Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Tell your problems to an orangutan
The orangutan theory
The orangutan says nothing, and says nothing about it afterward. The benefit comes from being forced to put your thoughts into some kind of structure. Munger played that role for Warren Buffett, one of the most intelligent people who ever lived, who still needed someone to organize his thoughts with.
Munger and Buffett
The pair worked closely for sixty-five years. Munger said that when he was asked how often he talked to Buffett, the answer was never, although they used to talk every day for hours. Buffett could pretend to pick up the phone to call him and already know what he was going to say.
Who to call
The same role matters for anyone doing complicated work. Sam Altman looks to the researchers who went through OpenAI's early years together, who share a language and intuition he cannot replicate with anyone outside the company. For a non-obvious problem, he goes to Paul Graham and Peter Thiel, because they are the two people whose next words he can predict the least.
Why does explaining a problem out loud help?
Programmers have a name for this practice: rubber duck debugging. They explain their code line by line to a rubber duck, and the bug often shows itself mid-sentence. The habit was popularized by the 1999 book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. Psychologist Michelene Chi found in a 1989 study that students who explained worked examples to themselves learned more than those who only read them.
How did Munger and Buffett first meet?
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger met in 1959 at a dinner in Omaha, their home city. Munger was practicing law in Los Angeles at the time and later moved into investing. Buffett was running his own investment partnerships. Munger became vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway in 1978 and held the post until his death in 2023 at the age of 99.
More from David Senra
