#hes treated exactly the same as a spouse except its a friendship

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Finally became roommates with krobus and h. Oh my g. Oh my god /pos like so positive like I'm crying

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The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger - Notes

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Systematically you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. Nevertheless, you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve”

Munger has drawn heavily from the study of psychology, economics, physics, biology and history, among other disciplines, in developing his system of “multiple mental models” to cut through difficult problems in complex social systems. It is a system like no other.

As a result his insights on business and life are unique, rare, and correct with unusual consistency. Adopting the “Munger” approach to thinking is difficult, as is imitating any genius. When asked his secret to success, Munger once answered simply “I’m rational.”

The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger

This talk features Charlie’s original concept of “behavioural finance”.

Charlie addresses the importance of recognizing patterns to determine how humans behave, both rationally and irrationally. He shares with us his checklist of twenty-five standard causes of human misjudgment, which contains observations that are ingenious, counter intuitive and important. He also emphasizes the “lollapalooza” power of psychological misjudgments in combination.

I have long been very interested in standard thinking errors. However I was educated in an era wherein the contributions of non-patient-treating psychology to any understanding of misjudgment met little approval from members of the mainstream elite. Instead, interest in psychology was pretty well confined to a group of professors who talked and publish mostly for themselves.

Right after my time at Caltech and Harvard Law School, I possessed a vast ignorance of psychology. Those institutions failed to require knowledge of the subject. And of course they couldn’t integrate psychology with their other subject matter when they didn’t know psychology. The institutions were proud of their wilful avoidance of “fuzzy” psychology and “fuzzy” psychology professors. Soon after leaving Harvard, I began a long struggle to get rid of the most dysfunctional part of my psychological ignorance.

When I started law practice, I had respect for the power of genetic evolution and appreciation of man’s many evolution-based resemblances to less cognitively-gifted animals and insects. I was aware that man was a “social animal”, greatly and automatically influence by behaviour he observed in men around him. I also knew that man lived, like barnyard animals and monkeys, in limited-size dominance hierarchies, wherein he tended to respect authority and to like and cooperate with his own hierarchy members while displaying considerable distrust and dislike for competing men not in his own hierarchy.

But this generalized, evolution-based theory structure was inadequate to enable me to cope properly with the cognition I encountered. I was soon surrounded by much extreme irrationality, displayed in patters and sub patterns. So surround, I could see that I was not going to cope as well as I wished with life unless I could acquire a better theory structure on which to hang my observations and experiences. By then my craving for more theory had a long history. Partly, I had always loved theory as an aid in puzzle solving and as a means of satisfying my monkey-like curiosity.

I also got curious about social insects. It fascinated me that both the fertile female honeybee and the fertile female harvester ant could multiply their quite different normal life expectancy by exactly twenty by engaging in one gangbang in the sky. The extreme success of the ants also fascinated me, how a few behavioural algorithms caused such extreme evolutionary success grounded in extremes of cooperation within the breeding colony and almost always extremes of lethal hostility toward ants outside the breeding colony, even ants of the same species.

I will start my summary with a general observation that helps explain what follows. This observation is grounded in what we know about social insects. The limitations inherent in evolution’s development of the nervous-system cells that control behaviour are beautifully demonstrated by these insects, which often have a mere 100,000 or so cells in their entire nervous systems, compared to man’s multiple billions of cells in his brain alone.

Each ant, like each human, is composed of a living physical structure plus behavioural algorithms in its nerve cells. In the ant’s case, the behavioural algorithms are few in number and almost entirely genetic in origin. The an learns a little behaviour from experiences, but mostly it merely responds to ten or so stimuli with a few simple responses programmed into its nervous system by its genes.

Naturally the simple ant behaviour system has extreme limitations because of its limited nerve system repertoire. For instance, one type of ant, when it smells a pheromone give off by a dead ant’s body in the hive, immediately responds by cooperating with other ants in carrying the dead body out of the hive. And Harvard’s great E.O. Wilson performed on of the best psychology experiments ever done when he painted dead-ant pheromone on a live ant. Quite naturally, the other ants dragged this useful live ant out of the give even though it kicked and otherwise pheromone on a live ant. Quite naturally, the other ants dragged this useful live ant out of the hive even though it kicked and otherwise protested throughout the entire process. Such is the brain of the ant. It has a simple program of responses that generally work out all right, but which are imprudently used by rote in many cases.

Man is often wrong but generally useful, psychological tendencies are quite numerous and quite different. The natural consequence of this profusion of tendencies is the grand general principle of social psychology: cognition is ordinarily situation-dependent so that different situations often cause different conclusions, even when the same person is thinking in the same general subject area.

“Of what use is a philosopher who never offends anybody? - Diogenes

These are a list of psychology based tendencies that while generally useful often mislead.

1)Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency

One of my favourite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The integrity of the Federal Express system requires that all packages be shifted rapidly among airplanes in one central airport each night. And the system has no integrity for the customers if the night work shift can’t accomplish its assignment fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the night shift to do the right thing. They tried moral suasion. They tried everything in the world without luck. And finally somebody got the happy thought that it was foolish to pay the night shift by the hour when what the employer wanted was not maximized billable hours of employee service but fault-free, rapid performance of a particular task. Maybe this person though if they paid the employees per and shift and let all night shift employees go home when all the planes were loaded, the system would work better. And behold that situation worked.

