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Rand statistics
The human mind is not constructed so that it works well without having reasons.
morality play
holding a critical mass of expertise in a rapidly changing and rapidly growing business,
They tore copper pipe out of the wall for dope fixes,
Once, Warren and I bought a company, and the seller had a big study done by an investment banker. It was about this thick. We just turned it over as if it were a diseased carcass. He
psychological force called reciprocity tendency,
first-order
“Well, George, you’ve just invented a new form of the tragedy of the commons. You’re locked in this system, and you can’t fix it. You’re going to go to a tragic hell in a handbasket, if going to hell involves being once the great leader of the world and finally going to the shallows in terms of leadership.”
You couldn’t covet thy neighbor’s ass, you couldn’t covet thy neighbor’s servant girl, you couldn’t covet …
There’s some paradox in economics that nobody’s going to get out.
When I was young, everybody was excited by [Kurt] Gödel,87 who came up with proof that you couldn’t have a mathematical system without a lot of irritating incompleteness in it. Well, since then, my betters tell me that they’ve come up with more irremovable defects in mathematics and have decided that you’re never going to get mathematics without some paradox in it. No matter how hard you work, you’re going to have to live with some paradox if you’re a mathematician.
the old country.
And I also urged that people not be discouraged by irremovable complexity and paradox. It just adds more fun to the problems.
My inspiration again is Keynes: Better roughly right than precisely wrong.
ability to clear.
Lewis Carroll.
Alfred A. Knopf
for good or ill,
I’d like to think that the development department had nothing to do with it.
What are the core ideas that helped me? Well,
the safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos in my opinion that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large, the people who have had this ethos win in life, and they don’t win just money and honors. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with. And there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.
that there’s no love that’s so right as admiration-based love, and such love should include the instructive dead. Somehow I picked up that idea, and I’ve lived with it all my life.
It’s a disease, and if you find yourself with a disease like that, you should eliminate it.
Another idea—and this may remind you of Confucius, too—is that the acquisition of wisdom is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. And there’s a corollary to that idea that is very important. It requires that you’re hooked on lifetime learning. Without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you learn after you leave here.
Alfred North Whitehead correctly said at one time that the rapid advance of civilization came only when man “invented the method of invention.” He was referring to the huge growth in GDP per capita and many other good things we now take for granted. Big-time progress started a few hundred years ago. Before that, progress per century was almost nil. Just as civilization can progress only when it invents the method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning.
was very lucky. I came to law school having learned the method of learning, and nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning. Consider
Warren Buffett again. If you watched him with a time clock, you’d find that about half of his w...
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Samuel Johnson
Perhaps the most important rule in management is “Get the incentives right.”
misgambling compulsion,
declaratory judgments
and juror, while pretending objectivity, is gaining objectivity. And many a trial lawyer or other advocate comes to believe what he formerly only pretended to believe.
reciprocation tendency results in constructive conduct. Daily interchange in marriage is also assisted by reciprocation tendency, without which marriage would lose much of its allure.
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 reciprocation tendency and in the opposite direction by reward-superresponse tendency pushing one to 100 percent of some good thing.
With luxury goods, the process works with a special boost because buyers who pay high prices often gain extra status from thus demonstrating both their good taste and their ability to pay.
cocoon of
Instead, just as he must learn that trend does not always correctly predict destiny, he must learn that the average dimension in some group will not reliably guide him to the dimension of some specific item.
Another antidote is to behave somewhat like Darwin did when he emphasized disconfirming evidence:
One consequence of this tendency is that extra-vivid evidence, being so memorable and thus more available in cognition, should often consciously be underweighed,
It is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist that he routinely uses.
next-to-last
special knowledge problems
rises worth, by poverty oppressed.”
