Intelligence is widely distributed. There are a lot of smart people. And so if you think about what actually differentiates those who do well, it's often the complements to intelligence — things like work ethic, integrity, the ability to get along with others, and emotional stability.
Intelligence is not sufficient for success. The world is full of intelligent people who don't succeed, and the reason is that intelligence has complements — things like drive, emotional stability, the ability to work with others, and good judgment — and those complements are often more important than intelligence itself.
Most of us have ideas about what we're looking for in a romantic partner. But psychologist Paul Eastwick says these preferences are surprisingly poor guides for finding love.
Intelligence is probably not the limiting factor for most intelligent people. If you're smart enough to be in the game, the question is really about the other stuff — your ability to stay humble, to keep learning, to manage your own psychology.
Stories, he says, are fundamentally about the negotiation of social life. They're about conflicts between characters, conflicts between desires, conflicts between values. And when we immerse ourselves in stories, we are essentially running simulations of human experience.
Intelligence is probably one of those things where there's a certain level you need, but beyond that, the marginal returns are pretty low. And actually the things that matter much more are the complements to intelligence — things like work ethic, emotional stability, intellectual honesty, and the ability to sit with uncertainty.
We are, in some sense, living inside of stories. We have a story about who we are, a story about our relationship, a story about what the world is like. And these stories shape what we see and what we don't see, what we remember and what we forget.
Intelligence is widely distributed, but the complements to intelligence — things like the ability to sit quietly in a room alone, to not need external validation, to be patient, to be willing to look foolish — those things are much more rare.
Intelligence is broadly useful, but if everyone is smart, then intelligence doesn't differentiate who wins. What differentiates who wins are the complements to intelligence — things like judgment, temperament, and the ability to act under uncertainty.
Intelligence by itself, has very limited value. What matters is what complements it — things like the ability to do hard things for a long time, the ability to be honest with yourself, to have good values, to care about the people around you.
Intelligence is probably not the limiting factor for most intelligent people. The limiting factor is more likely things like courage, or open-mindedness, or patience, or emotional balance — the complements to intelligence.
Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we communicate with each other, and how we understand ourselves. But stories can also mislead us, by making the world seem more coherent and predictable than it really is.
Intelligence is probably the thing people spend the most time thinking about in this business, and I think it's one of the least important factors in long-run success. The returns to intelligence are just not that high in investing, and the reason is that markets are pretty efficient.
Stories are so central to how we think that psychologists have found we don't just consume them passively — we use them to construct our own sense of self. The 'narrative identity' theory holds that we each build and constantly revise an internalized story of our own life that incorporates the past, present, and imagined future, and that this story is our identity.
We understand the world through the lens of narrative. When someone offers us a story, our defenses come down; we are transported into another world, and in that world, we update our beliefs and feelings. Stories don't just reflect reality — they shape it.
Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we connect with others, and how we understand ourselves. But our love of stories has a dark side: it can distort our thinking, make us vulnerable to manipulation, and cause us to ignore evidence that doesn't fit our preferred narrative.
What controls your aversions and desires controls you. And if that person is not you, it doesn't matter how strong you are, how rich you are, how famous you are, how powerful you are, you are a slave.
Being on the frontier just means you're getting distilled. If you're not getting distilled, that's the definition in your mind. Like unless other people will spend a lot of money to try to emulate your model and recreate it, then you are not — that's a good like reality check.
We don't experience our lives in global terms. We don't think of ourselves as having a good life. We think of ourselves as having a good morning or a bad morning. And so the quality of your life is largely determined by the quality of your experiences, your moments, but the moments aren't equal.
AI is essentially looking at patterns and trying to guess what the next word should be. And such that it's a regression to the mean. AI takes everything to the average and people aren't interested in reading average or average doesn't grab your heart. It's something that's an outlier that you haven't seen before that resonates with you.
We assume that other people who are happy are in a fundamentally different situation than we are — that they have things we don't have, or they don't have problems that we do. But the research suggests that happy people have essentially found ways to make peace with the same kinds of problems and shortcomings that unhappy people struggle with.
We tend to think that if we're unhappy, something must be wrong with our lives. But research suggests the opposite is also true: when we're unhappy, we look for things that are wrong with our lives. Our emotional state shapes what we perceive and remember, so that unhappiness itself can generate the very evidence we use to explain it.
I don't stay up at night, which might be dumb, right? There's a lot of very smart people who think AI is going to murder us all. There's a bunch of smart people who think it's going to, you know, become a god and save us all. I tend to be really focused on like, oh, there's actually a lot of like humans are flexible.
We tend to think that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. And when a good person suffers, we're forced to confront the uncomfortable reality that the world doesn't work the way we'd like it to.
Those who uh don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. And I am here before you today to say even if you know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. Because the you know the if when you're in the moment, you have no historical perspective. You see things in terms of your your impulses, your your you know what's good for you.
great investors should look for world-class strengths rather than an absence of weaknesses, and why expanding the ways we recognize talent can raise the bar rather than lower it
Most of us assume that negative experiences will harm us, and positive experiences will help us. But psychologists have found that bad experiences are often more instructive than good ones — we learn more from our failures than from our successes, and we grow more from adversity than from ease.
We're supposed to be able to predict and control what happens to us. And when bad things happen to good people, it's a violation of that assumption. It threatens our belief in a just world — the sense that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
When people feel distressed about a problem in the world, they often think about what they can do to help. But the wrong kind of help can sometimes make things worse. The urge to do something — anything — can lead us to take actions that feel good but don't actually address the underlying problem.
Think about the last time you had a discouraging thought. Maybe you told yourself, "This won't work. I'm not cut out for this." Did you take that thought as fact?
If you want to do the most good in the world, you should think carefully about where to direct your efforts. The problem is that our intuitions about impact are often badly miscalibrated — we're drawn to problems that are visible and emotional rather than problems that are large and tractable.
If the history books you're reading are fun and reassuring, you're not reading history, you're reading propaganda. The books you should pick up should open your world view. Should get you to see things that you didn't see before.
The economy is an iceberg where I think 90 to 95% of it is below the surface. And what the government does does matter, but the majority of the economy just grinds on regardless of who is tweeting what or not tweeting what or who has prostate cancer or doesn't have prostate cancer.
Before you give the government new powers, try the Munger Test: cross out "government" and insert the name of the politician you trust least. Then see if you still like the idea.
Most of us think about the problem of how to do good in the world the wrong way. We focus on what's in our hearts — whether our motives are pure — rather than thinking carefully about the effects of our actions. But doing good is actually a skill, and like any skill, it requires learning, feedback, and sustained effort.
If you want to make a difference, the truth is that some ways of helping are far more effective than others — and the differences between them are not marginal. They can be enormous, sometimes a factor of 10, 100, or even 1,000 times more impactful.
The thing that I've observed about the truly great investors is that they have an absolute obsession about not losing money. It's a very different orientation from people who are obsessed with making money. The ones obsessed with not losing money tend to make a great deal of it.
Most people, when they think about making a difference, think about the size of the action. But research suggests that what matters more is whether the action is targeted — whether it's aimed at a specific person or group of people. When we try to help everyone, we often end up helping no one.
Steven takes aim at terms like "alignment," "goal-seeking," and "rogue agents," arguing that they can anthropomorphize problems that software engineers have dealt with for decades. His framing is simpler: when software doesn't do what it's supposed to do, it has a bug.
We assume that if we are thinking something, other people can see it too. The problem is that our thoughts and feelings are invisible to others. What is obvious to us is often completely hidden to everyone else.
Your political view should be based on not how this would work for you in your current position in society, but imagine you are behind a veil of ignorance. You are picking policies for a society and then everything's going to be scrambled up and you're not going to know where you fall on the spectrum.
1mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
