Cause of misjudgment № 23
Twaddle Tendency
People produce and consume large amounts of empty talk, which crowds out and distracts from serious work.
Munger borrowed an image from biology: among honeybees, a forager that finds nectar communicates its location through a precise dance, but experiments show that a bee given a nonsensical situation will dance out garbled, meaningless gibberish anyway. Humans, he said, do the same. We are wired to chatter, and a great deal of what people say and write is twaddle — confident-sounding talk that carries no real information.
The practical harm is not the nonsense itself but what it displaces. In any organization there are people who are genuinely productive and people who are mainly skilled at talking, and the talkers consume the time and attention of the doers, gumming up the work with meetings, opinions, and noise. Munger’s worry was that the prattle of the unproductive distracts the productive from the serious tasks that actually matter.
His prescription was managerial and personal: keep the people doing real work insulated from the twaddlers, and discipline yourself to distinguish substance from confident-sounding emptiness — including your own. He admired terse, information-dense communication and had little patience for verbal filler. The skill worth cultivating is recognizing when a lot of words have conveyed nothing, and refusing to let that performance substitute for thought or eat the time of those who are getting things done.
