Hacker News Books

Oh I can only agree ! Each year I'm eagerly waiting for it.

To complement, I would add two books from Buffett and Munger:

- "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life" by Alice Schroeder

- "Poor Charlie's Almanack" by Charlie Munger - a fantastic read

* Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

* Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger

* The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

* The Great Mental Models

Regarding Poor Charlie's Almanack, the best way to buy the book is on a trip to the Huntington Library near LA. No discount, nor is it signed, but that way it comes with a free excuse to visit an amazing treasury of culture. Worth doing!

http://www.huntington.org/

Nice to see Poor Charlie's Almanack on there, I was wondering how many people bother to order it. I went to the Huntington Library on Friday and was reminded to pick the book up there from a link I saw on News.YC which you should read to get a great taste of Charlie Munger:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9364

Poor Charlie's Almanack, gave me a whole new framework to look at work and life.

He actually revised the entire speech, added a few more principles, and turned it into a formal essay called "The Psychology of Human Misjudment". I'm not sure if it's online, but it appears as the last chapter in Poor Charlie's Almanack.

- "Models of My Life" by Herbert A. Simon

- "Poor Charlie's Almanack" by Charlie Munger

Poor Charlie's Almanack (http://tinyurl.com/poorcharliesalmanack) is worth every penny.

Everyone should read that book.

Interesting. I hate books that teach you how to negotiate like a scumbag (ie most trial attorneys and car salesmen) so this is a refreshing change of pace. I will put this on my to-read list. A book in similar vein is "Getting to Yes". which influenced me greatly in how to handle disputes. It was recommended by Charlie Munger, in his book "Poor Charlie's Almanack" (antoher great book).

Also, check out "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger". Both that and Poor Charlie's Almanack are two books that describe the Warren Buffett/Charlie Munger way of thinking. In fact, I found out about "Getting to Yes" through those two books. Read them, these three books changed my outlook on life in a big way.

A summary of these books is here: http://sivers.org/book/SeekingWisdom

Poor Charlie's Almanack collects many of Munger's best speeches. You can find some of them on the web (here is a transcript of his famous "Psychology of Human Misjudgment" speech: http://www.rbcpa.com/Mungerspeech_june_95.pdf); read one and see if it speaks to you. If it does, the book, which includes Munger's edits to these speeches, is a worthwhile investment of your money and time.

I would recommend Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger and these following two books:

The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott Page

https://www.amazon.com/Model-Thinker-What-Need-Know/dp/04650...
and

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Mental-Models-Thinking-Concepts...

This year I've read:

Maxims - Epictetus

The road to serfdom - Friedrich Hayek

De officiis - Cicero

De divinatione - Cicero

Lives of eminent philosophers - Diogenes Laertius

Confessions - Al ghazali

Illiad - Homer

Odyssey - Homer

Influence - Robert Cialdini

Guns, Germs and steel - Jared Diamond

Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger - 2nd reading

Andrew Carnegie's Biography - Joseph Frazier

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Taleb - 2nd reading

Bed of Procrustes - Nassim Taleb

Never Split the Difference - Christopher Voss

The intelligent investor - Benjamin Graham

Autobiography - Benjamin Franklin

I always remember this quote:

"In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time -- none, zero." Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger is one of my few heroes. A great all-around thinker, about more than just investing. I highly recommend a dive into his mind via these two books:

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger = http://www.amazon.com/dp/1578644283 = a deep read, mostly focused on cognitive biases

Poor Charlie's Almanack = http://www.amazon.com/dp/1578645018 = a big coffee table book of his speeches and essays, good for leaving on the kitchen table to read over a meal

I think if you order the books directly from Charlie Munger's company, the proceeds go to charity: http://www.poorcharliesalmanack.com/

Just started going down this rabbit hole myself. I've noticed to really grasp and develop your own mental models you deeply have to understand a few things first:

1. Human biases: Every mental model is built upon some human bias.

2. How incentives work: Understanding the motivation behind why people do what they do.

3. Mental thought construction: Understanding how the brain gathers, processes and stores information.

4. Biology: How we've evolved (and haven't) from stone age times and how that still influences us today.

This is by no means exhaustive but are just some of the topics I've found most useful. That said, here are the best resources I've found:

- The Art Of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli: Taught me about human biases. Reads like a directory of most biases.

- Influence by Robert Cialdini: Taught me about incentives and a whole lot more.

- Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff: Taught me about mental thought construction.

- Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charles Munger: Taught me about many things but most importantly good decision making.

- Sapiens by Yuval Harari and his course https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE-kxvSEhkzDEmLQx3RE0...: Taught me about how we've evolved as humans and how we haven't.

- Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman: Taught me more about human biases.

- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely: Taught me more about how and why we make decisions and what good decisions are.

The thing I've really started to notice is it's not enough to know or read about mental models, you have to ruthlessly apply them. This is tough when even knowing about your biases doesn't stop you from still being affected by them.

Agreed - Munger has been one of my very few heroes for a long time now. Poor Charlie's Almanack is a great read.

Munger's concept of mental models is the basis for my book ("The Personal MBA"), which comes out in January. The project started because I was looking for a comprehensive treatment of Munger's models, but couldn't find one.

Munger's models also tend to be very clearly focused on making investment decisions, which is great, but tend to overlook how to start / grow a business, so that's what I set out to create.

This approach is now the basis of my work with my clients and course participants, with huge success. Mental models work wonders for people with little knowledge of a topic - they're a great way to teach people something useful quickly.

On all the strong recommendations I went out and bought Poor Charlie’s Almanack, and I must say it was underwhelming: a few general principles are sprinkled sparsely amongst business war stories of varying applicability to todays investor and a bunch of frankly embarrassing tributes to Munger.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but by the fourth sycophantic letter proclaiming Mungers genius (which I do not dispute) I was throughly off-put.

Munger is credited for Berkshire's first major tech investment in BYD. I think, unlike Buffett, Munger unabashedly displays his intellect. It turns a few people off, but if you can get past the brashness, there's much to learn from his approach to thinking.

I also recommend the two books (Seeking Wisdom & Poor Charlie's Almanack). The first is not only about Munger (and Buffett), but about other great thinkers like Darwin, Feynman, Einstein, Mark Twain.

I also definitely recommend watching some of the few videos available of him online:

His talk at CalTech (2008) (requires RealPlayer) 106 min.
http://today.caltech.edu/theater/item?story_id=30623

His USC Law School Speech (2007)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6Cy7UwsRPQ

Both are relatively recent, and not in his books.

"I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you." -CM

"Poor Charlie's Almanack" was one of two books which had a profound impact on my way of thinking ( "Charlie Munger - The Psychology of Human Misjudgment", listed in the parent post is probably the best piece in this book.)

The other book, which I read when I was 15 or 16, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" by Ray Kurzweil was the other. Instead of looking at the universe through the question of why won't this work, I began thinking about problems as under what circumstances would this occur. Today, the book may be dated, but its effect for me remains.