In the age of multi-disciplinary events, this is one of the best. You can keep track of it live on Livestream.com, check out the event’s blog on Tumblr, its Twitter feed or Facebook page. Enjoy!

The larger one is a New Yorker profile on Peter Thiel, the “dystopian utopian” (as we’ve read someone describe him) VC/ hedge fund investor that founded Paypal and later (among many other things) was the first outside investor in Facebook. No easy takeaways but he remains one of the most provocative thinkers in our realm.

Finally, it appears that the speed of light (as a limit) is indeed in question as recent studies were able to repeat the first experiment’s results. We’ll certainly hear a lot more about this in the near future, as there is still plenty of doubt. In the meantime, for those concerned with the state of a world in which not even the speed of light is a certainty, we suggest a further cause for concern: our degrees of separation, which used to be 6, are now down to 4.74, according to researchers from the University of Milan and Facebook. Yes, apparently Facebook has a research department.

Here’s a quote dear to our hearts: “the most important phrase in science is not ‘Eureka!’, it’s ‘that’s strange’… “

LINKS:

Richard Feynman at his best in this 49:37 video, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”. There’s a wealth of stuff on Feynman online, and we wouldn’t do him justice by trying to quickly compile some list today. If you don’t have 50 minutes readily available, jump to the last 7 minutes (starts at 42:54) – but come back someday for the rest. This last bit starts with pseudo science and “experts” – about how hard it is to really know something. It seems that smart, experienced people are extremely careful in the process of forming their views, opinions and “truths”. It continues with the need to keep an open mind – the need not to “marry” your ideas and frameworks. He says about physics: if it turns out that there’s one universal law, so be it. If it turns out that it’s a multitude of laws, so be it. It doesn’t matter, it’s important that nature reveals itself as it is, not as one group of scientists or another wants it to behave. Intellectual integrity: you must doubt, you must question even yourself. “When you doubt, you ask, and it gets a little harder to believe. I can live with doubting and not knowing. (…) I don’t feel frightened about not knowing things.” – that’s the spirit.

Great books and anti-libraries – About things you realize you don’t know and unread books.

Hammers and nails – About avoiding the trap of the “man with just a hammer”.

Edge.org’s question for 2011 – One of the best answers to their 2011 question is “independent thinking”.

Multidisciplinary approach and communication – Should we seek to be multidisciplinary or is it enough to build a multidisciplinary team?

Classics: Psychology of Human Misjudgment – Charlie Munger’s timeless speech (it can also be found in the more recent Munger link above).

LINKS:

Classic articles: Munger’s “Psychology of Human Misdjudgement” speech at HBS in 1995 – May 28th, 2010 – Must-read. If you read this yearly you’ll be a smarter human being. Seriously.

Li Lu describes Charlie Munger – Feb. 14th, 2011 – Li Lu met provides a great account of Mr. Munger in a way that even Buffett hasn’t done yet.

The Woodstock of Capitalism, 2011 – May 3rd, 2011 – Links regarding Berkshire’s 2011 shareholders’ meeting, including an 18-minute video with Mr. Munger that we found very interesting.

Munger and Buffett talks – September 9th, 2010 – There’s plenty of material on Buffett, but there’s also a good talk by Munger at the University of Michigan.

Misdirection/ disorientation – May 13th, 2010 – In defense of misdirection and disorientation – or more accurately in defense of stepping outside your comfort zone, learning something every day and being multidisciplinary in your approach to pretty much everything. That’s how Munger views his life even at his age. He’s learning astrophysics at 88 years of age!

Charlie Munger interview – March 2010 – Rare interview, so enjoy it.

“Tweets” from the 2009 Berkshire meeting – to get a sense of Mr. Munger’s “performances” at BRK’s meetings.

First of all, it’s humbling that such a commonsensical notion about the brain has been at least in dispute for almost 15 years, while we still get everyday stories of “right side vs. left side”. Good reminder to keep one’s preconceived notions in check – including the assumption that the current line of thinking is definitive.

The author then goes into the “modern” theory and highlights some alternative approaches to try to stimulate insights, the “Aha!” moments. Here are a few quotes that caught our attention:

- “The shelves of the brain are stocked with what you’ve seen or heard or read about what others have done before. This process takes place naturally in every human brain, but active study can accelerate and improve it (…)” – indeed. Compare it to two quotes by Charlie Munger: “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.” and “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.”

