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Poor Charlie's Almanack

When asked to describe himself in one word, Charlie Munger chose “rational.” He knows he’s subject to the same biases affecting all other humans, and he’s trained himself to recognize when the biases are active and how to limit their damage.

Objectivity and Changing One’s Mind

If you want to make better decisions, you need to seek truth—what is really happening in the world, not what you want to believe is happening. Recognizing the truth is often painful—it may go against your prior beliefs or desires, but recognizing reality is better than deluding yourself.

Here are major principles on staying objective.

First, recognize that it’s very easy to delude yourself.

“What a man wishes, he will believe.”—Demosthenes
“Never fool yourself, and remember that you are the easiest person to fool.”—Richard Feynman
“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”—Abraham Lincoln
“Apply logic to help avoid fooling yourself. Charlie will not accept anything I say just because I say it, although most of the world will.”—Warren Buffett
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."—Max Planck

Second, you should readily entertain other opinions. You should deliberately consider arguments of the other side. In fact, try to state the other side’s opinions better than they can themselves.

Resist the tendency to accept only information that confirms your prior beliefs and to reject information that contradicts it (also known as confirmation bias).
If you don’t take up these practices, you’ll find that you automatically reject ideas you disagree with. This is a dangerous habit you need to train yourself out of.
Example: Munger cites “[CBS head] Paley was a god. But he didn’t like to hear what he didn’t like to hear, and people soon learned that. So they told Paley only what he liked to hear. Therefore, he was soon living in a little cocoon of unreality and everything else was corrupt.”