STREET DOGS

From the Introduction to Michael Mauboussin’s book, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition:

In December 2008, two seemingly unrelated events occurred. The first was the release of Stephen Greenspan’s book, Annals of Gullibility: How We Get Duped and How to Avoid It. Greenspan, a professor of psychology, explained why we allow other people to take advantage of us and discussed gullibility in fields including finance, academia and the law.

The second was the exposure of the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, run by Bernard Madoff, which cost its unsuspecting investors in excess of $60bn .... Madoff’s scheme unravelled when he couldn’t meet requests for redemptions from the investors stung by the financial meltdown.

The irony is that Greenspan, who is bright and well regarded, lost 30% of his retirement savings in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The guy who wrote the book on gullibility got taken by one of the greatest scammers of all time.

In fairness, Greenspan didn’t know Madoff. He invested in a fund that turned money over to the scheme. And Greenspan has been gracious in sharing his story and explaining why he was drawn to investment that looked, in retrospect, too good to be true.

If you ask people to offer adjectives they associate with good decision makers, words such as “intelligent” and “smart” are generally at the top of the list. But history contains plenty of examples of intelligent people who made poor decisions, with horrific consequences, as the result of cognitive mistakes.

No one wakes up thinking, “I am going to make bad decisions today.” Yet we all make them. What is particularly surprising is that some of the biggest mistakes are made by people who are, by objective standards, very intelligent.