Decision Making Articles

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "Man, as a social animal who has the gift of language, is born to prattle and to pour out twaddle that does much damage when serious work is being attempted. Some people produce copious amounts of twaddle and others very...

By Charlie Munger's Almanack "Some seller of an ordinary industrial product will often change his product's trade dress and raise its price significantly hoping that quality-seeking buyers will be tricked into becoming purchasers by mere association of his product and...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "Sibling jealousy is clearly very strong and usually greater in children than adults. It is often stronger than jealousy directed at strangers." (p. 465) "Envy/jealousy is extreme in myth, religion, and literature...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "The automatic tendency of humans to reciprocate both favors and disfavors has long been noticed as extreme, as it is in apes, monkeys, dogs, and many less cognitively gifted animals." "The standard antidote one's...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "When one sperm gets into a human egg, there's an automatic shut off device that bars any other sperm from getting in. The human mind tends strongly toward the same sort of result." (p. 461) "People tend to accumulate...

From Charlie Munger "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "I think I've been in the top 5 percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I've alway underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that...

From Charlie Munger "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision." (p. 459) To help prevent Doubt- Avoidance Tendency, judges and jurors are forced to delay their decisions to try to...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the disliker/hater tend to (1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, (2) dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" A newly hatched baby goose is programmed to love the first creature that is nice to it, which usually is his mother. If the first thing a baby goose see is a nice human, the baby goose will "love" the human. "Each child,...