Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: The One With The Bird Poop

(Expanded from February 7, 2025)

Welcome back to the digital saloon, where we trade fleeting forecasts for the only currency that matters: reality.

In February, we stumbled into one of my favorite investing parables—one involving cosmology, Bell Labs, and a rather unglamorous pile of pigeon droppings.

The Noise That Wasn’t

In the mid-1960s, astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were attempting to eliminate a persistent hiss in their radio antenna. They tried everything—checking wiring, changing orientation, even scraping away what they delicately described as “white dielectric material.” (Translation: bird poop.)

They assumed the noise was an error. A nuisance. Something to be cleaned.

It wasn’t.

The hiss turned out to be the cosmic microwave background radiation—the afterglow of the Big Bang itself. In trying to remove “noise,” they discovered the origin story of the universe.

There is a lesson here for investors, and it’s not subtle.

The Illusion of Control

Markets are not moved by neat models; they are shaped by outliers, accidents, and events that never made it into your spreadsheet.

The human brain despises uncertainty. Robert Greene calls the “need for certainty” the greatest disease of the mind. It pushes us to mistake confidence for competence and precision for truth.

This is why strategists still publish year-end S&P targets with decimal points, as if the market were a Swiss watch instead of a drunk octopus.

If you relied solely on forecasts to understand markets, you’d have been confused for roughly a century.

Embracing the “I Don’t Know”

The most honest answer to “what will the market do next?” remains: I don’t know.

Rather than predicting rain, build the ark.

Intellectual humility is not weakness—it is structural strength. What you dismiss as noise today may be the signal that defines tomorrow. As Eisenhower reminded us: plans are useless, but planning is indispensable—because the crisis is always the thing you didn’t plan for.

Sometimes the universe speaks softly. Sometimes it sounds like static. Sometimes it looks like bird poop.

Ignore it at your peril.

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: The Atlas We Carry

 Cloud Atlas is a time-looping ledger of human cause and consequence: every exploitation returns as its own invoice.

Capitalism’s glory is compounding—but compounding applies to moral choices too:

• exploitation compounds fragility
  
  

• integrity compounds trust
  
  

• patience compounds possibility
  
  

• purpose compounds permanence
  
  

Speculation—Mitchell’s “bonanza instinct”—is the infantile belief that wealth should arrive without wisdom.

A humanistic capitalist rejects that.
Purpose is a long-duration asset.
Trust is a dividend stream.
Dignity is intrinsic value.

Mitchell’s warning isn’t anti-market—it is pro-human market:
capitalism not as a predatory adulthood, but as a mature guardianship.

The Financial Takeaway:
Never interrupt compounding—of capital or character.
The future is not built by quarterly maximizers but by stewards of endurance.

Profit without purpose is noise.
Profit with purpose is music.

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: When Leverage Turns Human

 Mitchell’s corpocracy is not built by villains; it is built by efficient people who forgot why efficiency exists.

Leverage—the financial kind—is merely a metaphor for the deeper risk: moral leverage.
The pressure to enhance:

• earnings
  
  

• throughput
  
  

• utilization
  
  

• shareholder return
  without enhancing humanity.
  
  

The true danger isn’t debt on the balance sheet; it’s debt on the social ledger.

A corporation can borrow against:

• worker well-being
  
  

• environmental resilience
  
  

• public trust
  for years before the margin call arrives.
  
  

But it arrives.

Just as markets misprice tail risk until the tail devours the system, societies misprice moral risk until collapse becomes inevitable rather than unthinkable.

Mitchell’s future isn’t dark because systems fail—it’s dark because they succeed at the wrong aim.

The Financial Takeaway:
Leverage is less about interest rates than existential rates.
If returns accelerate while dignity decelerates, the liquidation moment is scheduled—even if unknown.

Build capital systems that do not require sacrificing humans to function.

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: Ambition Without Purpose

Mitchell’s worlds are full of people trapped in upward trajectories with no upward meaning. So are ours.

We trade entire decades for:

• status symbols
  
  

• corporate ascent
  
  

• abstractions of success
  
  

And the payoff? A life that arrives too late to be lived.

This is Mitchell’s recurring indictment: capitalism detached from purpose will consume the time it claims it’s giving back.

Economic theory calls humans agents. Cloud Atlas reminds us humans are souls—with interiority, identity, transcendence. Work that denies this becomes not creation but consumption of the worker.

The cure is not resignation but integration:
capital → vocation → community → meaning → reciprocity.

