CrossFit develops General Physical Prepardness: Lessons from Epictetus to Hackenbruck (no matter what Erin Simmons says)

Avoid Intense Ideology—or at least it’s bad effects

Erin Simmons posted an interesting piece on why she doesn't do CrossFit recently. 

Erin Simmons has a thoughtful take on why she doesn't do CrossFit

I agree with a lot of what she writes. I find some aspects of her critique shortsighted. One feature of her writing that I find completely unassailable is her attempt to get people to think things through carefully instead of blindly buying an ideology.

Simmons has lots of friends who CrossFit. Recognizing that many of them might get upset at a critique of the popular workout program, she sets her sights not on making friends, or even worrying about not alienating people. Rather, her “goal is not to simply go along with what is popular or to avoid tough subjects so that people won’t ‘unfollow’ me. The goal is to educate people about fitness and health and to warn against potentially harmful or unhealthy diet and exercise practices.”

To the extent that she gets people to examine the quality of instruction they're receiving, to consider the potential for benefit and harm their workout program is doing and can do, Simmons is on the right track. 

CrossFitters are often accused of being in a cult. So are devotees of this blog's other subject: Charlie Munger. Munger himself often levels the charge (good-naturedly) at those who attend Berkshire Hathaway's annual meetings to hear him and partner Warren Buffet speak.

If you've ever read this blog, you're aware that I agree with much of what both CrossFit founder Greg Glassman and Munger say and do. And I think being in wide agreement with them and following their prescriptions for physical fitness and worldly wisdom will lead most of us to exceptional results. But blindly following them, taking their opinions and outlooks as gospel, or never formulating one's own opinions or reexamining their positions in light of experience--or own or observed in others--is stupid. 

Munger, in no uncertain terms, announces that such uncritical adherence to ideology is extremely harmful.

CrossFit (and Epictetus) has it right

Why? Because Olympic and power lifts are not meant to be done in sets of 30 or for time. They are extremely technique-oriented and are meant to be explosive and powerful over very short periods of time with plenty of rest.

True. Kind of. Greg Glassman has said that the most important adaptation CrossFit offers happens between the ears. In my opinion, the best thing CrossFit does is cultivate grit in its participants. Thinking that CrossFit gets Olympic lifts ‘wrong’ because they’re designed for power and only power misses the mark.

Glassman’s point behind developing general physical preparedness is that life is unpredictable. Because we can’t know what life will throw at us, the workout program that forces us to tackle what’s in front of us—no matter what that is—is desirable.

Charlie Munger has lauded the importance of assiduity. And he likes it for the same reason Glassman likes general physical preparedness: because you just don’t know what’s coming. “I like th[e] word [assiduity] because it means: sit down on your ass until you do it. Two partners that I chose for one little phase in my life had the following rule when they created a design, build, construction team. They sat down and said, two-man partnership, divide everything equally, here’s the rule: if ever we’re behind in commitments to other people, we will both work 14 hours a day until we’re caught up. Needless to say, that firm didn’t fail. The people died very rich. It’s such a simple idea.

Epictetus on assiduity

 
“Another thing, of course, is that life will have terrible blows in it, horrible blows, unfair blows. And some people recover and others don’t. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He said that every missed chance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every missed chance in life was an opportunity to learn something, and that your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in constructive fashion. That is a very good idea. You may remember the epitaph which Epictetus left for himself: ‘Here lies Epictetus, a slave maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and the favored of the gods.’”

CrossFit’s Real problem: Iatrogenics

Despite her misdiagnosis of CrossFit’s unconventional use of Olympic and power lifts in metabolic conditioning workouts, Simmons’s charge that coaches do harm is well taken.

The CrossFit coach, like the medical professional, should be concerned with the phenomenon of iatrogenics: damage from treatment in excess of the benefits. Iatrogenics “caused by the healer,” iatros being a healer in Greek.

Nassim Taleb points out how painfully slowly the medical profession has been to deal with the fact of iatrogenesis, writing calling the discipline a ‘slow learner’ on the subject. Even worse, though, he writes, is that  “the very notion of iatrogenics is quite absent from the discourse outside medicine.”

If the maxim, ‘first do no harm’ should apply to medical professionals, it should just apply just as much to trainers. And, no doubt CrossFit trainers are sometimes guilty of doing the bad stuff Simmons writes that they do.

Success Leaves Clues

Charlie Munger is famous for saying, “success leaves clues.” He and many who admire his thinking believe that careful study of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual letters would be more valuable than an MBA. Learning from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger is learning from the best at what they do.