This is from our “Why we write” page on Buysiders.com:

“At IP we seek to fight our structural cognitive limitations acting with discipline and dedication in 4 fronts: (…) 1) Investing our attention in the acquisition of “frameworks”, “mental models”, “vocabularies” and information of several disciplines, industries, companies, geographies, business models, vehicles and investment structures. These resources form a tacit knowledge mosaic that: a) creates context(s) for us to understand and organize the innumerable stimuli we receive, helping distinguish what is relevant and what is not; b) functions as a repository of information with potential to be used in the future; c) encourages our creativity, providing us with perspectives and starting points different from the “average view” for everything we do.”

Another quote from the article:

- “The presence of mind Clausewitz describes is akin to the calm state that precedes a flash of insight, (…) when your brain is relaxed and wandering, instead of focused on a particular problem.” – Again we turn to Charlie Munger, who has said: “We both (Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett) insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.”

Finally, the author describes GE in the 1990′s. Then-CEO Jack Welch and his Chief Learning Officer Steve Kerr had a method for problem-solving that the author considers very clever. Describing the method he calls “the GE matrix” he says:

- “(…) Then ask the most important question you can ever ask to solve any problem of any kind: Has anyone else in the world ever made progress on any piece of this puzzle?” – Or, as we’ve written in a 2009 post: “(…) But we can greatly improve where and how we get our “building blocks” by looking abroad. We joke that it’s the “crystal ball that works” – we wish it was that good, but we find more and more over the years that we gain valuable insights. (…) In some cases, NOT doing it may blind you to risk factors not previously seen.”

We’d like to add another dimension to the first and third quotes we’ve highlighted above: networking. Part of the active, relentless effort to acquire mental models, knowledge, facts and other building blocks involves getting to know the right people and foster these relationships. As we’ve written (again…) in the “Why We Write” page:

“2) Building up and developing a local, national and international “intelligence network”. According to our experience, it is not very “wise” to leave out of consideration, in a strict process of evaluation of investments, the input of people who know much more than you about some key points of your analysis. (…) There are also thousands of formal and informal specialists spread throughout Brazil and worldwide. They are former company administrators, regulators, shareholders, investors, consultants. They are very useful on several manners: as independent sources of information on companies, people background checks (administrators, shareholders), as ‘devil advocates’, for specific aspects of an investment thesis, and are also useful to make us get quickly up to speed with respect to relevant themes that take place in countries different from ours.”

Other references at Buysiders.com:

- Creative problem-solving – Dec. 20th, 2010.

- Multidiscplinary approach and communication – Feb. 17th, 2010.

We can’t stress enough how great the book “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” is, since it gathers this speech and nine other talks Mr. Munger gave throughout the years. Some are classics in their own merits. You can find links to most of them in the Wikipedia page, but to have it all in one place saves a lot of time.

LINKS:

The audio to the speech – Found at this blog, many thanks.

Buysiders.com post on the book Think Twice – Mental traps are also discussed in this video with Michael Mauboussin.

Buysiders.com post on the multidisciplinary approach and communication.

Whitney Tilson reviews the speech – Motley Fool, 2002

A post on Seth Godin’s blog over Mother’s Day weekend had one sentence that “clicked” right away: “The best ideas come out of the corner of our eye, the edge of our consciousness, in a flash. They are the result of misdirection and random collisions (…)”

Nicholas Nassim Taleb had this to say about going to parties: “Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.”

From a recent NYT article on the American University in Cairo and how it challenges students to “unlearn” in the first year: “Who am I? What does it mean to be human? These are the kinds of questions posed to undergraduate students entering this 90-year-old university during what the president, David D. Arnold, called a first year of “disorientation.” During disorientation, the students — 85 percent of them Egyptians — are taught to learn in ways quite at odds with the traditional method of teaching in this country, where instructors lecture, students memorize and tests are exercises in regurgitation.”

Charlie Munger has always talked about this: “Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.”

We’re sure we could come up with more “pieces” to this puzzle, and so could you, but we’ll let Mr. Munger himself sum it up perfectly for us:

“Experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime. A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind that loves diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.”

There are many ways to “be prepared”, so here’s one: Build your own mental models with discipline and drive, sourcing as diversely as possible but always focusing on what’s really relevant, collaborating with a team of bright people both inside and outside your firm – better yet, people brighter than you.

It’s hard, patient, disciplined and long-term work, but it’s well worth it.