Munger's Ally. Freeman Dyson's Contrarian Reminder: Intellectual Independance > Academic Credential

It Turns Out Freeman Dyson Is Pretty Smart

A wonderful recent piece in WIRED on Freeman Dyson's accomplishment doesn't establish the thinker's academic or intellectual bona fides, but does remind us what an exciting and visionary thinker he has been over the course of his long career. Writing of the two-day celebration of Dyson's "eclectic achievements in math, physics, astronomy and public affairs" at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, the WIRED piece rightly holds up the almost unlimited possibilities open to those who couple intellectual independence with continuous study. Of course, few if any of us have Dyson's native cognitive capabilities, but there are, I think, important lessons to be learned for all of us regardless of the kinds of problems we face. For those of us working in highest level mathematics, Munger's assertion that we "don’t have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long time." 

And He Hates The PHD System

Dyson follows Charlie Munger in not being a huge fan of the way academics are trained. That's an understatement. In fact, Dyson might be the only man in the Western Hemisphere who despises the system more than Munger does, even calling the fact that he's raised six children all of which he managed to steer clear of a PHD one of his proudest contributions.

"Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors," Dyson said in an interview with WIRED. "But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all."

Freeman Dyson below Yosemite Falls in Tuolumne Meadows, California in 1955. Photo: Verena Huber-Dyson

"I was lucky because I got educated in World War II and everything was screwed up so that I could get through without a Ph.D. and finish up as a professor. Now that’s quite impossible. So, I’m very proud that I don’t have a Ph.D. and I raised six children and none of them has a Ph.D., so that’s my contribution."

Lessons From Another Scholar Without A PHD

British philosopher Michael Oakeshott's only formal academic credential was a history degree from Cambridge. Born in 1901, he was a generation older than Dyson. Like Dyson, he managed to land the job of professor at one of his country's leading universities without an advanced degree. Similar to Dyson's groundbreaking work providing mathematical language to famed physicist Richard Feynman's work, Oakeshott established his reputation with a single, masterwork as a young man: Experience and its Modes was published in his early 30s.

Charlie Munger is famous for his scathing critique of poetry professors, arguing, "all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That's why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don't have enough models in their heads. So you've got to have models across a fair array of disciplines." Oakeshott's take is (not surprisingly) less polemical, but it's also more nuanced. And, so long as the caveat Dyson offers, to remain intellectually independent, is observed, Oakeshott points to the possibility of more scholars behaving as Dyson has.

"Everyone who knows anything about it knows that there is a difference between the pursuit of learning and the acquisition of information," Oakeshott writes. He foreshadows Munger's idea of a circle of competence when he maintains, "a scholar is something more than a picker-up of unconsidered trifles: he knows something about what he is looking for, and can distinguish between what he knows and what he does not know." He diverges from Munger, though, as he continues, "The world's contempt for the 'poor pedant' is often mistaken; it judges the scholar's activity by its use, and finds it pedantic when it appears useless. But this is a false standard; what is reprehensible is not the pursuit of knowledge which has no immediate use, not that attention to detail which is unavoidable in scholarship, but that blind groping about among fragments of learning which are known only as fragments into which scholarship sometimes degenerates."

Oakeshott he avers, again pace Munger, that this isn't (or wasn't when he wrote the essay in 1950) as common a practice as many believe, "This does not happen as often as the world thinks; and perhaps it is less liable to happen in a university than elsewhere." While I agree with Oakeshott regarding that sentence's first clause, I side with Munger on the latter. Still, Oakeshott's and Dyson's lives and practice suggest a more robust, intellectually independent course is possible both inside and out of academia. The scholars demonstrate that a pursuit akin to Munger's vision for arraying our experience across a broad latticework of mental models and using that understanding to solve problems is possible. And richly rewarding. 

Unafraid to Stick One's Nose Where (Others Think) It Doesn't Belong

Though Dyson never lost sight of the fact that mathematics was where just about all of his training and much of his ability was, he was sufficiently playful and audacious enough to explore other avenues that interested him - a move dangerous to all those who (in language one professor admonished me) are not 'immanently tenured'.  "I was trained as a mathematician, and I remain a mathematician," Dyson said.  "That’s really my skill, just doing calculations and applying mathematics to all kinds of problems, and that led me into physics first and also other fields, such as engineering and even a bit of biology, sometimes a little bit of chemistry. Mathematics applies to all kinds of things. That’s one of the joys of being a mathematician."

Compare Dyson's take to this point made by Oakeshott, "Unavoidably, each scholar is something of a specialist who cultivates a chosen field. But it rarely happens that this is a very narrow field, and a scholar may often be found turning from one study to another or poking his nose into something which is not his chief business scholar sticking his nose in many areas that aren’t properly his business."

To give Munger, as usual, the last word, "There will be immense worldly rewards...in a more multidisciplinary approach to many problems, common or uncommon. And more fun as well as more accomplishment."