Overweighing What Can Be Counted

Charles T Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation writes:

The late, great, Thomas Hunt Morgan, who was one of the greatest biologist who ever lived, when he got to Caltech, had a very interesting, extreme way of avoiding some mistakes from overcounting what could be measured, and undercounting what couldn't. At that time there were no computers and the computer substitute then available to science and engineering was the Frieden calculator, and Caltech was full of Frieden calculators. And Thomas Hunt Morgan banned the Frieden calculator from the biology department. And when they said, "What the hell are you doing, Mr Morgan?" He said, "Well, I am like a guy who is prospecting for gold along the banks of the Sacramento River in 1849. With a little intelligence, I can reach down and pick up big nuggets of gold. And as long as I can do that, I'm not going to let any people in my department waste scarce resources in placer mining." And that's the way Thomas Hunt Morgan got through life.

I have adopted the same technique. I haven't had to do any placer mining yet. And it begins to look like I'm going to get all the way through, as I had always hoped, without doing any of that damned placer mining. Of course if I were a physician, particularly an academic physician, I'd have to do the statistics, do the placer mining. But it's amazing what you can do in life without placer mining if you've got a few good mental tricks and just keep ragging the problems the way Thomas Hunt Morgan did.