Money is the main incentive/reward that drives habits. A monkey can be trained to seek and work for an intrinsically worthless token, as if it were a banana, if the token is routinely exchangeable for a banana. So it is also with humans working for money only more so, because human money i exchangeable for many desired things in addition to food, and on ordinarily gains status from either holding or spending it. Moreover, a rich person will often through habit, work on connive energetically for money money long after he has almost no real need for more. Averaged out, money is a mainspring of modern civilization, having little precedent in the behaviour of nonhuman animals. Money rewards are also intertwined with other forms of reward. For instance, some people use money to buy status and others use status to get money, while still others sort of do both things at the same time.

Although money is the main driver among rewards, it is not the only reward that works. People also change their behaviour and cognition for sex, friendship, companionship, advancement in status and other non-monetary items.

2)Liking/Loving Tendency

A newly hatched baby goose is programmed, through the economy of its genetic program, to “love” and follow the first creature that is nice to it, which is almost always its mother. But, if the mother goose is not present right after the hatching, and a man is there instead, the gosling will “love” and follow the man, who becomes a sort of substitute mother.

Somewhat similarly a newly arrived human is “born to like and love” under the normal and abnormal triggering outcomes for its kind. Perhaps the strongest inborn tendency to love, ready to be triggered is that the human mother for its child. On the other hand, the similar “child-loving” behaviour of a mouse can be eliminated by the deletion of a single gene, which suggests that there is some sort of triggering gene in a mother mouse as well as in a gosling.

Each child like a gosling, will almost surely come to like and love, not only as driven by its sexual nature, but also in social groups not limited to its genetic or adoptive “family”. Current extremes of romantic love almost surely did not occur in man’s remote past. Our early human ancestors were surely more like apes triggered into mating in a pretty mundane fashion.

And what will a man naturally come to like and love, apart from his parent, spouse and child? Well he will like and love being liked and loved. And so many a courtship competition will be won by a person displaying exceptional devotion, and man will generally strive, lifelong, for the affection and approval of many people not related to him.

The phenomenon of liking and loving causing admiration also works in reverse. Admiration also causes or intensifies liking or love. With this “feedback mode” in place, the consequences are often extreme, sometimes even causing deliberate self-destruction to help what is loved.

Liking or love, intertwined with admiration in a feedback mode, often has vast practical consequences in areas far removed from sexual attachments. For instance, a man who is so constructed that he loves admirable persons and ideas with a special intensity has a huge advantage in life. This blessing came to both Buffett and myself in large measure, sometimes from the same persons and ideas. One common, beneficial example for us both was Warren’s uncle Fred Buffett, who cheerfully did the endless grocery store work that Warren and I ended up admiring from a safe distance. Even now, after I have known so many other people. I doubt if it is possible to be a nicer man than Fred Buffett was, and he changed me for the better.

There are large social policy implications in the amazingly good consequences that ordinarily come from people likely to trigger extremes of love and admiration boosting each other in a feedback mode. For instance, it is obviously desirable to attract a lot of lovable, admirable people into the teaching profession.

3)Disliking/Hating Tendency

In a pattern obverse to Liking/Loving Tendency, the newly arrived human is also “born to dislike and hate” as triggered by normal and abnormal triggering forces in it’s life. It is the same with most apes and monkeys.

As a result the long history of man contains almost continuous war. For instance, most American Indian tribes warred incessantly and some tribes would occasionally bring captives home to women so that all could join in the fun of torturing captives to death. Even with the spread of religion, and the advent of advanced civilization much modern war remains pretty savage. But we also get what we observe in present day Switzerland and the United States, wherein the clever political arrangements of man “channel” the hatreds and disliking of individuals and groups into nonlethal patterns including elections.  

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 of his dislike, and 3) distort the other facts to facilitate hatred.

Distortion of that kind is often so extreme that miscongnition is shockingly large. When the World Trade Centre was destroyed, many Pakistanis immediately concluded that the Hindus did it, while many Muslims concluded that the Jews did it. Such factual distortions often make mediation between opponents locked in hatred either difficult or impossible.  

4)Doubt-Avoidance Tendency

The brain of a man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision.

It is easy to see how evolution would make animals, over the eons, drift toward such quick elimination of doubt. After all, the one thing that is surely counterproductive for a prey animal that is threatened by a predator is to take a long time in deciding what to do. And so man’s doubt-avoidance tendency is quite consistent with the history of his ancient, nonhuman ancestors.

So pronounced is the tendency in man to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision that behaviour to counter the tendency is required from judges and jurors. Here, delay before decision making is forced. And one is required to so comfort himself, prior to conclusion time, so that he is wearing a “mask” of objectivity. And the “mask” works to help real objectivity along.

Of course, once one has recognized that man has a string doubt-avoidance tendency, it is logical to believe that at least some leaps of religious faith are greatly boosted by this tendency. Even if one is satisfied that his own faith comes from revelation, one still must account for the inconsistent faiths of others.

