B000U5KFIC EBOK (54 page)

Munger and Buffett stepped down from U.S. Airway's board.

Berkshire acquired FlightSafety International for $1.6 billion and
International Dairy Queen for $585 million.

Salomon Brothers was sold to Travelers Group for $9 billion. Berkshire's share of the deal was about $1.7 billion.

Travelers merged with Citicorp, forming the world's largest financial
service firm.

Today I am going to engage in a game reminding us of our old professors: Socratic solitaire. I will ask and briefly answer five questions:

1. Do broadscale professionals need more multidisciplinary skill?

2. Was our education sufficiently multidisciplinary?

3. In elite broadscale soft science what is the essential nature of practicable best-form multidisciplinary education?

4. In the last fifty years, how far has elite academia progressed toward attainable best-form multidisciplinarity?

5. What educational practices would make progress faster?

We start with the question: Do broadscale professionals need more multidisciplinary skill?

To answer the first question, we must first decide whether more multidisciplinarity will improve professional cognition. And, to decide what will cure bad cognition it will help to know what causes it. One of Bernard Shaw's characters explained professional defects as follows: "In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity." There is a lot of truth in Shaw's diagnosis, as was early demonstrated when in the sixteenth century, the dominant profession, the clergy, burned William Tyndale at the stake for translating the bible into English.

But Shaw plainly understates the problem in implying that a conscious, self-interested malevolence is the main culprit. More important, there are frequent terrible effects in professionals from intertwined subconscious mental tendencies, two of which are exceptionally prone to
cause trouble:

1. Incentive-caused bias, a natural cognitive drift toward the conclusion that what is good for the professional is good for the client
and the wider civilization; and

2. "Man with a hammer" tendency, with the name taken from the
proverb: "to a man with only a hammer, every problem tends to
look pretty much like a nail."

One partial cure for man-with-a-hammer tendency is obvious: if a
man has a vast set of skills over multiple disciplines, he, by definition, carries multiple tools and therefore will limit had cognitive effects from
"man with a hammer" tendency. Moreover, when he is multidisciplinary
enough to absorb from practical psychology the idea that all his life he
must fight had effects from both the tendencies I mentioned, both within
himself and from others, he has taken a constructive step on the road to
worldly wisdom.

If "A" is narrow professional doctrine and "B" consists of the big,
extra-useful concepts from other disciplines, then, clearly, the professional possessing "A" plus "B" will usually be better off than the poor possessor of "A" alone. How could it be otherwise? And thus the only rational
excuse for not acquiring more "B" is that it is not practical to do so, given
the man's need for "A" and the other urgent demands in his life. I will
later try to demonstrate that this excuse for unidisciplinarity, at least for
our most gifted people, is usually unsound.

My second question is so easy to answer that I won't give it much
time. Our education was far too unidisciplinary. Broadscale problems, by
definition, cross many academic disciplines. Accordingly, using a unidisciplinary attack on such problems is like playing a bridge hand by counting trumps while ignoring all else. This is "honkers," sort of like the Mad
Hatter's tea party. But, nonetheless, too much that is similar remains present in professional practice and, even worse, has long been encouraged
in isolated departments of soft science, defined as everything less fundamental than biology.

Even in our youth, some of the best professors were horrified by
bad effects from balkanization of academia into insular, turf-protecting
enclaves wherein notions were maintained by leaps of faith plus exclusion of non-believers. Alfred North Whitehead, for one, long ago
sounded an alarm in strong language when he spoke of "the fatal unconnectedness of academic disciplines." And, since then, elite educational
institutions, agreeing more and more with Whitehead, have steadily fought unconnectedness by bringing in more multidisciplinarity, causing some awesome plaudits to be won in our time by great unconnectedness fighters at borders of academic disciplines, for instance,
Harvard's E.O. Wilson and Caltech's Linus Pauling.

So, modern academia now gives more multidisciplinarity than we received, and is plainly right to do so.

The natural third question then becomes: what is now the goal? What
is the essential nature of best-form multidisciplinarity in elite education?
This question, too, is easy to answer. All we have to do is examine our
most successful narrowscale education, identify essential elements and
scale up those elements to reach the sensible solution.

To find the best educational narrowscale model, we have to look not
at unthreatened schools of education and the like, too much driven by our
two counterproductive psychological tendencies and other had influences, but, instead, where incentives for effective education are strongest
and results are most closely measured. This leads us to a logical place: the
hugely successful education now mandatory for airline pilots. (Yes, I am
suggesting today that mighty Harvard would do better if it thought more
about pilot training.) In piloting, as in other professions, one great hazard
is the had effect from "man with a hammer" tendency. We don't want a
pilot, ever, to respond to hazard "Y" as if it was hazard "X" just because
his mind contains only a hazard "X" model. And so, for that and other reasons, we train a pilot in a strict six-element system:

1. His formal education is wide enough to cover practically everything useful in piloting.

2. His knowledge of practically everything needed by pilots is not
taught just well enough to enable him to pass one test or two; instead, all his knowledge is raised to practice-based fluency, even
in handling two or three intertwined hazards at once.

3. Like any good algebraist, he is made to think sometimes in a
foreword fashion and sometimes in reverse; and so he learns
when to concentrate mostly on what he wants to happen and
also when to concentrate mostly on avoiding what he does not
want to happen.

4. His training time is allocated among subjects so as to minimize
damage from his later malfunctions; and so what is most important in his performance gets the most training coverage and is
raised to the highest fluency levels.

5. "Check list" routines are always mandatory for him.

6. Even after original training, he is forced into a special knowledge-maintenance routine: regular use of the aircraft simulator to prevent atrophy through long disuse of skills needed to cope
with rare and important problems.

The need for this clearly correct six-element system, with its large demands in a narrowscale field where stakes are high, is rooted in the deep
structure of the human mind. Therefore we must expect that the education we need for broadscale problem solving will keep all these elements
but with awesomely expanded coverage for each element. How could it
be otherwise?

Thus it follows, as the night the day, that in our most elite broadscale
education, wherein we are trying to make silk purses out of silk, we must
for best results have multidisciplinary coverage of immense amplitude,
with all needed skills raised to an ever-maintained practice-based fluency,
including considerable power of synthesis at boundaries between disciplines, with the highest fluency levels being achieved where they are
most needed, with forward and reverse thinking techniques being employed in a manner reminding one of inversion in algebra, and with
"check list" routines being a permanent part of the knowledge system.
There can be no other way, no easier way, to broadscale worldly wisdom.
Thus the task, when first identified in its immense breadth, seems daunting, verging on impossible.

But the task, considered in full context, is far from impossible, when
we consider three factors:

First, the concept of "all needed skills" lets us recognize that we don't
have to raise everyone's skill in celestial mechanics to that of Laplace
and also ask everyone to achieve a similar skill level in all other
knowledge. Instead, it turns out that the truly big ideas in each discipline, learned only in essence, carry most of the freight. And they are
not so numerous, nor are their interactions so complex, that a large
and multidisciplinary understanding is impossible for many, given
large amounts of talent and time.

Second, in elite education, we have available the large amounts of talent and time that we need. After all, we are educating the top one
percent in aptitude using teachers who, on average, have more aptitude than the students. And we have roughly thirteen long years
in which to turn our most promising twelve-year-olds into starting
professionals.