STREET DOGS

From Charlie Munger at Farnam

B syndrome, ias from deprival superStreet:reaction including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed but never possessed.

Here I took the Munger dog, a lovely harmless dog. The one way, the only way to get that dog to bite you was to try to take something out of its mouth after it was already there.

Any of you who’ve tried to do take-aways in labour negotiations will know the human version of that dog is there in all of us.

I had a neighbour, and his nextdoor neighbour put in a little pine tree that was about a metre high, and it turned his 180-degree view of the harbour into 179 and threequarters. Well, they had a blood feud like the Hatfields and McCoys, and it went on and on.

People are really crazy about minor decrements down.

Then if you act on them, you get into reciprocation tendency because you don’t just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity. And the whole thing can escalate, and so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously overweighing the importance of what you’re losing or almost getting and not getting.

Smart people make these terrible blunders.

People do not react symmetrically to loss and gain … three, four, five of these things work together, and it turns human brains into mush. And maybe you think this doesn’t happen in picking investments. If so, you’re living in a different world than I am.

Finally, the open-outcry auction. It is just made to turn the brain into mush. You get social proof. You get reciprocation tendency. You get deprival superreaction syndrome. It just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behaviour.