CrossFit’s motto is ‘Forging Elite Fitness.’ Though he formulated a workout program that is ‘universally scalable,’ CrossFit founder Greg Glassman designed his workout program with an eye toward the elite athlete. His thinking in doing so was that people aspire to emulate the best. It’s not a new idea, Aristotle compared the practice of setting laws just above what’s possible to a conductor providing a pitch a half-step higher than the note he wanted his chorus to sing.

Munger has his own reasons to be elitist, too. In his piece, “The Need for More Multidisciplinary Skills from Professionals: Educational Implications,” Munger explicitly gears his arguments to ‘elite academia.’

He begins his piece by recognizing that ‘broadscale professionals’ need more multidisciplinary education. But then he gears his comments toward elite institutions and their elite students. Some of that makes sense; his address was to the fiftieth reunion of Harvard Law School’s Class of 1948. So, when he asks, “Was our education sufficiently multidisciplinary?,” he’s asking an appropriate question for his audience.

Munger’s subsequent exclusive focus on the elite, though, isn’t as necessary. He goes on to ask, “In elite broadscale soft science…” and “how far has elite academia progressed…” He clearly isn’t concerned with what the masses are up to. Partly, I think he shares Glassman’s motivations: changing what’s done at the elite level often has a galvanizing effect on what the rest of us do. You don’t have to look past the phenomenon of kids continuing to wear Jordan brand shoes more than 10 years after Michael’s retirement to figure that out. Munger’s elitism, though, runs a bit deeper than Glassman’s.

Consider his response to the question of what the most important of the 24 causes of psychological misjudgment is most important. Munger begins by saying it’s the way the factors combine to have a multiplying effect. He then goes on to posit why psychology as a discipline hasn’t latched on to this hugely important idea, after suggesting that he was like a truffle hound taking what he wanted from the discipline, he opined, “I don't think it's good teaching psychology to the masses. In fact, I think it's terrible.”

I’m not sure either Glassman’s or Charlie Munger’s elitism is always helpful. I may explore why later, but for now, I’d like to consider the kernel of their elitism that is absolutely valuable.

Correct. I am elitist.

Thomas Hackenbruck: Correct. I am elitist.

That quote doesn’t come from either Glassman or Munger, but from Ute CrossFit owner Thomas Hackenbruck. Hackenbruck exemplifies how strict adherence to elitism is a good thing.

He recently found himself in a bit of a Twitter kerfuffle, in which the charge was leveled against him that he’s ‘an elitist.’  Here’s the charge, “So you're saying there's no truth to "Anyone can CF?" The cost is what makes excellence? That is so elitist”

Here's what made Hackenbruck mad: getting his business undercut.
5 @CrossFit gyms within 20 miles all offering groupings right now. It's called the race to the bottom folks #NeverUs

His response? “Correct. I am elitist.”

Twitter exchange between Thomas Hackenbruck and Eric Kiv and Matt Riffe

It’s his rationale that’s interesting. Remember all of Erin Simmons’s critiques of CrossFit. Read her piece again. Most people will probably recognize some legitimate concerns. I certainly did. Whatever concerns you have about CrossFit after reading Simmons’s piece, consider how many apply to Ute CrossFit’s practice.

Simmons’s assertions that CrossFit coaches get certified in a weekend, that the only barrier to opening a gym is money and that trainers don’t have any real knowledge of proper form, especially regarding Olympic and power lifts, are undoubtedly accurate in some instances. But they’re not universally applicable, either, as Hackenbruck’s example makes clear.

A different set of anecdotal evidence

Thomas Hackenbruck and his wife Bobbie Jo decided to open a CrossFit gym largely on the basis of exactly the kind of anecdotal evidence Erin Simmons pointed to in her recent piece. In an interview with Stack, Bobbie Jo cited the lack of results clients at the corrective exercise clinic where she worked were getting to being a major factor in her deciding to open the gym. Clients were paying $300 to $400 per month and “No one was really getting fit at the corrective exercise clinic," she said. Especially compared to the results she was getting and her friends were getting from CrossFit.  "I thought, 'These people are paying a lot of money and not getting any real results.'" 

Hackenbruck’s practice: Do as I do

Hackenbruck gears the training offered at his gym to those who will receive it. 

CrossFit Ute has about 400 members; about 10 percent of whom are interested in competing in CrossFit. Not only are the 'regular' people numerically greater, they're the main focus for the gym. “They are the heart of your box and community," Bobbie Jo said. "We try to keep the CrossFit Games aspect separate. Training for the sport of CrossFit is a completely different thing than real CrossFit."

Thomas echoes his wife's sentiments, if "you have five or six people that are really asking for [competitive CrossFit courses] and want it and want it and want it but it’s only five or six people. You create a whole new class. You could have 15 people doing the regular class or you have four doing the competitors’ class. That’s not good business." 

Ute CrossFit minimum standards for 2013 CrossFit Games

To each according to his need; to each according to his ability

So, his solution was to treat different people, who have different goals and expectations, differently. "The thing that we’re really lucky here is we have the two spaces so we can do a competitors’ class over there and a regular class here," Thomas said. "We never ever want to cancel a regular class to do anything else unless it’s more important. Having two spaces has worked really well to do that stuff. I think your bread and butter has to be just CrossFit." 

Not only are the Hackenbrucks good at providing opportunity and instruction tailored to the different clients with different abilities and limitations, they're good at being up front with them as to why they get treated the way they do. 

"It was really important for us to make this known to everybody: if we’re going to have a separate group at a separate time with different workouts we need to explain to everybody in the gym why we do that so they don’t walk in the gym and look over and see someone doing that and think that person’s in better shape, what’s up with these secret workouts and how come we don’t do them if these are really the best things to do? I think it all comes back to taking care of your clients and developing trust with them. 

If we make a big change in the gym or we make a big decision or we add a new program it’s important to explain to every client this is what we’re doing and this is why we’re doing it and then they can make the decision if they want to do it or not. You never want to alienate your big client base. If you have this little secret group going on and people don’t understand what it is then it could be an issue."  

The Hackenbruck Secret to injury prevention  

The Hackenbrucks have a 'secret' that is especially applicable to the ten percent of their clients who are interested in CrossFit competition: the 1-to-1 Injury-Proofing Rule.

According to this rule, every one hour of training means a corresponding one hour in recovery and restorative work. 

And Thomas is no exception to that rule. “He gets in body work, he foam rolls, mobility exercises and the like,” Bobbie Jo said. “After his morning endurance workout—even though it’s at an easy effort—he takes a 20-minute ice bath.” 

The 1-to-1 training-to-recovery ratio works in preventing injuries. And when Ute CrossFit athletes complain of sore muscles or being tired, they're prescribed a bodyweight-only training program until they're right again.   

One final anecdote  

Before the 2013 CrossFit Games, which Thomas led his team Hack's Pack to its second consecutive win in the team competition, Hackenbruck had a 550-pound Back Squat, ran five kilometers in under 22:00, and had a 285-pound Snatch. 

 


Not everyone will be capable of those kinds of results. Even if Greg Glassman is right (and I think he is) that CrossFit is infinitely scalable, CrossFit may not be for everyone. But Thomas Hackenbruck is a wonderful example that CrossFit can bring out one of our best qualities: assiduity. 

Mental models in our schools

I have a dream

I have a crazy idea. More of a dream, really. I’d love to see schools try to teach something like the latticework approach to multidisciplinary ‘mental models’ Charlie Munger thinks is the surest path to becoming wise.

I’d love to see rival entities competing to flood the marketplace with Munger-inspired projects.

Of course, there is a market for Munger’s ideas (see, for example Think Mental Models or it's better, free alternative Farnam Street blog). Unfortunately, these mostly would have us take an individual, isolated route to discover the principles and practice Munger offers.

I would greatly prefer to see people taking an approach to cultivating institutions and supporting practices that brings people together and involves classrooms, teachers, and students working and learning together. I’d prefer that people try to revolutionize the places—including our public education institutions—where we go to learn and be taught.

I prefer Ben Franklin’s project to Charlie Munger’s. Munger’s ideas, no doubt, have had an outsized effect on elite institutions in this country. Perhaps that influence will continue. It might even become more pronounced. But I’d prefer the kind of audacity that Franklin attempted in his radical redesign of curriculum for the Penn Academy.

Because I have such high hopes for such a project, I have mixed feelings when I come across a piece like this piece from Outside magazine: Can the National Pro Fitness League Become the Next Big Thing?

National Pro Fitness League Arena

 

New Pro Fitness League?

Tony Budding, former longtime co-director and executive producer of the CrossFit Games left CrossFit to pursue the pro fitness league. And the reason he found the enterprise viable-and needed—is interesting. “All of the competitions that we were doing in CrossFit were limited by the need to prove fitness,” he said.

That’s great. So is, both Budding and I agree, CrossFit’s definition of fitness: being competent in the following ten skills: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. 

One of the biggest drivers of the CrossFit movement is the CrossFit Games. Because of the sport’s peculiar definition of fitness, Budding recognized that “If you want to test fitness, you have to do a wide variety of things.” There’s a downside, though: a lot of what’s needed to test fitness doesn’t “end up playing very well for spectators and for TV.”

I wonder if we can look at Munger’s idea of cultivating a latticework of mental models in the same way. Munger, too, has a peculiar, and peculiarly demanding, idea of wisdom. You’ve got to have competencies across a very wide range of disciplines. Just like CrossFit. 

Moreover, Munger’s rationale, like Greg Glassman’s regarding fitness, for needing such a wide array of skills and abilities is pragmatic—you have to have a wide range of skills because that’s how life works. 

Defining functional (mental and physical) fitness

Because we can’t predict what we’ll need to know and do given the tasks life throws at each of us, we need to be able to have a broad, multidisciplinary skill set. Or, in Munger’s terms, we need to have a full toolkit of mental models. Either way, Glassman and Munger argue for general physical and mental preparedness, respectively.

Yes, the ability to do advanced mathematical modeling is wonderful, but not particularly helpful if you’re trying to determine the character of a CEO running a company you’re considering investing in. Similarly, the ability to lift a 100 kilogram stone off the ground is great, but doesn’t do a lot of good if you’re 400 meters away from a friend who fell out of your boat who can’t swim. 

It’s not that the strengths and skills a person needs to construct complex math models or lift heavy weights are completely irrelevant to those tasks—in fact because someone possesses either is a decent indication that they may be more likely, all else being equal, to have the wherewithal to accomplish other difficult tasks. But anyone who wants to swim a quarter mile to rescue an endangered swimmer or hiring a CEO will need to draw on different attributes and abilities than making math models and picking up heavy stuff.

To only have a single ability and attempting to apply that single (even if singular) ability to any problem is, as Munger puts it, like going through life as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Making fitness telegenic

Anyone who’s even remotely familiar with CrossFit is aware that fitness can be photogenic.

But Tony Budding thinks fitness competitions aren’t as friendly to television as they could be. Here’s his idea: two teams of ten, five women, five men per team compete on a playing field the size of a basketball court. Matches entail eleven races in which teams of five must perform a certain number of functional fitness exercises, such as deadlifts, rope climbs, and handstand pushups. 

Budding made his idea telegenic by ensuring a format that fits into a two-hour time slot—including time for commercial breaks and personal interest stories. He wants to make it attractive to the general populace to attend events—and sponsors and advertisers to help fund them. “We are a spectator sport which means we exist for the fans.”

Culture matters

CrossFit, as I’m sure Munger has been, has been approached many times by those who would take CrossFit and turn it into something that can turn a profit. Because Munger’s and Glassman’s respective enterprises are so richly rewarding, “Huge companies like Nike and Under Armour want[ed] to be involved,’” says William Imbo, Associate Editor at BoxLife Magazine, a CrossFit lifestyle publication.

Like Munger, CrossFit founder Greg Glassman didn’t bite. The reason: control. Those companies “wanted to have a say in how CrossFit is advertised and marketed and he shot them down,” Imbo says. Glassman recognized that CrossFit’s success 

While some would argue that the CrossFit Games have been a huge success, selling out tickets, drawing a half-million viewers on ESPN, and winning title sponsorship from Reebok, Budding believes he can do better.

“CrossFit is a fitness program,” Budding says. It’s a participatory sport whose Games attract fellow CrossFitters. “Our goal is to make our teams and our athletes so compelling, so exciting, so speaking for the metropolitan area that they’re from, that people want to just be fans of the team”—even people that have no intention of ever performing a snatch.

Mental models in public school?

I wonder what we would need to do to be able to say about Munger’s articulation of how to acquire a latticework of mental models something like Budding did about CrossFit, “They’re in the gym business. They’ve given people the opportunity to make a living doing what they love, and that’s very cool,” Budding says. “But that’s not a spectator sport. That’s not a sponsorship business. That’s not a TV business.” 

Budding hopes that the NPFL he’s launching will be bigger in the United States than the National Hockey League is. 

I wish Budding well. While I do, I’ll hope that someday we’ll have public schools that look every bit as different because of Munger’s ideas as our colleges and universities do because of the work Ben Franklin did in establishing Penn Academy.

Ben Franklin's Penn Academy

What a bug's life can teach us about investing

A new Utah State University study (here's a look at some interesting research previously done at the University of Colorado) separates chance from choice in the process of genetic mutation.  The study is interesting on its own—offering insight into how and under what conditions creatures might be capable of adapting to habitat shifts—it also offers those looking for mental models to apply elsewhere an extraordinary look at evolutionary change. 

What do bugs have to do with investing?

Thinkers ranging from Charlie Munger to Robert Hagstrom laud biology and evolutionary theory as providing especial illumination to understanding similar processes in economics and market behavior. Hagstrom’s book “Investing: The Last Liberal Art” draws parallels between natural selection and the evolution of profitable trading strategies; unprofitable strategies, he suggests, will die off in the process of competition. 

“At the market level, what we think and have done well is to recognize that it’s not an equilibrium-based theory, as modern portfolio theory dictates it should be,” Hagstrom said. “But that it’s more biological in nature.” 

Because of his study in biological systems, Hagstrom isn’t fazed when financial markets act in ways that would horrify anyone steeped in physical models (a more fecund source for the mathematical-driven rational choice theory-based economic modeling that inspire work done by many interested in forecasting economic behavior). Stuff that doesn’t occur in physics—five standard deviation, non-linear events—happen all the time in biological systems.

 

Principles of predictable adaptation

USU scientist Zachariah Gompert, who worked on the new study, asks the kind of question many investors would love to know, "As we change the landscape, change the environment, it would be nice to know how populations can evolve or not. It seems like there are components that are predictable."

To locate the kind of predictable responses that have inspired Hagstrom and others, the USU research team looked at insect genomes of the timema cristianae, isolating genetic mutations of the in the same places. They determined that separate populations of the insects that had adapted to the same plant had nearly twenty percent of mutations in common. "There’s a significant portion of the genome that is showing these repeatable patterns," Gompert said.

Gompert and colleagues tried to glean predictable components in this process by looking at two varieties of the same species of stick insects that possess different physical characteristics. Each of these adapts into two ecotypes: one with a black the other a green stripe down its back. These adaptations provide camoflauge in the plant species native to California’s Santa Ynez Mountains where they live.

"We have a population repeatedly adapting to some similar environment … either it takes the same route each time or it doesn’t," Gompert said. "Most people look at it in the context of a single trait or gene. Here, we’re able to say, if we looked across the entire genome, is it doing the same thing if you expose it to the same environment?"

Testing the hypothesis

Not content to identify predictable patterns and similar mutations, the team took an additional, and interesting step. If the evolutionary response exhibited by the insects were really as predictable as they thought, wouldn’t they be able to guess how they’d change in response to different stimuli? They thought so. So, they moved a population of the stick insects to a new plant to find out. 

Why the T. cristinae changed her stripes.

One generation later, the team observed genetic divergences in the species that were about 1.5 times more likely to correlate with each other than random chance would predict.

"There’s this core set of things that seem to be predictable from long-term patterns in nature and from our experiments," Gompert said, "and they seem to be important things."

Timothy Farkas and a team from the University of Colorado team provides an explanation of some of those important things. By empirically examining the ecological effects of evolutionary processes other than natural selection--their study also looked at gene flow and founder effects--they were able to observe "ongoing effects of rapid evolutionary processes on ecology: year after year, natural selection rapidly increases local adaptation, and gene flow breaks it down, allowing eco-evolutionary effects to persist through time." 

It is fascinating to know that the evolutionary changes to T. cristinae due to its habitat are accounted for in this way: "that poor camouflage...approximately 7% of variation in population size...the effects of host-plant species 5% and habitat patch size 14%." 

Charlie Munger, Blaise Pascal, and the psychology of misjudgment in ‘the gambler’s fallacy’

The psychology of misjudgment and the gambler's fallacy

The New Yorker recently posted a devilishly interesting piece on the myth of the hot hand in gambling. (The author, Jay Caspian Kang, writes both for the New Yorker and ESPN.com’s Grantland). This topic has received much scrutiny in the sports world (including a spate of debunking articles, followed by a more optimistic piece—don’t be too surprised if subsequent studies take a similarly non-liner explanatory path). This study is the first of its kind I’ve seen applied to gambling. Though, I have seen more evidence than I’d care to recall of the phenomenon in practice. 

A new study on the existence of a 'hot hand' in gambling is something out of a Dostoevsky novel.

This piece is rich in what Munger calls ‘the psychology of misjudgment’—right down to the commissioning body: the ‘Responsible Gambling Trust’, an organization funded by casino companies trying to find ways to prevent problem betting. You can bet that the headlines the study will generate—‘New Report: Hot Hand Real in Gambling’—will discourage very, very few problem gamblers.

The study results were staggering. It examined more than 500,000 bets taken from an online sports-gambling site too gauge the effect that previous wins and losses had on future wins and losses. Within the study, the overall winning percentage for all bets was about forty-eight percent. Isolating only winning initial bets, the study authors found that in their next bet, the winners won at a rate of forty-nine percent. That a nice, but not amazing, improvement. What happened next, though, was jarring. Players who had won consecutive bets won their third bet fifty-seven percent of the time. Now we’re talking. Winners of three straight won forth bets sixty-seven! percent of the time, and fifth bets seventy-two percent.

Taken from a pool with an overall winning percentage of 48, those results are worth noting. 

Hot hand, indeed. 

The losers lost in just as incredible pattern; fifty-three percent of bettors who lost their initial bet lost their subsequent wager. Sixty percent of those who retained the wherewithal to make another wager lost their third. Those who kept going got down to a twenty-three percent success rate after five straight losses. 

Of course, anyone who has spent more than thirty minutes in a casino is aware of this phenomenon. It’s even got a name: the gambler’s fallacy. “If you’ve ever called heads on a coin flip, seen the coin land tails up, and then called heads again because ‘heads is due,’” Kang reminds us,  “you’ve been caught up in the gambler’s fallacy.”

If you’re a gambler, no matter what you think: you’re wrong

The study found that gamblers on streaks—good or bad—acted under the influence of the gambler’s fallacy in a way that prolonged both winning and losing streaks. “Winning bettors began placing more prudent bets because they assumed their luck would soon run out. Losers began placing bets with longer odds because they wanted to win big when their luck finally, inevitably changed.” 

The study’s findings are taken right out of the Charlie Munger playbook. Streaky gamblers who win, it found, “do so because they expect to lose, and streaky gamblers who lose do so because they expect to win. Or, more simply put, when you’re losing, you’re wrong, but when you’re winning, you’re also wrong."

Learning the very first mental model

Basic mathematics is the very first mental model Munger suggests people add to their toolkit. “Obviously, you've got to be able to handle numbers and quantities ‑ basic arithmetic.”  As an investor, of course, Munger predictably thinks the “great useful model” is compound interest. Next, is the elementary math of permutations and combinations as discovered by Pascal and Fermat. Interestingly, the pair engaged in the project at the behest of friends who needed to fairly award stakes to players in card games that needed to be suspended or interrupted in the middle of a hand. 

The insight, though, that Munger provides that’s useful is knowing basic statistical probability can guide conduct in ways that will lead to outcomes that outperform the average. Sometimes significantly so. All that’s needed is acquiring and using the system for deriving probabilities that is “dramatically consonant with the way that the world works. And it's fundamental truth.” While probability isn’t that hard to learn, Munger thinks what is difficult is to “use it routinely almost everyday of your life.” 

It turns out, Munger argues, that people mostly can’t automatically use this system. “If you understand elementary psychology, the reason they can't is really quite simple: The basic neural network of the brain is there through broad genetic and cultural evolution. And it's not Fermat/Pascal. It uses a very crude, shortcut ‑ type of approximation.” While what we have by dint of natural ability contains elements of Pascal's formulae in it, what we have is a very poor substitute.

The improvements to natural ability may be fairly minor, but the effects can be outsized. “If you don't get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one‑legged man in an ass‑kicking contest. You're giving a huge advantage to everybody else.

The Exceptions: Warren Buffett & Moe Norman

One of the most interesting aspects of Munger’s argument in that famous section of his talk on worldly wisdom is the argument he uses immediately following his assertion that our brains just aren’t wired to calculate probability effectively. “So you have to learn in a very usable way this very elementary math and use it routinely in life” he said. And I completely agree. But I’m not so sure I follow his next point, “just the way if you want to become a golfer, you can't use the natural swing that broad evolution gave you. You have to learn to have a certain grip and swing in a different way to realize your full potential as a golfer.”

You don’t have to have a subscription to the Golf channel or have committed the Tiger Woods swing coaching tree to memory to know that today’s golfers have swings that don’t exactly resemble any movement our prehistoric ancestors likely made. Unlike the major movements in CrossFit—like the squat, the deadlift, the overhead press, etc—that are required by anyone who wants to sit down, stand up, put anything on a shelf or pick up anything off the ground, the golf swing doesn’t look like anything survival would have required hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I’m not completely convinced by Munger’s analogy, though. I think there may be people who do have these kinds of aptitudes naturally. Munger’s partner Warren Buffett comes to mind, actually. A dear friend, mathematician Paul Fife, who recently died had that kind of ability. I never knew him until he was more than fifty years old…but if he didn’t have those kinds of abilities at birth, he’d been so good at doing that stuff for so long it was effortless and seemingly natural. Another, more pertinent example considering the topic of gambling, is Freeman Dyson, who cracked the code on a prisoner's dilemma strategy in which "one player can enforce a unilateral claim to an unfair share of rewards." 

There’s one example in golf, too, that would seem to run counter to Munger’s point. Moe Norman. He was a legendarily strange guy, with a weird swing to match. In fact, his social awkwardness was likely one of the factors that drove—and kept—him away from the professional golf tour. But his homemade swing was dead straight.
 

One of the hot hand in gambling authors remarks that, “If there’s one idea to take away from the study, it’s this: just don’t gamble.” And don’t get into a competition of closest-to-the-centerline with Moe Norman or his disciples.

Will the Milwaukee Bucks win the NBA Draft? Lessons from their prediciment win or lose.

Learning from Losing: the Milwaukee Bucks case study

The Milwaukee Bucks lost a lot of games last year. The team won 15 games and lost an incredible 67—that’s a .183 winning percentage. It was the worst mark by far in a league that had a handful of teams seemingly trying not to win. As a result, the team will have the best shot at winning the National Basketball Association’s draft lottery tonight. Because of it’s woeful record, the Bucks will have a one-in-four shot at landing the top pick—and with it the right to select its choice of Andrew Wiggians, Joel Embiid, Jabari Parker, Julius Randle, or any other prospect it likes.

So, perhaps things are looking up for the nearly moribund franchise. Basketball savant and Grantland writer Zach Lowe points to another development that’s nearly as big a deal as the number one overall draft pick would be. He writes, about the Bucks in a piece on National Basketball Association front office intrigue, “The team’s medical staff has partnered with an outside consultant to develop a software program that tracks individual biological data for each player — which muscles are strong, which are weak, and what those findings mean for related muscles and joints. They’ve used the information to craft individual offseason workout plans for every player on the roster — a first for the team, according to John Hammond and David Morway, the team’s GM and assistant GM, respectively.”

This is a phenomenal insight into the way having deficiencies can hurt you. It’s easier to grasp intuitively when thinking about an athlete—if his or her body has a glaring weakness, it stands to reason that his or her weakness can easily cause problems in other strong areas when moving. It’s perhaps less obvious that having intellectual areas of weakness can do the same.

Play the game you know you’re going to win

Charlie Munger’s partner Warren Buffett recently talked about “The best really know when they are playing the game that they're going to win.”

Buffet and Munger are well known to love Ted Williams's approach to hitting. He took a very scientific approach to the task—his book on the subject was even called “The Science of Hitting.” Just about the single most important variable to predicting batting success for Williams was pitch selection. Get a good pitch to hit was rule 1. Munger and Buffet approach their craft the same way—only with an additional advantage. Williams had to swing before accruing three good pitches. Buffet and Munger could theoretically wait indefinitely. 

Ted Williams's 'heat zone' batting chart from 'The Science of Hitting'.

Williams even went so far as to chart his expected success rate at swinging at pitches in every possible location. Notice he didn’t bother charting his success rate outside of the strike zone. He didn’t plan on swinging at any balls not represented by the 77 that comprise the strikezone in the graphic above. And, if one account is to be believed, he didn’t need to. So good was Williams eye, so impeccable his plate discipline, an umpire was once reported to tell a young pitcher who complained about a called ball he thought had found the strike zone, “When you throw a strike, Mr. Williams will let you know.”

A display of Ted Williams's 'heat zone' in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Buffett’s and Munger’s track records are so good, that they often get the kind of respect that the umpire apocryphally afforded Williams. But Buffett and Munger, just as much as Williams, needed to constantly display that discipline. Start swinging at bad pitches and making bad calls on stocks, and they’d get exposed pretty quickly.

Even the great ones fail sometimes

While Buffett does acknowledge that he and Munger have been quite good at staying within their circles of competence, he admits that he’s not perfect in this regard. “Charlie and I are reasonably good at knowing the perimeter of our circle of competence. I would say in my own case, I've gone out of it more often in retail than any other arena. It's easy to think you understand retail, and then subsequently find you didn't, as in the department store in Baltimore. You can say I was outside my circle when I bought Berkshire, though; I originally bought it to resell. But when I decided to buy control, that was a dumb decision -- but that worked out.”

Buffett made Mrs B, who ran Nebraske Furniture Mart, famous for having Williams-like discipline. Calling her “the ultimate” in operating within her circle of competence, Buffett pointed to what would be a curious decision for most.

Rather than take stock for Buffet’s purchase of her operation, Mrs. B wanted cash. Now, Berkshire Hathaway recently repelled a shareholder push to get the company to offer a dividend. For most, Buffett’s and Munger’s thinking goes, this is a terrible idea, because they’re so good at allocating capital, reinvesting is likely to result in vastly more profit for shareholders than getting cash. But Buffet recognizes that, for Mrs. B at least, taking cash was the better play. “She told me she wanted cash, not stock. It might seem like a bad decision, but it wasn't. She didn't know stocks. She knew cash, property, and retail, so it was a good decision.”

Of course, in the NBA, players are limited in the physical activities they can exclude in the course of their performance. Sometimes, life is like that, too. That’s where Greg Glassman’s notion of general physical preparedness comes in.

Glassman argues that 'general physical preparedness', or GPP, has been highly undervalued. "GPP has been given short shrift. There is more…especially where the margins of victory are super, super tight. I can make more ranking change in there with GPP than with sport specific training.

“Fixing chinks in your armor will manifest in improved sporting performance even when the chink was seemingly irrelevant to the activity.” Glassman provides a nice example from the real world—competitive skiing. “We got a hold of the guys at USA skiing and found out that they couldn’t do shit for pullups and the women had none. The guys sucked and the women were abysmal. And I said, ‘We’ve got to fix it.” Jonna Mendez is America’s best skier and she can’t do pull ups.” So she trained with Glassman for a summer, and by summer’s end she had 20 pull ups.  And she comes back and would tell you that pullups make a huge difference in skiing.”

