed against their own clients.
| googlryas wrote:
| Except there may be many cases of to the rules being bypassed
| after special pleading from the non-connected, but we just
| never hear about them because the people don't go on to become
| billionaires years later and write autobiographies.
| hammock wrote:
| The wealthy made the rules. Why are you surprised that they
| should bend or change them at will? It's not like we had some
| nationwide democratic vote on the process and requisites for
| law school admissions
| pembrook wrote:
| Yes, like _80 years ago._
|
| Nobody would accuse Ivy League schools of being bastions of
| fairness. We all know nepotism & pay-for-play is a core part of
| their business model.
|
| But I'm not sure you could get away with that today. You'd have
| to make a sizable 'donation' instead.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| and they shouldn't be expected to be fair
|
| Ivy League schools survived for 300 years before a couple
| decades of the general public thinking that they need Ivy
| League, due to the corporate sector's inability to screen a
| larger working population
|
| Ivy League schools will survive this meme too. Academia as a
| whole has never adjusted to the underclass' need to learn for
| the purpose of making money, they teach irrelevant theory for
| the sole pursuit of knowledge to this very day
|
| They are for the wealthy to connect with each other and build
| rapport with each other
|
| The rest of us are just ... around
| csa wrote:
| > But I'm not sure you could get away with that today.
|
| As long as an applicant meets the minimum/lower-end standards
| for admissions, Ivy League professors in grad schools (law,
| mba, and PhD-track... not sure about medicine)can and do make
| by-name requests for admissions that are best not ignored.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| You pretty much get away with it even today.
| jackmott wrote:
| And now we still live under the thumb of billionaires made by
| those acts 80 years ago, and he insults the youth for
| complaining about it to.
| ajra wrote:
| He didn't have an undergraduate degree because he dropped out
| of college to serve in the military during WW2, and then
| graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law. Yes, his family
| connections certainly helped, but it's hard to say he wasn't
| deserving of a place.
| tenpies wrote:
| Also worth noting that practicing law in the US, even today,
| does not require an undergraduate. That requirement is purely
| a result of academia being academia and eagerly wasting 4
| years of people's lives for the sake of not finding a better
| way to filter people.
|
| In most states, to pass the bar, you only need a Juris Doctor
| which is usually received upon graduating from law school. In
| some states you don't even need this, and in some others you
| can skip law school entirely by studying under a judge or
| practicing attorney[1].
|
| Law, especially in the US, is much more like a trade that
| accidentally ended up being taught by the universities,
| instead of a trade school separate from academia. Very
| similar to medicine in that regard, where again, there is no
| need for an undergraduate degree to practice medicine.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_bar_in_the
| _Un...
| vajrabum wrote:
| No need for an undergraduate degree to practice medicine?
| Well perhaps not but if you look at the list of classes
| required to enter most medical schools, and the content of
| the curriculum most anybody is going to be hard pressed to
| get in, much less get through it without something pretty
| close to an undergraduate major in biology or chemistry.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Then how would you say he was not deserving of the place?
|
| OP apparently isn't talking about the subject's brilliance or
| so. I think the OP is talking specifically about the rule
| bending for the rich.
|
| > ... his family connections certainly helped, but ...
|
| Put few people with similar background -- except the
| socioeconomic part of their backgrounds in the same situation
| and see whether they would have made it.
|
| I doubt it. So, I'd say you can omit the "but".
| caminante wrote:
| _> ...not deserving of the place?_
|
| FYI, you have it backwards. The parent said Munger was
| deserving.
|
| _> I doubt it._
|
| Exceptionally bright people exist. Had Munger not gone to
| HLS immediately or at all, I wouldn't bet against him doing
| exceptionally well (still top 1% of 1% of business
| outcomes).
| massinstall wrote:
| You may be right about him "deserving" the place, but you
| appear to be missing the point here: just by pure statistics,
| there would have been others who also dropped out of college
| to serve in WW2, but who did not have an influential father
| like Munger, and who then did not get the admission he did.
| Also by pure statistics, there is a likelihood that among
| these others were many who were at least as deserving as he
| was.
|
| In summary, the argument is to point out the difference
| between personal effort/discipline/work ethic/character (and
| everything that's commonly named as the "reason" of success)
| and the huge impact of external conditions that are
| completely outside the realm of influence of the individual
| in question, such as their parent's wealth and influence,
| physical build, natural attractiveness, health, location of
| birth, etc.
|
| It is very, VERY common that people uphold and believe in the
| (comforting) myth that mostly oneself is responsible for
| success and that said external factors are basically
| negligible. The "self-made" person... You could even throw
| them on Mars and they'll somehow become billionaires and own
| mansions!
|
| There is not much to add, except that such thinking appears
| outdated (previous economic booms allowed for a bit more
| control of one's fate), ignorant, and self-congratulatory - a
| delusion of a successful person who is neither aware nor
| grateful for the external circumstances that allowed them to
| get where they are.
|
| FWIW I like Charlie Munger, a down-to-earth thinker who
| doesn't shy away from talking about inconvenient truths.
| Chances are he would even agree with the above.
|
| Book recommendation: "Outliers: The Story of Success" by
| Malcolm Gladwell.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| Nobody said that Harvard is fair.
| raincom wrote:
| Today, the wealthy play a different game than what Charlie's
| dad did. If you belong to the right group (wealth, political
| connections, power, etc), if you can give $5M donation, you can
| get into Harvard.
| pinewurst wrote:
| Not so much wealthy as being connected. I used to work with
| someone admitted to Stanford grad school sans undergrad degree
| based on connections and it wasn't 80 years ago.
| melling wrote:
| Buffett applied to Harvard and was rejected.
|
| He did ok.
|
| https://inshorts.com/m/en/amp_news/warren-buffett-was-reject...
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(page generated 2023-01-01 23:01 UTC)