Live data from Hacker News

Charlie Munger has died

berkshirehathaway.com

391–400 of 454 posts

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#391
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all great, but does it qualify for a hero? They did't do anything with the cash except piling it up and multiplying. By all means they could do that - don't get me wrong again, but that doesn't make them heroes, does it? Their videos are by far _not only_ sane advice out there. They are good, but any decent book on the subject value much more.

His actions and the value he created helped to (or actively did) build countless companies, and millions of jobs . Services and products we are using every day. People that earned a living, kids and families enjoying a prosperous life - are all result of his actions. Moreover, he taught and inspired many others do the same. That's a hero in my book. Not some sports player, actor or worse - some politician - people ar…

Well, if you believe so. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#392
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural light, fresh air, second means of egress, bla bla. The egregious thing is it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect. It’s like if you wanted to make a safer car by building it out of 500mm thick concrete. Oh, it’d be safe alright, but slow, wallowy, dangerous for others, poor gas mileage. Fast downhill, I guess. Wouldn’t be any better as an EV. It might be good for a few people, app…

Others might disagree, but I still don't think you've provided a good explanation for why you believe it's "plainly a completely stupid idea". Your argument is: > it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect. But it does solve the problem? And unlike your concrete car example, the only downside here is that students won't have natural light in their dorms, which as many people in this thread h…

Sure, I recognize "some" people may be OK with no windows. How many is that? Lacking empirical data at hand, let's just look around. How many windowless bedrooms have you seen? I don't think I'm extrapolating from too few data points when I suggest the answer is, statistically, zero.

It's not just a couple of rooms, it's thousands (iirc).

The overweighting is out of all proportion and doesn't reflect common experience. Further, students tend to lack money and choices. Here is a choice between bad or worse. Even I would choose a windowless cell over sleeping rough. I would choose to eat bugs over starving. Must it come to this on a university campus?

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#393
post #239

You cannot spend a billion in one century if you spend $25K per day, I cannot understand why a billionaire will work until the age of 99..

> I cannot understand why a billionaire will work until the age of 99..

It's that insane obsession with collecting more of what they love: $$$.

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#394
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really dislike the "Light On Two Sides Of Every Room" pattern of Christopher Alexander, which is ideally accomplished with two externally facing windows on different walls. Windows compromise how I would like to layout the room's interior to my own preferences. I don't care what an architect envisioned for a generic human habitability, I want a space to feel habitable to me. Most of the time that means eliminating…

That is, of course, your completely legitimate individual choice. If there’s a window, you can block it. If, on the other hand, there is no window and you want one, this is more difficult to resolve. Alexander and his team absolutely expected people to adapt the patterns to individual preferences, and so stated right up front. As a matter of general preferences, “light on two sides” was found through diligent researc…

Of course, and there's a lot to like about Alexander's approach. Though while designers may lean heavily one way at first, maybe they could also sample the perspective of the actual thousands of people who will occupy the space before construction starts? Priors are just that: priors. They are meant to be updated to posteriors, whether by an individual, or whether by thousands of people. Sometimes the update will be minimal no matter what sub-population you sample, which is a good sign something is actually deep and inescapable, but sometimes it will be rather large because even thousands of people can share a few specific characteristics not so prevalent in a random general population sample where the prior came from and which absolutely affect what feels habitable to them.

e.g. Active college students, so also mostly young, mostly unmarried, freshly liberated from the parental household.. And of course the main activities of the building and its rooms, like sleep vs work, should be considered more strongly before applying a general pattern. I don't mean to assert that form should always follow function, though, or that architects don't already consider inescapable tradeoffs, which by their nature some people won't like the decisions because they would have traded differently all else equal.

On a tangent, I was reminded of a funny architecture crime. CS students at MIT got a wacky Gehry building (the Stata Center) while the architects have and keep a very normal and tasteful building (the Rogers Building). Gehry was even sued at some point because the building had functional issues. That goes back to the point about windows: frequently it's actually not enough to just block a window. They change the environment more than just letting in light or not, they affect things like temperature (sometimes for the better! Ability to open one for a breeze or window AC is a blessing in many rooms), humidity, structural soundness, and ease of mold growth. When you have a window or two in the bedroom that you block out, it still affects where you can place things because of those other concerns.

