The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
Munger's checklist of the standard ways a human mind fools itself — roughly twenty-five biases, how they compound, and what to do about it.
Munger’s second foundational talk, given to a Harvard audience in 1995 and revised for Poor Charlie’s Almanack a decade later. Where Elementary, Worldly Wisdom argues for a latticework of models, this one supplies the psychology tray: reward-and-punishment superresponse, liking and disliking distortion, doubt-avoidance, commitment and consistency, deprivation superreaction, social proof, authority, and the rest — ending with the Lollapalooza effect, where several biases fire at once and push behavior to an extreme.
He is blunt that knowing the list is not the same as being immune to it:
I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.
About 30 minutes. Watch it once for the catalog, then keep the transcript as a checklist.