What triggers doubt-avoidance tendency? Well an unthreatened man, thinking of nothing in particular, is not being prompted to remove doubt through rushing to some decision. Doubt-Avoidance tendency is some combination of 1) puzzlement and 2) stress. And both of these factors naturally occur in facing religious issues.

Thus, the natural state of most men is in some form of religion. And this is what we observe.

5) Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency

The brain of a man conserves programming space by being reluctant to change, which is a form of inconsistency avoidance. We see this in all human habits, constructive and destructive. Few people can list a lot of bad habits that they have eliminated, and some people cannot identify even one of these. Instead, practically everyone has a great many bad habits he has long maintained despite their being known as bad. Given this situation, it is not too much in many cases to appraise early-formed habits as destiny. When Marley’s miserable ghost says, “I wear the chains I forged in life”, he is taking about chains of habit that were too light to be felt before they became too strong to be broken.

It is easy to see that a quickly reached conclusion, triggered by doubt-avoidance, when combined with a tendency to resists any change in that conclusion, will naturally cause a lot of errors in cognition for modern man. And so it observably works out. We all deal much with others whom we correctly diagnose as imprisoned in poor conclusions that are maintained by mental habits they formed early and will carry to their graves.

So great is the bad decision problem caused by inconsistency avoidance tendency that our courts have adopted important strategies against it. For instance before making decisions, judges and juries are required to hear long and skillful presentations of evidence and argument from the side they will not naturally favour, given their ideas in place. And this helps prevent considerable bad thinking from “first conclusion bias”. Similarly other modern decision makers will often force groups to consider skillful counterarguments before making decisions. So people tend to accumulate large mental holdings of fixed conclusions and attitudes that are not often reexamined or changed, even though there is plenty of good evidence that they are wrong.

Inconsistency-Avoidance tendency has many good effects in civilization. For instance, rather than act inconsistently with public commitments, new or old public identities etc. Most people are more loyal in their roles in life as priests, physicians, citizens, soldiers, spouses, teachers, employees, etc.

One corollary of Inconsistency-Avoidance tendency is that a person making big sacrifices in the course of assuming a new identity will intensify his devotion to the new identity. After all, it would be quite inconsistent behaviour to make a large sacrifice for something that was no good. And thus civilization has invented many tough and solemn initiation ceremonies, often public in nature, that intensify new commitments made.

Tough initiation ceremonies can intensify bad contact as well as good. The loyalty of the new “made-man” mafia member, or of the military officer making the required “blood oath” of loyalty to Hitler, was boosted through the triggering of inconsistency-avoidance tendency.

Moreover, the tendency will often make a man a “patsy” of manipulative “compliance-practitioners” who gain advantage from triggering his subconscious Inconsistency-Avoidance tendency.

For instance modern education often does much damage when young students are taught dubious political notions and then enthusiastically push these notions on the rest of us. The pushing seldom convinces others. But as students pound into their mental habits what they are pushing out, the students are often permanently damaged. Educational Institutions that create a climate where much of this goes on are, I think irresponsible. It is important not to thus put one’s brain in chains before on has come anywhere near his full potentiality as a rational person.

6) Curiosity Tendency

There is a lot of innate curiosity in mammals, but its nonhuman version is highest among apes and monkeys. Man’s curiosity, in turn, is much stronger than that of his simian relatives. In advanced human civilization, culture greatly increases the effectiveness of curiosity in advancing knowledge. For instance, Athens developed much math and science out of pure curiosity while the Romans made almost no contribution to either math or science. They instead concentrated their attention on the ‘practical’ engineering of mines, roads, aqueducts, etc. Curiosity enhanced by the best of modern education much helps man to prevent or reduce bad consequences arising from other psychological tendencies. The curious are also provided with much fun and wisdom long after formal education has ended.

7) Kantian Fairness Tendency

Kant was famous for his “categorical imperative”, a sort of a “golden rule” that required humans to follow those behaviour patterns that, if followed by all others, would make the surrounding human system work best for everybody. And it is not too much to say that modern acculturated many displays, and expects from others, a lot of fairness as thus defined by Kant.

In a small community having a one-way bridge or tunnel for autos, it is the norm in the United States to see a lot of reciprocal courtesy, despite the absence of signs or signals. And many freeway drivers, including myself, will often let other drivers come on front of them, in lane changes or the like, because that is the courtesy they desire when roles are reversed. Moreover there is in modern human culture a lot of courteous lining up by strangers so that all are served on a “first-come-first-served” basis.

Also, strangers often voluntarily share equally in unexpected, unearned good and bad fortune. And, as an obverse consequence of such “fair-sharing” conduct, much reactive hostility occurs when fair-sharing is expected yet not provided.

8) Envy/Jealously Tendency

A member of a species designed through evolutionary process to want often-scarce food is going to be driven strongly toward getting food when it first sees food. And this is going to occur often and tend to create some conflict when the food is seen in the possession of another member of the same species. This is probably the evolutionary origin of the envy/jealousy tendency that lies so deep in human nature.

