Mental models in our schools

I have a dream

I have a crazy idea. More of a dream, really. I’d love to see schools try to teach something like the latticework approach to multidisciplinary ‘mental models’ Charlie Munger thinks is the surest path to becoming wise.

I’d love to see rival entities competing to flood the marketplace with Munger-inspired projects.

Of course, there is a market for Munger’s ideas (see, for example Think Mental Models or it's better, free alternative Farnam Street blog). Unfortunately, these mostly would have us take an individual, isolated route to discover the principles and practice Munger offers.

I would greatly prefer to see people taking an approach to cultivating institutions and supporting practices that brings people together and involves classrooms, teachers, and students working and learning together. I’d prefer that people try to revolutionize the places—including our public education institutions—where we go to learn and be taught.

I prefer Ben Franklin’s project to Charlie Munger’s. Munger’s ideas, no doubt, have had an outsized effect on elite institutions in this country. Perhaps that influence will continue. It might even become more pronounced. But I’d prefer the kind of audacity that Franklin attempted in his radical redesign of curriculum for the Penn Academy.

Because I have such high hopes for such a project, I have mixed feelings when I come across a piece like this piece from Outside magazine: Can the National Pro Fitness League Become the Next Big Thing?

National Pro Fitness League Arena

 

New Pro Fitness League?

Tony Budding, former longtime co-director and executive producer of the CrossFit Games left CrossFit to pursue the pro fitness league. And the reason he found the enterprise viable-and needed—is interesting. “All of the competitions that we were doing in CrossFit were limited by the need to prove fitness,” he said.

That’s great. So is, both Budding and I agree, CrossFit’s definition of fitness: being competent in the following ten skills: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. 

One of the biggest drivers of the CrossFit movement is the CrossFit Games. Because of the sport’s peculiar definition of fitness, Budding recognized that “If you want to test fitness, you have to do a wide variety of things.” There’s a downside, though: a lot of what’s needed to test fitness doesn’t “end up playing very well for spectators and for TV.”

I wonder if we can look at Munger’s idea of cultivating a latticework of mental models in the same way. Munger, too, has a peculiar, and peculiarly demanding, idea of wisdom. You’ve got to have competencies across a very wide range of disciplines. Just like CrossFit. 

Moreover, Munger’s rationale, like Greg Glassman’s regarding fitness, for needing such a wide array of skills and abilities is pragmatic—you have to have a wide range of skills because that’s how life works. 

Defining functional (mental and physical) fitness

Because we can’t predict what we’ll need to know and do given the tasks life throws at each of us, we need to be able to have a broad, multidisciplinary skill set. Or, in Munger’s terms, we need to have a full toolkit of mental models. Either way, Glassman and Munger argue for general physical and mental preparedness, respectively.

Yes, the ability to do advanced mathematical modeling is wonderful, but not particularly helpful if you’re trying to determine the character of a CEO running a company you’re considering investing in. Similarly, the ability to lift a 100 kilogram stone off the ground is great, but doesn’t do a lot of good if you’re 400 meters away from a friend who fell out of your boat who can’t swim. 

It’s not that the strengths and skills a person needs to construct complex math models or lift heavy weights are completely irrelevant to those tasks—in fact because someone possesses either is a decent indication that they may be more likely, all else being equal, to have the wherewithal to accomplish other difficult tasks. But anyone who wants to swim a quarter mile to rescue an endangered swimmer or hiring a CEO will need to draw on different attributes and abilities than making math models and picking up heavy stuff.

To only have a single ability and attempting to apply that single (even if singular) ability to any problem is, as Munger puts it, like going through life as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Making fitness telegenic

Anyone who’s even remotely familiar with CrossFit is aware that fitness can be photogenic.

But Tony Budding thinks fitness competitions aren’t as friendly to television as they could be. Here’s his idea: two teams of ten, five women, five men per team compete on a playing field the size of a basketball court. Matches entail eleven races in which teams of five must perform a certain number of functional fitness exercises, such as deadlifts, rope climbs, and handstand pushups. 

Budding made his idea telegenic by ensuring a format that fits into a two-hour time slot—including time for commercial breaks and personal interest stories. He wants to make it attractive to the general populace to attend events—and sponsors and advertisers to help fund them. “We are a spectator sport which means we exist for the fans.”

Culture matters

CrossFit, as I’m sure Munger has been, has been approached many times by those who would take CrossFit and turn it into something that can turn a profit. Because Munger’s and Glassman’s respective enterprises are so richly rewarding, “Huge companies like Nike and Under Armour want[ed] to be involved,’” says William Imbo, Associate Editor at BoxLife Magazine, a CrossFit lifestyle publication.

Like Munger, CrossFit founder Greg Glassman didn’t bite. The reason: control. Those companies “wanted to have a say in how CrossFit is advertised and marketed and he shot them down,” Imbo says. Glassman recognized that CrossFit’s success 

While some would argue that the CrossFit Games have been a huge success, selling out tickets, drawing a half-million viewers on ESPN, and winning title sponsorship from Reebok, Budding believes he can do better.

“CrossFit is a fitness program,” Budding says. It’s a participatory sport whose Games attract fellow CrossFitters. “Our goal is to make our teams and our athletes so compelling, so exciting, so speaking for the metropolitan area that they’re from, that people want to just be fans of the team”—even people that have no intention of ever performing a snatch.

Mental models in public school?

I wonder what we would need to do to be able to say about Munger’s articulation of how to acquire a latticework of mental models something like Budding did about CrossFit, “They’re in the gym business. They’ve given people the opportunity to make a living doing what they love, and that’s very cool,” Budding says. “But that’s not a spectator sport. That’s not a sponsorship business. That’s not a TV business.” 

Budding hopes that the NPFL he’s launching will be bigger in the United States than the National Hockey League is. 

I wish Budding well. While I do, I’ll hope that someday we’ll have public schools that look every bit as different because of Munger’s ideas as our colleges and universities do because of the work Ben Franklin did in establishing Penn Academy.

Ben Franklin's Penn Academy