Mingyao’s Reviews > Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger > Status Update

most of the money-making activity would contain profoundly antisocial effects. This would be so because the activity would exacerbate the current, harmful trend in whichever more of the nations ethical young brainpower is attracted into lucrative money management and its attendant modern frictions, as distinguished from work providing much more value to others.

And I’m all for doing things where, based on a slight preponderance of the evidence, you guess that it’s likely to do more good than harm. What I’m against is being very confident and feeling that you know, for sure, that your particular intervention will do more good than harm, given that you’re dealing with highly complex systems wherein everything is interacting with everything else. 

Instead, he faithfully honors Albert Einstein’s admonition, “A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Or in his own words, “What I’m against is being very confident and feeling that you know, for sure, that your particular action will do more good than harm. You’re dealing with highly complex systems wherein everything is interacting with everything else.” 

“Yet, within this pursuit of rationality and simplicity, he is careful to avoid what he calls “physics envy,” the common human craving to reduce enormously complex systems (such as those in economics) to one-size-fits-all Newtonian formulas.

His clarity is hard won: the product of a lifetime of studying the patterns of human behavior, business systems, and a myriad of other scientific disciplines. ”

Like a chess grandmaster, throUgh logic, instinct, and intuition, he determines the most promising investment “models,” all the while projecting the illUsion that the insight came easily,., even simple. But make no mistake: This “simplicity” comics only at the end of a long journey, towards understanding-not at the beginning.