Jason,

Thank you very much for your thoughts, which resonate with the way I have been thinking about the subject. I have spent a good amount of time trying to narrow down the success in investing to a set of the most important factors and you have touched upon all of these.

I would like to make one important distinction in understanding reality and that is the presence of the element of uncertainty in it. The accurate assessment of reality, which I think of as interplay of the physical processes of different magnitude, indeed plays an important role in determining success in investing. However, the reality that we try to assess as investors isn’t very real as it lies in the future.

In addition to developing a model of the world that closely resembles reality in our minds, a successful investor must also have a good understanding of what that reality would look like in the future. In other words, making decisions based on the accurate assessment of probabilities must also play a role sucessful investing.

Umed