The system is not corrupt when it rewards wealth. It is corrupt when wealth-devotion eclipses human growth.

The Financial Takeaway:
A healthy portfolio compounds capital.
A healthy life compounds agency, dignity, and presence.

Do not optimize for exit; optimize for contribution.
Freedom is not the absence of work but the presence of purposeful work.

Edwin Quince's Wisdom Bites: The Cost of Disposability

 In Cloud Atlas, Sonmi-451 is manufactured for service, spent for utility, and discarded without mourning. Mitchell didn’t invent that system—he refined it.

Today, we don't fabricate clones; but we might fabricate expendability:

• gig workers without security
  
  

• algorithms extracting attention
  
  

• customers mined for data rather than served
  
  

• ecosystems depleted for next-quarter EPS
  
  

Every modern corporation claims “customer obsession” while many exhibit extraction obsession:
“How much can we get before they notice we’ve stopped giving?”

This is the quiet corporate nihilism at the heart of the corpocracy:

• growth without gratitude
  
  

• efficiency without empathy
  
  

• dominance without duty
  
  

The true inverse of Sonmi-451’s world is not socialism nor technocracy—it is humanistic capitalism: capital aligned to meaningful ends, value created with dignity-preservation built into the operating philosophy.

Business should be a covenant, not a drain.

The Financial Takeaway:
If the model works only when people are disposable, the model is disposable. Value creation is not value extraction: build systems where workers and users ascend, not just margins.

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: The Corprocratic Endgame

 Welcome back to our little thinking room at the edge of the economic universe.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is not a dystopia—it is a projection line. A future built one diluted principle, one morally flexible transaction at a time. The novel names the terminal state of unrestrained markets: corpocracy—a world where capital is mastery, humanity is raw material, and profit is the one liturgy left standing.

Mitchell’s brilliance lies not in inventing a nightmare but in extending a trend line we already recognize:

• efficiency without empathy
  
  

• freedom without responsibility
  
  

• growth without guardrails
  
  

Capitalism, handled properly, is the most human-centered engine ever designed—voluntary exchange, innovation, incentives aligned to serve. But untethered from purpose, it corrodes into what the book reveals: industrialized extraction masquerading as progress.

Where human dignity is not embedded, capital becomes predatory by default.

The lesson is not anti-market; it is anti-amoral market. The economy is not a perpetual motion machine. It bends toward its animating values, not its quarterly targets.

The Financial Takeaway:
Capital has a soul—or it borrows one from its stewards. If your enterprise cannot prosper without using people as modes of production, you are building the prequel to Cloud Atlas’s corpocracy. Virtue isn’t a soft input. It is the structural steel.

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: Remembering Munger - Humility

Edward Quince (EQ): Charlie, you and Mr. Buffett have consistently advised the average investor to steer clear of complex trading and active management. What is your basic prescription for most people seeking sound long-term returns?

Charlie Munger (CM): Most people probably shouldn't do anything other than have index funds. If you have ample diversification and a minimization of transactions and fees, and simply allow for the passage of time, you will likely enjoy dividends and capital gains.

EQ: Why is this simple, passive route superior for the majority? Is it because the average investor is not equipped psychologically or intellectually to beat the market?

CM: It is certainly not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid. Many people have a fretful disposition which is the enemy of long-term performance. You must develop a temperament that can own securities without fretting. Investors must be able to keep raw irrational emotions under control. The less prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the greater prudence with which we should conduct our own affairs.

EQ: We see an endless supply of forecasters claiming certainty about the market's next move. You've offered a memorable analogy about the futility of listening to them.

CM: People have always had this craving to have someone tell them the future. Long ago, kings would hire people to read sheep guts. Listening to today's forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts.

EQ: So if forecasting is useless, how should a prudent investor make decisions?

CM: You must accept the limits of certainty and cultivate humility. The key skills are patience and discipline. You must adopt the mental discipline of knowing that big opportunities come infrequently. We must realize that There are worse situations than drowning in cash and sitting, sitting, sitting. It's waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait.

---

The Edward Quince Takeaway

For most individuals, the path to prosperity is paved with simplicity, patience, and non-action; Munger advises that most people should simply use index funds. Avoid the trap of certainty—and the financial pundits who sell it—recognizing that the craving for forecasts is as irrational today as hiring someone to read sheep guts was centuries ago. Success is achieved by mastering your own impatience and letting time, the great exponent, work its silent magic.