Envy/jealousy is extreme in myth, religion and literature wherein, in account after account, it triggers hatred and injury. It was regarded as so pernicious by the Jews of the civilization that preceded Christ that it was forbidden, by phrase after phrase, in the laws of Moses. You were even warned by the Prophet not to covet your neighbour’s donkey.

And envy/jealousy is also extreme in modern life. For instance, university communities often go bananas when some university employee in money management, or some professor in surgery, gets annual compensation in multiples of the standard professional salary and in modern investment banks, law firms etc. The envy/jealousy effects are usually more extreme than they are in university faculties. Many big law firms, fearing disorder from envy/jealousy have long treated all senior partners alike in compensation, no matter how different their contributions to firm welfare. As I have shared the observation of life with Warren Buffet over decades, I have heard him wisely say on several occasions: “It is not greed that drives the world, but envy”

9) Reciprocation Tendency

The automatic tendency of humans to reciprocate both favours and disfavours has long been noticed as extreme, as it is in apes, monkeys, dogs, and many less cognitively gifted animals. The tendency clearly facilitates group cooperation for the benefit of members. In this respect, it mimics such genetic programming of the social insects.

We see the extreme power of the tendency to reciprocate disfavours in some wars, wherein it increases hatred to a level causing very brutal conduct. For long stretches in many wars, no prisoners were take, the only acceptable enemy being a dead one. And sometimes that was not enough, as in the case of Genghis Khan, who was not satisfied with corpses. He insisted on their being hacked into pieces.

Reciprocation tendency does cause good results, doesn’t join forces only with the superpower of incentives. It also joins Inconsistency-Avoidance tendency in helping cause 1) The fulfillment of promises made as part of a bargain, including loyalty promises in marriage ceremonies and 2) correct behaviour expected from persons serving as priests, shoemakers, physicians and all else.

And the very best part of human life probably lies in relationships of affection wherein parties are more interested in pleasing than being pleased a not uncommon outcome in display of reciprocate tendency.

The final phenomenon we will consider is wide spread human misery from feelings of guilt. To the extent the feeling of guilt has an evolutionary base, I believe the most plausible cause is the mental conflict triggered in one direction by reciprocate favour tendency and in the opposite direction by reward super response tendency pushing one to enjoy one hundred percent some good thing. Of course, human culture has often greatly boosted the genetic tendency to suffer from feelings of guilt. Most especially religious culture has imposed hard to follow ethical and devotional demands on people. There is a charming Irish Catholic priest in my neighbourhood who, with rough accuracy, often says “The old Jews may have invented guilt, with but we Catholics perfected it” And if you like me and this priest, believe that averaged out, feelings of guild do more good than harm, you may join in my special gratitude for reciprocate favour tendency, no matter how unpleasant you find feelings of guilt.

10) Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency

In the standard conditioned reflexes studied by Skinner and most common in the world, responsive behaviour, creating a new habit, is directly triggered by rewards previously bestowed. For instance, a man buys a can of branded shoe polish, has a good experience with it when shining his shoes, and because of this “reward,” buys the same shoe polish when he needs another can.

But there is another type of conditioned reflex wherein mere association triggers a response. For instance, consider the case of many men who have been trained by their previous experience in life to believe that when several similar items are presented for purchase, the one with the highest price will have the highest quality. Knowing this, 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 hoping that quality seeking buyers will be tricked into becoming purchasers by mere association of his product and its high price. This industrial practice frequently is effective in driving up sales and even more so in driving up profits. For instance, it worked wonderfully with high-priced power tools for a long time. And it would work better yet with high-priced pumps at the bottom of oil wells. With luxury goods, the process works with a special boost because buyers who pay high prices often gain extra status from thus demonstration both their good taste and their ability to pay.

Even association that appears to be trivial, if carefully planned, can have extreme and peculiar effects on purchasers of products. The target purchaser of shoe polish may like pretty girls. And so he chooses the polish with the pretty girl on the can or the one with the pretty girl in the last ad for shoe polish that he saw.

Advertisers know about the power of mere association. You won’t see coke advertised alongside some account of the death of a child. Instead Coke ads picture life as happier than reality.

Similarly it is not from mere chance that military bands play such impressive music. That kind of music appearing in mere association with military service, helps to attract soldiers and keep them in the army. Most armies have learned to use mere association in this successful way.

However the most damaging miscalculations from mere association do not ordinarily come from advertisers and music providers.

Some of the most important miscalculations come from what is accidentally associated with one’s past success or one’s liking and loving or one’s disliking and hating, which includes a natural hatred for bad news.

To avoid being misled by the mere association of some fact with past success, use this memory clue. Think of Napolean and Hitler when they invaded Russia after using their armies with much success elsewhere. And there are plenty of mundane examples of results like those of Napoleon and Hitler. For instance a man foolishly gambles the in a casino and yet wins. This unlikely correlation causes him to try the casino again, or again and again, to his horrid detriment. Or a man gets lucky in an odds against venture headed by an untalented friend. So influenced he tries again what worked before with terrible results.

The proper antidotes to being made such a patsy by past success are 1) to carefully examine each past success, looking for accidental, non-causative factors associated with such success that will tend to mislead as one appraises odds implicit in a proposed new undertaking and 2) to look for dangerous aspects of the new undertaking that were not present when past success occurred.

11) Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial

This phenomenon first me had in World War II when the super athlete, super student son of a family friend flew off over the Atlantic Ocean and never came back. His mother, who was a very sane woman, then refused to believe he was dead. That’s simple pain-avoiding psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so one distorts the facts until they become bearable. We all do that to some extent, often causing terrible problems. The tendency’s most extreme outcomes are usually mixed up with love, death, and chemical dependency.

Where denial is used to make dying easier, the conduct meets almost no criticism. Who would begrudge a fellow man such help at such a time? But some people hope to leave life hewing to the iron prescription, “It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere” And there is something admirable in anyone able to do this.

12)Excessive Self-Regard Tendency

We all commonly observe the excessive self-regard of man. He mostly misappraises himself on the high side, like the ninety percent of Swedish drivers that judge themselves to be above average.

Man’s excess of self-regard typically makes him strongly prefer people like himself.

Excesses of self-regard often cause bad hiring decisions because employers grossly over appraise the worth of their own conclusions that rely on imporessions in face to face contact. The correct antidote to this sort of folly is to underweight face to face impressions and over weigh the applicant’s past record.

13) Overoptimism Tendency

About three centuries before the birth of Christ, Demosthenes, the most famous Greek orator, said “What a man wish, that also will he believe”. Demosthenes parsed out, was thus saying that man displays an excess of optimism even when he is already doing well.

14) Deprival-Superreaction Tendency

The quantity of man’s pleasure from a ten dollar gain does not exactly match the quantity of displeasure from a ten dollar loss. That is, the loss seems to hurt much more than the gain seems to help. If a man almost gets something he greatly wants and has it jerked away from him at the last moment, he will react much as if he had long owned the reward and had it jerked away. I include the natural human reactions to both kinds of loss experience, the loss of the possessed reward and the loss of the almost possessed reward. Man frequently incurs disadvantage by misframing his problems. He will often compare what is near instead of what really matters. For instance, a man with $10 million in his brokerage account will often be extremely irritated by the accidental loss of $100 out of the $300 in his wallet.

A man ordinarily reacts with irrational intensity to even a small loss or threatened loss of property, love, friendship, dominated territory, opportunity, status, or any other valued thing.

15) Social-Proof Tendency

The otherwise complex behaviour of man is much simplified when he automatically thinks and does what he observes to be thought and done around him. Such following often works fine. For instance, what simpler way could there be to find out how to walk to a big football game in a strange city than by following the flow of the crowd. For some such reason, man’s evolution left him with Social-Proof tendency to think and act as he sees others around him thinking and acting.

In social proof, it is not only action by others that misleads but also their inaction. In the presence of doubt, inaction by others becomes social proof that inaction is the right course.

16) Contrast-Misreaction Tendency

Because the nervous system of a man does not naturally measure in absolute scientific units, it must instead rely on something simpler. The eyes have a solution that limits their programming needs, the contrast in what is seen is registered. And as in sight, so does it go largely, in other senses. As a perception goes so goes cognition.

Contrast misreaction tendency is routinely used to cause disadvantage for customers buying merchandise and services. To make an ordinary price seem low, the vendor will very frequently create a highly artificial price that is much higher than the price always sought, then advertise his standard price as a big reduction from his phony price. Even when people know that this sort of customer manipulation is being attempted, it will often work to trigger buying. This phenomenon  accounts in part for much advertising in newspapers. It also demonstrates that being aware of psychological ploys is not a perfect defence.

17) Stress-Influence Tendency

Everyone recognizes that sudden stress for instance from a threat, will cause a rush of adrenaline in the human body, prompting faster and more extreme reaction. In a phenomenon less well recognized but still widely known, light stress can lightly improve performance say, in examinations whereas heavy stress causes dysfunction.

18) Availability-Misweighing Tendency

This mental tendency echoes the words of the song: “When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near” Man’s imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what’s easily available to it. And the brain can’t use what it can’ remember or what it is blocked from recognizing because it is heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it, as the fellow is influenced by the nearby girl in the song. And so the mind overweighs what is easily available.

Still, the special strength of extra-vivid images in influencing the mind can be constructively used 1) in persuading someone else to reach a correct conclusion or 2) as a device for improving one’s own memory by attaching vivid images, on after the other, to many items one doesn’t want to forget. Indeed such use of vivid images as memory boosters is what enabled the great orators of classical Greece and Rome to give such long, organized speeches without using notes.

The great algorithm to remember in dealing with this tendency is simple: An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you.

19) Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency

All skills attenuate with disuse. I was a whiz at calculus until age twenty, after which the skill was soon obliterated by total non use. The right antidote to such a loss is to make use of the functional equivalent of the aircraft simulator employed in pilot training. This allows a pilot to continuously practice all of the rarely used skills that he can’t afford to lose.

Throughout his life, a wise man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and therefore the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency. His learning capacity will also shrink as he creates gaps, in the latticework of theory he needs a framework for understanding new experience. It is also man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and therefore the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency. His learning capacity will also shrink as he creates gaps in the latticework of theory he needs as a framework for understanding new experience. It is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist that he routinely uses. Any other mode of operation will cause him to miss much that is important.

Skills for a very high order can be maintained only with daily practice. The pianist Paderewski once said that if he failed to practice for a single day, he could notice his performance deterioration and that, after a week’s gap in practice, the audience could notice it as well.

If a skills is raised to fluency, instead of merely being crammed in briefly to enable one to pass some test, then the skill 1) will be lost more slowly and 2) will come back faster when refreshed with new learning. These are not minor advantages, and a wise man engaged in learning some important skill will not stop until he is really fluent in it.

20) Drug-Misinfluence Tendency

This tendency’s destructive power is so widely known to be intense, with frequent tragic consequences for cognition and the outcome of life, that it needs no discussion here to supplement.

21) Senescence-Misinfluence Tendency

With advanced age there comes a natural cognitive decay, differing among individuals in the earliness of its arrival and the speed of its progression. Practically no one is good at learning complex new skills when very old. But some people remain pretty good in maintaining intensely practice old skills until late in life. Old people like me get pretty skilled without working at it, at disguising age related deterioration because social convention, like clothing, hides much decline.

Continuous thinking and learning, done with joy, can somewhat help delay what is inevitable.

22) Authority-Misinfluence Tendency

Living in dominance hierarchies as he does, like all his ancestors before him, man was born mostly to follow leaders, with only a few people doing the leading. And so, human society is formally organized into dominance hierarchies with their culture augmenting the natural follow the leader tendency of a man.

But automatic as most human reactions are, with the tendency to follow leaders being no exception, man is often destine to suffer greatly when the leader is wrong or when his leader’s ideas don’t get through properly in the bustle of life and are misunderstood.

Other versions of confused instructions from authority figures are tragic. In World War II, a new pilot for a general, who sat beside him in the co-pilot’s seat, was so anxious to please his boss that he misinterpreted some minor shift in the general’s position as a direction to do some foolish thing. The pilot crashed the plane and became a paraplegic.

When I once finished in the Rio Colorado in Costa Rica, my guide in a state of shock told me a story about an angler who’d earlier come to the river without ever having fished for a tarpon. A fishing guide like the one I had runs the boat and gives fishing advice, establishing himself in this context as the ultimate authority figure. In the case of this guide, his native language was Spanish, while the angler’s native language was English. The angler got a big tarpon on and began submitting to many directions from this authority figure called a guide: tip up, tip down, reel in, etc. Finally when it was necessary to put more pressure on the fish by causing more bending of the angler’s rod, the guide said in English: “Give him the rod, give him the rod”.

Well, the angler threw his expensive rod at the fist, and when last seen, it was going down the Rio Colorado toward the ocean. This example shows how power is the tendency to go along with an authority figure and how it can turn one’s brain into mush.

So strong is undue respect for authority that this CEO, and many even worse examples, have actually been allowed to remain in control of important business institutions for long periods after it was clear they should be removed. The obvious implication: Be careful whom you appoint to power because a dominant authority figure will often be hard to remove.

23) Twaddle Tendency

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 little.

24) Reason-Respecting Tendency

There is in man, particularly one in an advanced culture, a natural love of accurate cognition and a joy in its exercise. This accounts for the widespread popularity of crossword puzzles, other puzzles, and bridge and chess columns, as well as all games requiring mental skill.

This tendency has an obvious implication. It makes man especially prone to learn well when a would be teacher gives correct reasons for what is taught, instead of simply laying out the desired belief ex cathedra with no reasons given. Few practices, there are wiser than not only thinking through reasons before giving orders but also communicating these reasons to the recipient of the order.

No one knew this better than Carl Braun, who designed oil refineries with spectacular skill and integrity. He had a very simple rule, one of many in his large, Teutonic company. You had to tell Who was to do What, Where, When, and Why. And if you wrote a communication leaving out your explanation of why the addressee was to do what was ordered, Braun was likely to fire you because Braun well knew that ideas got through best when reasons for the ideas were meticulously laid out.

In general, learning is most easily assimilated and used when, life long, people consistently hang their experience actually and vicarious, on a lattice work of theory answering their questions: Why? Indeed, the question “Why?” is a sort of Rosetta stone opening up the major potentiality of mental life.

Unfortunately Reason-Respecting tendency is so strong that even a person’s giving of meaningless or incorrect reasons will increase compliance with his orders and requests. This has been demonstrated in psychology experiments wherein “compliance practitioners” successfully jump to the head of the lines in front of copying machines by explaining their reason: “I have to make some copies” This sort of unfortunate by product of Reason-Respecting tendency is a conditioned reflex, based on a widespread appreciation of the importance of reasons. And, naturally the practice of laying out various claptrap reasons is much used by commercial and cult “compliance practitioners” to help them get what they don’t deserve.

