Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try to bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang tog… - Charlie Munger

The first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.

Fourth, in filling scarce academic vacancies, professors of superstrong, passionate political ideology, whether on the left or right, should usually be avoided. So also for students. Best-form multidisciplinarity requires an objectivity such passionate people have lost, and a difficult synthesis is not likely to be achieved by minds in ideological fetters. In our day, some Harvard Law professors could and did point to a wonderful example of just such ideology-based folly. This, of course, was the law school at Yale, which was then viewed by many at Harvard as trying to improve legal education by importing a particular political ideology as a dominant factor.

Therefore, if you interpret being true to yourself as requiring that you retain every notion of your youth, you will be safely underway, not only toward maximizing ignorance but also toward whatever misery can be obtained through unpleasant experiences in business.

Which models are the most reliable? Well, obviously, the models that come from hard science and engineering are the most reliable models on this earth. And engineering quality control — at least the guts of it that matters to you and me and people who are not professional engineers — is very much based on the elementary mathematics of Fermat and Pascal: It costs so much, and you get so much less likelihood of it breaking if you spend this much. It’s all elementary high school mathematics.