The basic neural network of the brain is there through broad genetic and cultural evolution. And it's not Fermat/Pascal [pioneers of probability theory] It uses a very crude, shortcut-type of thinking. It's got elements of Fermat/Pascal in it. However, it's not good.

First there's mathematics. Obviously, you've got to be able to handle numbers and quantities - basic arithmetic. And the great useful model, after compound interest, is the elementary math of permutations and combinations.

"Models have to come from multiple disciplines - because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That is why poetry professors are so unwise in a worldly sense." - Charlie Munger The 100 Mental Models Program: gumroad.com/a/743273587/Ax…

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines - because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That is why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don't have enough models in their head.

It's like the old saying, "To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." That's the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that's a perfectly disastrous way to think and operate in the world. So you have got to have multiple models.

If you have just one or two [mental models] you're using, the nature of human psychology is such that you'll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you'll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor, who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.

You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and fail in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.

The theory of modern education is that you need a general education before you specialize. And I think, to some extent, before you're going to be a great stock picker, you need some general education.

When asked: "How do you get worldly wisdom? What system do you use to rise into the tiny top percentage of the world?" --- Get the 100 Mental Models Program: gumroad.com/a/743273587/Ax…

While quantum mechanics is unlearnable for a vast majority, reliability can be learned to great advantage by almost anyone.

Reliability is essential for progress in life.

If you interpret being true to yourself as requiring that you retain every notion of your youth, you will be safely underway, not only toward maximizing ignorance, but also toward whatever misery can be obtained through unpleasant experiences in business.

Einstein said that his successful theories came from "Curiosity, concentration, perseverance, and self-criticism." And by self criticism, he meant the testing and destruction of his own well-loved ideas.

"If your professors won't give you an appropriate multidisciplinary approach - if each wants to overuse his own models and underuse the important models in other disciplines - you can correct that folly yourself" - C Munger 100 Mental Models Program: gumroad.com/a/743273587/Ax…

Extreme objectivity helps the objective person end up like the only player without a blindfold in a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey,

"So [to win in] the game of life, get the needed models into your head and think it through forward and backward. What works in bridge will work in life." - Charlie Munger Get the 100 Mental Models Program: gumroad.com/a/743273587/Ax…

Most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact They become people of whom Wylie said: "You couldn't squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn"

It is in the nature of things, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward.

My prescription for a life of fuzzy thinking and infelicity is to ignore a story they told me when I was very young about a rustic who said, "I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I'd never go there" Most smile at the rustic's ignorance and ignore his basic wisdom.