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jack LaLanne died at 96 years old, yet my grandpa who's eaten tons of Taco Bell for most of his life is alive at just a hair from that age. I wonder what people will think about the obsession with "longevity" in the likely outcome of David Sinclair or Andrew Huberman dying in their 80s or earlier.

Peter attia adresses that in outlive: bias survivor. People with good longevity genetic don't pay the price as much for their behavior, so they indulge in it and stand out. But most people don't have that, and can only emulate a little their epigenetic by exercice, diet, etc.

There a tribe in Ecuador with reduced height studied by Walter Longo etc. They have a mutation in their growth hormone receptor, that means that they experience less effect of human growth hormone, hence reduced height. And their lifestyle is rather unhealthy: alcohol, smoking, sugars, junk food, obesity etc. Yet they rarely experience diabetes, cancer etc probably due to reduced mTOR pathway activation.

In the context of this specific post regarding Charlie Munger, you can't say that it's genetics unless you measure specific genes. He could be 100x Bryan Johnson, but Bryan Johnson at least makes his protocols open for use. And Munger didn't even bother to make a genetics test with his curiosity, thus providing no essential value to human civilization.

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#396
post #132

A legend of the business and investing world. Acquired podcast got to do one of (possible the) last interviews with him a month ago for anyone looking for recent content from him: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/charlie-munger Also Stripe Press is releasing just next week a book (technically re-release of an older book) on his collected thoughts: https://press.stripe.com/poor-charlies-almanack

This is one of his greatest. I wrote a nice summary of Poor Charlie’s Almanack back in 2021 which I’ve occasionally kept coming back to. I think today I‘ll revisit it with a sense of emptiness inside me. I’m sharing it here for others to enjoy: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/poor-charlies-almanack...

There's also some speeches of his that are really fascinating too.

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. What makes it index investing is low fees and simple, objective stock selection without human judgement. There are various well-studied criteria for value stocks. An S&P500 index does stock selection too, it's just picking large-cap stocks instead of value stocks.

Large/Small are not correlated to value/growth. I for instance, invest pretty much all my money on ETFs such as ISCV, that invest on companies that fit the small and the value criteria. Over the decades, these two factors combined seemed to be the ones that on average gave the most returns.

I didn't claim they are correlated. I said some funds select based on value, and others based on size. Some do both.

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#398
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The efficient market hypothesis has been dogma for about half a century, but there's a lot of academic research showing that value and various other factors outperform anyway. There are all sorts of structural and psychological reasons they might persist; e.g. a short-term bias among fund managers, who tend to lose investors if they underperform a few quarters. The research does say that value doesn't work quite as w…

There is no reliable evidence that value investing still outperforms the market on a risk-adjusted basis. Everyone knows the trick now so the trick no longer works.

There's no reliable evidence that it doesn't, either. Value has never been something that works all the time. You have to put up with lagging performance when growth stocks are ascendent, which could be a reason that value keeps working in the long term. Time will tell whether it has its day again.

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#399
post #268

As billionaires go, he seemed unusually down to earth. I listen to his lecture on "The Psychology of Human Misjudgement" every few years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws

What you mean is probably 'as far as public billionaires goes'. And with regards to 'down to earth' like anyone of prominence they don't care about you or wouldn't help you in any way (and couldn't possibly). So we are not talking about the guy next door who lends you his saw and is already around for advice and a helping hand. Don't think for a second they aren't selfish in their own way they would have to be in ord…

[deleted]

Re: Charlie Munger has died

#400
post #268

As billionaires go, he seemed unusually down to earth. I listen to his lecture on "The Psychology of Human Misjudgement" every few years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws

What you mean is probably 'as far as public billionaires goes'. And with regards to 'down to earth' like anyone of prominence they don't care about you or wouldn't help you in any way (and couldn't possibly). So we are not talking about the guy next door who lends you his saw and is already around for advice and a helping hand. Don't think for a second they aren't selfish in their own way they would have to be in ord…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN