Wednesday, July 30, 2014

If it's not simple, then I'm not interested...

I was recently reminded of this story, as told by Peter Bevelin in one of my interviews with him (HERE):
As Munger says: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.” When I hear them at the annual meeting, I am thinking about Einstein’s reply to a student. The student had challenged Einstein’s statement that the laws of physics should be simple by asking: “What if they aren’t simple?” Einstein replied, “Then I would not be interested in them.”  
They have a unique ability to distinguish masses of trivia from what is really important – to filter out situations, and find what’s at their core.
The “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there” was also quoted in the book 100 to 1 in the stock market (see THIS post), and it also reminds me of Taleb's Fourth Quadrant.