Fairly certain! It’s been seven (eight?) years now that I’ve tried to put Munger’s various recommendations to practice. I’ve mostly failed. The only bit about Munger’s cognition that I’ve gotten to work for me is the CFT stuff — How Note Taking Can Help You Become an Expert - Commoncog — and that required an external theory of expertise to give me a mechanism for Munger’s ability to reason by analogy.
I mean — you’ve listened to that interview on ILTB. What checklist or series of mental models did Munger use for that dorm solution? It seems to me he reasoned by analogy more than he did anything like a model search — he looked for domains that had to solve similar problems (ship design). There was some cue in the problem that he noticed, then he found an analogous design problem in an unrelated domain, and then he broke it down by asking “why does it work on ships, and can that apply to buildings?”
You can actually find comments from Munger’s various friends over the decades — they all say that Munger’s mind is quite singular. So perhaps it might be a matter of mental wiring. The exhortation to use checklists and mental models might work for his brain wiring (again, I am sceptical — I don’t think is the full picture; I think this is what he thinks he does), but the true test is if it can work for you? If it can, I would like details. I just can’t get it to work for me.
There’s something here that falls out of the broader expertise research field that I’ve covered in Commoncog. Experts are not good at metacognition. There is a reason why the researchers in Accelerated Expertise use Cognitive Task Analysis — a form of tacit knowledge elicitation. The other bit that falls out of that body of work is that experts don’t actually do anything as simple as checklists (there was a whole movement in the 90s to extract knowledge and turn it into checklists; this failed miserably because expertise is more than static checklisting — it is about adaptation[1]). In fact experts often think that they’re using a checklist, but in reality they’re doing recognition-primed decision making, which is richer, faster, and more adaptable.
Ultimately, this doesn’t matter as much: I think there is limited value to debate what Munger has said (the historical record is very clear that he believes in checklists and mental models; also that he is very believable). The true test is if this is useful — can you get Munger’s recommendation to work for you? And on that note, I’m still stuck.
Edited to add [1] is actually one of the most important papers in Naturalistic Decision Making.