Saturday Serendipity

Quote,Mental Model, Twitter Thread.

Quote

"It's a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes"

-Charlie Munger

Mental Model

Chauffeur Knowledge

There’s a story that I’m borrowing from Munger here cause it makes my job easier and he does it better so,

“ I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving a same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine, if I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?” And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question. The speaker said, “Well, I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.

Well, the reason I tell that story is not to celebrate the quick wittedness of the protagonist. In this world I think we have two kinds of knowledge: One is Planck knowledge, that of the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. Then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned to prattle the talk. They may have a big head of hair. They often have fine timbre in their voices. They make a big impression. But in the end what they’ve got is chauffeur knowledge masquerading as real knowledge. I think I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States. You’re going to have the problem in your life of getting as much responsibility as you can into the people with the Planck knowledge and away from the people who have the chauffeur knowledge.“

What do you get from this?

Most people know a lot of things but their understanding of those things is missing.

In life

When I was in middle school I was taught the formula of Compound Interest. I remembered the formula by heart. I still know it. The problem is that I only understood what it really is two years ago. I understood what impact it has in my life and how a mathematical concept can help me in so many ways.

My point is simply rote learning is chauffeur knowledge. You don’t learn anything you simply just know things.

Feynman has a great video to show the difference between knowledge and understanding. Check it out in the end.

In Investing

In the investing world you can find a lot about companies through other people’s reports and work. Now this is a smart idea something Mohnish Pabrai preaches ‘cloning’. But the problem comes in when we become like the chauffeur and blindly clone. We need to clone in the idea generation phase and then do our own independent thinking.

So far whatever I have written has been influenced by a blog written by Vishal Khandelwal and honestly speaking maybe even I am a victim of Chauffeur knowledge here. I guess the only way to battle it is to use the Feynman technique and try and teach the concepts we learn to know if we understand them or not.

We also need to use the words I Don’t know a lot more as Vishal Khandelwal has said.

My conclusion from this is simple. We need to understand not to know. Also Knowledge ≠ Understanding.

Twitter Thread

https://twitter.com/warikoo/status/1258643663707688960?s=46&t=fjU8yGaYrj3Ggyn8ammoGA

That’s it for this week! Find the Feynman video below👇👇