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SEEKING WISDOM by Peter Bevelin

Author: Peter Bevelin is a Swedish investor and author of four books focusing on the intersection of investing, natural & social sciences, and decision-making. His views and approach to investing have been profoundly influenced by Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

Book: Seeking Wisdom is a collection of ideas coming from a wide variety of fields (economics, investing, biology, neuroscience, etc.) designed to improve decision-making. Mr Bevelin brings his own mistakes and those from others to the table and tries to show how the ideas of great thinkers thought history may help us to prevent them. Even if most of the ideas of the book come from Charlie Munger/Warren Buffet, the author also cites a wide range of thinkers, from first-century BCE Roman poet Publius Terentius to Richard Feynman, Michel de Montaigne, or Charles Darwin.

Opinion: I think this book is the best collection/summary of great ideas and decision-making principles out there. Even if Bevelin does not bring new ideas to the table, the book delivers what it promises, pure multidisciplinary wisdom. This is the kind of book that after reading for the first time, one should keep at home to re-read random chapters from time to time. Even if some parts of the book may sound repetitive for those already familiar with Kahneman, Darwin, Taleb, Buffett, etc. I still believe that the book is worth it. The main reason why I do not give it a 10/10 is because it seems to me that the author is overly married to the Buffett/Munger dogma and because he also shares some of the intellectual crap of psychologists / behavioral economists (i.e., not considering scalability/reduction of tail risk when claiming that a heuristic like mental accounting is irrational). If these heuristics have survived (and helped people survive) over centuries if not millennia, perhaps it is their new definition of rationality that is wrong, right? (See picture 10 in the Instagram account)

Key Stats:
• Pages: 296
• Level: Intermediate
• Mark: 9.5/10


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