Flourishing in complex environments

Glassman makes a point about fitness that translates to nearly any complex environment. “I am of the view that the demands physiologically, metabolically, hormonally, of sport are so complex that they’re not perfectly knowable," he said. His solution to dealing with this complexity is culled directly from Munger's 'latticework of mental models' playbook: "I want to throw out a broad net. I want to increase work capacity across broad time and modal domains.” What Glassman wants in the physical realm, Munger wants in the mental. 

While NBA players need to be generally physically prepared, because they can’t pick and choose their spots the way Williams could and even less the way Munger and Buffett can, the kind of identification of weakness and customized training program that Lowe cites the Bucks as having recently adopted can help. The Bucks had better hope it does, Lowe's piece points to the difficulty the team had in dealing with injuries to players such as Ersan Ilyasova, Larry Sanders, and Brandon Knight. Problems with injuries, it seems, are endemic to the organization. Consider this 2013 piece in Business Insider piece that pegged the Bucks as having paid more money to injured players than any other team in the league that season. 

Just as the Bucks are looking to improve their health through general physical preparedness, advanced metrics and other analytical approaches can help organizations determine how to put players in advantageous positions on the court.

The trick, as Buffett would say, is knowing when you’re playing to your strengths and when you’re not. Munger is famous for answering the question, “How do you beat Bobby Fischer at chess?” by saying, “Play him at anything but chess.”

Munger is on the record as thinking that one’s IQ is far less important than having a well-stocked toolkit of mental models, staying within one’s circle of competence, and only playing when one enjoys a competitive advantage. He once said, “"A money manager with an IQ of 160 and thinks it's 180 will kill you. Going with a money manager with an IQ of 130 who thinks its 125 could serve you well."

Ted Williams knew hitting was like swinging an axe. A nice example of applying a mental model from one activity to another.

Even the guy with the highest IQ will do better when he plays where he has an advantage

LeBron James is a physical genius. In basketball terms, a 180 IQ is far from a fair assessment. He’s a 200+. But even he has benefited greatly from the kind of discipline Munger and Buffett advocate. Interestingly, he’s done so largely as a result of analytics. Similar to the way the Milwaukee Bucks are looking at individual muscles within the physical systems of its players, the Miami Heat have scoured what its players do within its system on the court.

Consider how LeBron’s game has evolved to take advantage of his historic talents. Grantland's Kirk Goldsberry charts the evolution of the world’s greatest basketball player from Cleveland to Miami. 

Here's what Lebron James's shot chart looked like his last year in Cleveland:

James's shots tended to be closer to the basket in Miami than in Cleveland.

Lebron's shots continued to be of the higher percentage variety his second year; he took almost no three-point shots in 2011-2012. Goldsberry notes that he took barely any shots outside of 16 feet. James's efficiency helped Miami win the NBA championship that year--Lebron's first.

Amazingly, Lebron continues to evolve. Here’s what his shot chart looked like in 2013:

 

Despite the MVP award recently being bestowed on Kevin Durant, Goldsberry’s assessment that Lebron is basketball’s most valuable and its most versatile player stands. According to Goldsberry, Lebron “is acutely aware of his own game and his team’s strategy. He continues to find new ways to integrate his own evolving talents with those of his teammates, and he makes everyone better in the process. While it’s simple to label James a physical freak with outrageous basketball talents, that sells his progress, work ethic, and intelligence short. LeBron James is a basketball nerd who just happens to possess once-in-a-generation talent.” 

You don't need Charlie Munger to tell you that's a pretty good combination.

Will the Bucks Win?

Will the Milwaukee Bucks become winners? Lowe is skeptical, calling the Bucks open general manager job "probably the least appealing" of the six currently open NBA positions of its kind. But, there is some room for optimism. Lowe points out that the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement aimed at creating “a system in which every team would be flexible enough to turn things around in one summer, NFL-style.” While he thinks that kind of parity is a “pipe-dream,” he remarks that the league “is undeniably leaner now than it was before.”

Lowe also recognizes a few attractive assets the Bucks possess, including "two intriguing young players in Giannis Antetokounmpo and John Henson"  and the a salary cap sheet that "basically resets after the 2015-16 season."

 

It could certainly be worse. Given the team's move to get in line with its peers and assess the general physical preparedness of its players, we can at least hope for a healthier season. Despite Lowe's pessimism, here's saying the team is finally headed in the right direction. And, in a year when it won just 18 percent of its games, the team's 25 percent chance of winning the draft means Bucks fans just might walk away from 2014 with a win. And a smile. Finally.