25) Lollapalooza Tendency—The Tendency to Get Extreme Consequences from Confluences of Psychology Tendencies Acting in Favor of a Particular Outcome

This tendency was not in any of the psychology texts I once examined, at least in any coherent fashion, yet it dominates life. It accounts for the extreme result in the Milgram experiment and the extreme success of some cults that have stumbled through practice evolution into bringing pressure from many psychological tendencies to bear at the same time on conversion targets. The targets vary in susceptibility, like the dogs Pavlov worked with in his old age, but some of the minds that are targeted simply snap into zombie mode under cult pressure. Indeed that is one cult’s name for the conversion phenomenon: snapping.

[rogerrachel1995]

Save Marriage Islam Clipart Portentous Useful Tips

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How To Save Your Marriage L Ron Hubbard

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What To Say To Save A Relationship

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[jamesgeiiger]

The Economics of Divorce

Even in the most carefully run and financially independent of lives, there will be some wrenching twists and turns.

Friendships and businesses will fail. You or your loved ones will get sick and some of them will die. Kids will have plenty of trouble on their long road to adulthood – if they even make it. And all around you, there will be a sea of fighting and breakups and divorces and mismatched relationships that you wish would end, for your sake or that of your best friends.

With all of this happening, it’s a wonder that we can remain happy and productive and even thrive as humans. But we can. And we do. Because sometimes life just serves up a shit salad and we don’t have a choice in the matter, but we always have a choice of how to respond to it.

So if you haven’t already heard through the rumor mill, the former Mrs. Money Mustache and I are no longer married. Although we had been drifting this way for a while, the formal change of our status is still less than a year old, so it’s still a topic that deserves some quiet respect*.

The downfalls of our own relationship are personal and not something we choose to make public, but you’ve heard it all before anyway. Sometimes people just grow apart over the decades and find that they want different things from life. And when this happens, not even the greatest advantages of a lifetime money surplus or a supportive network of great friends and family or living in a beautiful place can save you.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that we have had about the most amicable separation that one could hope for, we all still spend plenty of time together and our son is still in the same loving environment he has always had. And I would venture to say that both of us parents are going to come out of the experience much better off than we were before.

See, even the harshest moments come with a little golden key taped secretly onto their side, which you can use to unlock personal growth and greater future happiness. But only if you choose to accept that key and put it to use.

I’m not going to sit here and pretend that there weren’t plenty of harsh moments for both of us, both before and during this experience, with plenty more still to come. Because divorce, especially with children and family and traditions involved, is really fucking hard. 

But guess what? There are a lot of things in life that are hard. Being born and going through childhood is hard. Having babies of your own is even harder. School and jobs are hard, and money is really hard for most people. Relationships and friendships and dealing with bossy or dysfunctional friends or family or parents, personal habits and addictions, and everything else. Life is full of hardships.

But throughout all of it, we always have a choice about how to deal with them.

We can choose to focus on how unfair the situation is, how we were right and we tried our best and the world still mistreated us. And we can fight back, chasing the unfair person or company or situation and get revenge. We can make sure they know exactly why they were wrong and every way in which they were flawed.

And we can collect bathtubs full of sympathetic tears from our friends. And burn years on reliving the past, with a mixture of regret and vengeful self-righteousness and self-pity.

– OR – 

We can get right back to work on positive things to rebuild our lives. Improving ourselves through better habits and health. Building new relationships and nurturing old ones, and making sure we put out only positive energy to every person in our lives, including our ex-spouse. Building everyone up and never, ever tearing anyone down. Because they already do that plenty to themselves.

Like almost everything else in life, human nature draws us to the easier but more destructive of these paths, and only self-knowledge and self-discipline can lift us out of that rut and place us onto the more productive one. And even then, our human nature will keep pulling us back and we’ll make mistakes. And then we’ll have to drag ourselves back out of that rut again. And put the happy face back on, and start behaving like an adult again.

As one friend puts it, “Being a divorced coparent is like being the co-owner of a business. Except it’s the most important company in the world and having it fail is not an option. So you have to treat your business partner accordingly.”

It has been a hard year. But at the same time, I feel we have both already learned so much, that it seems almost impossible that the experience won’t help both of us live better lives in the future. We are both doing well in new relationships and supportive of the other’s success in that important aspect of moving on.

But this is usually a personal finance blog. What does my romantic life have to do with your financial life? Not too much in the specifics, but quite a bit in general, because about half of all marriages end in divorce, and I have found it can be quite a tricky minefield to navigate.

First of all, there is the effect on your child raising, which is a parent’s most important job in life. In the best scenario, the end of a marriage is just a change to your love life, and you can continue to collaborate with your former spouse in a wonderful and open way. But the more conflict you have with that ex, the harder it is to cooperate, which leads to a worse experience for everyone – especially your children.

Then there is the social shame attached to divorce in our culture. While it could be looked at as the natural and peaceful end of an arrangement that has just run its course, other people will see it as a failure or a betrayal or a sin. In fact, when rumour of our separation got out, multiple gossipy and negative and downright distasteful discussions formed around the Internet – on Reddit, other bloggers’ websites, even right here on my own forum. People who don’t even know you, will speculate on your character and your motives. It adds pain to an already difficult situation. The only way to survive this is to ignore it and focus on your own internal compass.

And finally there is the famed financial cost of divorce. It is legendary for destroying lives and fortunes, and indeed this is sometimes accurate. This is because conflict is a form of war, and war is the most expensive things humans have ever invented. And if you hire lawyers and other specialists to fight on your behalf, you just multiply the damage and the cost and stretch out the timeline.

But fortunately, like everything else, going to war is almost always a choice.

And if you don’t choose to fight, a divorce doesn’t have to cost much at all. Two people can peacefully collect up their financial and physical belongings and go their separate ways, and the only cost is in any duplication of possessions you choose to do, to replace things you formerly shared.

So the former Mrs. MM and I (mostly under her guidance!) worked through the do-it-yourself paperwork and paid a $265 fee to the county court for the divorce. I bought the lowest-cost house in the neighborhood, just a 2.5 minute bike ride down the hill from the family house, and I’ve already fixed it up and started hosting Airbnb rentals to help make it carry its own weight. I left the Nissan Leaf behind and chose not to buy a car of my own because I already have bikes.

We share plenty of time with our son and he is doing amazingly well – because we are choosing to make this new life about growth rather than conflict.

And most notably from the perspective of early retirement and financial independence, having enough money in advance has made this part of the split much less painful. Both of us can remain retired and continue to live in mortgage-free houses with investments easily covering our living expenses, while sharing child raising expenses. Although I chose to buy a house, nobody had to compromise on quality of life or sell the expensive family house.

Because I enjoy moderate living for its own sake, my own cost of living will go way down. And because I continue to enjoy writing and working, my income may continue to stay high through this next stage of my life. I’ll continue to use the surplus for projects and philanthropy just as before, but the point here is that one’s relationship status does not have to affect their financial status.

As a long-time reader said to me in a recent email as we discussed our shared fate, having a solid financial cushion and low expenses and lifestyle flexibility, has made the best of an otherwise difficult situation – especially in not having to disrupt the lives of our kids.

Still, having been through it, I would not recommend divorce as a decision to be taken lightly. If you’re still married and there is even a chance that you want it to last, you might consider the following steps.

How to Stay Married

Read about how to stay married – early and often. Peruse the bountiful relationship advice section at Amazon and definitely check out the 5 Love Languages book that resonates strongly with so many people.

Most of us (myself included) drift through the years, assuming we are doing a perfectly good job at being married, while unintentionally making all the same mistakes that everyone else makes.

Bad idea.

You need to proactively nurture a close, loving relationship before things get too dire, and never take it for granted. Because many bits of damage you do to a relationship are permanent. You cannot nag or criticize your partner for years and expect them to forgive you when you eventually see the light. And for those being nagged: you cannot ignore the requests of your partner for years, and expect them to forgive you for that either.

There are so many things, like being on each other’s team in times of hardship, and being genuinely excited and greeting your partner warmly at the door if they’ve been away, that fall to the side in marriages as they get stale. Every time you let this slide, you do a bit of permanent damage. The effects are cumulative like erosion, not temporary like moods or weather.

So the bad news is that there is definitely such thing as “too late.” At some point, the idea of “working on” a marriage sounds like hell because you have been waiting for so long to be able to escape it.

But the good news is that it might not be too late for you, if you do want to stay married. And the benefits begin immediately – if both people are working at it, every positive gesture from one side will be met with a positive one from the other, and they can reinforce each other into a beautiful upward spiral.

But if You’d Rather Not Stay Married

The flipside of all this is that many, many people are currently married, who should not be and don’t want to be.

You may be two perfectly great people with irreconcilable differences, or there might be one great person stuck with an abusive user or loser, or any other combination in the grand spectrum of possible humans. And it is important for these people to hear that although divorce is always difficult, sometimes it really is the best choice and there should not be shame or blame associated with this choice.

Every human needs and deserves to be accepted and loved – even the people who drive us crazy and even those who treat us poorly. They are who they are and while you can’t change them, you can’t make the world any better by spitting venom back at them. So your best strategy is to carve them out of your life, while keeping your words as kind and respectful as you possibly can.

And heed the wise words of my own relationship and coparenting counselor, who noted that the first months after any divorce are the times of greatest conflict. And then it gets easier. And easier. And mellower and friendlier. And after a few years, many former divorcees have moved on so happily that can’t even believe that they were ever angry at each other. That’s entirely possible, and it should be your goal.

So lean on friends, talk to a relationship counselor even if it is just by yourself (yes, it’s really worth it!), read books, laugh, cry, learn mindfulness and meditation, eat salads, get outside and exercise, write more new things and build new things and new businesses and new relationships, and you will come through it better than ever.

That’s what I’ll be up to in 2019.  I hope your new year is even better!

In the Comments: I have found it so helpful over this past year to share with others and realize that I am not alone in this. Feel free to share your own experiences and hopes and fears anonymously.

My comment form allows you to use a pseudonym so you can be anonymous while you let out the truth. And read the other comments, to see what other people around you are feeling.

And for those who have been through this and gotten through the other side and found happiness, go ahead and share your message of hope.

* A bit of social approrpriateness that seems to be lost on certain forum participants and even other bloggers, who we won’t call out here. Please don’t be like them – using the Internet to publicly gossip about strangers helps nobody.

    The Economics of Divorce published first on https://worldwideinvestforum.tumblr.com/