Making mistakes is vital to creativity…so long as the mistake isn’t fatal

Creativity as rebellion

NPR ran an interesting piece on Philippe Petit, the guy who made his name by walking illegally by tightrope between the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

He sounds like an amazing guy. He’s just written a book on creativity. He’s also a self-described loather of such books. His is different, though, because he wants to spur risk-taking. The book is titled “Creativity, the Perfect Crime”. Its focus on creativity as a kind of transgressiveness is refreshing. 

Philippe Petit: creative rebel

Real creativity has to be rebellious. "My journey has always been the balance between chaos and order.”

Surfing the wave

Charlie Munger loves the microeconomic mental model 'surfing'

One of Charlie Munger’s favored mental models comes from microeconomics.

Foreshadowing Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation,[i] Munger writes about the process of ‘competitive destruction’ that occurs in societies marked by rapid technological change. “You know, you have the finest buggy whip factory and all of a sudden in comes this little horseless carriage. And before too many years go by, your buggy whip business is dead. You either get into a different business or you're dead—you're destroyed. It happens again and again and again.

And when these new businesses come in, there are huge advantages for the early birds. And when you're an early bird, there's a model that I call ‘surfing’—when a surfer gets up and catches the wave and just stays there, he can go a long, long time. But if he gets off the wave, he becomes mired in shallows....”

Christensen’s take: "Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream."

Those familiar with Munger’s thought are well acquainted with this idea and Munger’s take on how it operates and why it’s such a powerful model.

Petit and parkour

Petit’s case provides a very interesting example.

There’s a point in the interview when NPR’s Arun Rath asks incredulously about his longstanding interest and participation in parkour—the practice of moving through one’s environment as efficiently as possible while using only the human body (and regular clothes). Parkour artists try to use as much momentum as possible while safely navigating the obstacles their (often urban) environments present them.

Petit mentions that he got involved early on in the movement, which flourished in France several decades ago. Speaking “I have been performing in the street for more than 50 years: magic for basically 60 years, and the high wire 45 years. The beauty of it is that it's never the same. It's never easy. And yet, part of my art is to make it look easy.”

There’s a pay off for the hidden difficulty: it’s much of what observers find joy in. “Any activity such as parkour, such as wire-walking, any art that will rejoice in rebellious freedom,” Petit said, “is something that is going to enrich our lives.”

Parkour and fatal mistakes

Parkour wasn’t a huge mainstream phenomenon in the United States until recently. In fact, I’d guess few had heard of the activity before this famous scene in Daniel Craig ‘s debut as James Bond in “Casino Royale”.

When Casino Royale opened in 2006, “The Bourne Supremacy” had already made use of the shaky camera or ‘free camera’ technique[ii]. The movie made quite a splash with an opening scene that was more kinetic than probably any scene in the entire film’s history. No less an authority than Roger Moore calls Daniel Craig the best Bond ever, largely on the basis of that striking first impression. Moore said, “Yes, I thought Casino Royale was tremendous. I thought his action was quite extraordinary—he did more action in the first 30 seconds of the film than I did in 14 years of playing Bond. To me, he looks like a killer. He looks as though he knows what he’s doing. I look as though I might cheat at backgammon.”

Of course, in the film, there’s not much that can go wrong. But doing parkour in real life can be dangerous. It’s one thing to rebel, but the kind of rejoiceful celebration Petit is after is probably only possible when the stakes are high. If he had set a wire between a couple friends’ apartments two stories high in a Parisian suburb, he likely wouldn’t be as famous as he is today. Making a mistake on that tightrope at that altitude is fatal. Making some kinds of mistakes in parkour can be seriously dangerous, if not fatal. Certainly, were someone to attempt Daniel Craig’s Bond’s variety of parkour and make a mistake, it would be fatal.

Fatal mistakes from Politics...

Elie Kedourie in his book “Nationalism” treats nationalism as an ideology that tries to specify conduct according to a rote formula. It’s what Oakeshott calls ‘rationalism’ and is a pernicious example of what he calls ignoratio elenchi. It’s also a terrible side-effect of what Charlie Munger refers to as intense ideology. In the the book’s second edition, Kedourie responds to some reviewers, who leveled the complaint against him that he didn't "attempt to discuss whether nationalists should be conciliated or resisted." 

One of my former professors mentioned to me that an honest response from Kedourie would have been to take them out and shoot them, he instead argued in ‘his most archly Oakshottian manner’ writing, "A decision on such an issue is necessarily governed by the particular circumstances of each individual case, and whether its consequences are fortunate or disastrous will depend on the courage, shrewdness and luck of those who have the power to take it.  For an academic to offer his advice on this matter is, literally, impertinent:  academics are not diviners, and it is only at dusk, Hegel said, that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings." Kedourie took Hegel to mean that a culture's philosophical understanding reaches its peak only when the culture enters its decline.
 
During his or her time in office, about the best a politician might hope for is to act, intra vires, to help bring about less homophobic policies, or at least to act as foil against the most homophobic proposals of his rivals. Considering the political context in which people actually operate, though, whatever a politician might do is likely to be best done indirectly and subtly. Ignoratio elenchi in those lines of work can sometimes be fatal; no matter how nimble a politician or parkour artist, to act too directly in these endeavors is likely to render the participant unfit and unable to keep performing them.

Kedourie has it about right when he says that political action depends on "the courage, shrewdness, and luck" of the decision-takers.  I suspect even Richard Flathman would agree (ruefully) that an elected official should think long and hard before deciding to be "free-spirited."

And Investing

Whitney Tilson attended a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting near the turn of the century and returned telling amazing and humorous stories about the goings-on. Charlie Munger offered a wonderful example of how one can commit a fatal mistake in investing by trying to tackle a problem their ill equipped to handle. "We don't consider [Warren Buffet's and Charlie Munger's company Berkshire Hathaway] in remotely the same business as Tiger and Quantum [both of which recently announced that they are closing down]. They are mostly buying and selling securities. We're structured poorly from a tax standpoint to own securities." (Corporations like Berkshire Hathaway pay a 35% tax rate on capital gains compared to 20% on long-term gains realized by private investment partnerships like Tiger and Quantum.) Munger added, "Soros couldn't bear to see others make money in the technology sector without him, and he got killed. It doesn't bother us at all [that others are making money in the tech sector]."

At the same meeting, Munger said, "When you mix raisins and turds, you've still got turds." He was talking about the benefits that the Internet and technology (raisins) provide to society compared to the evils of stock speculation (turds), but he may well have been talking about the person who knows lots of great stuff (raisins) but who also acts in areas where he doesn't know much of anything (turds).

A prime example of this phenomenon is the economists who "shared a Nobel Prize…went into money management himself...and sank like a stone.” Or former Harvard president Larry Summers, a remarkably intelligent guy by nearly any criteria, but one who erred significantly by investing Harvard’s cash account alongside its endowment, thereby exposing the university to a pretty massive liquidity risk. Summers mixed raisins with turds and and both he and the university paid a steep price.

Embracing Mistakes…so long as they don’t kill you

One of the primary benefits to Petit’s approach is that it allows for a healthy relationship with failure. Munger points to –even more radically looking to seek out and destroy his own best and most successful ideas.

Petit expresses a very similar sentiment, “I have discovered the my best teachers were my mistakes, and instead of covering a mistake with a list of excuses, I actually unwrap the mistake and I look at it and approach it, and I see why ... it's my fault, and that's how I'm going to learn. So, I love mistakes.”

So do I. It’s important to keep in mind, though, regardless of our pursuits the mistakes that can be fatal. Can't say I'm interested in making that kind of mistake.

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[i] Munger’s example comes from his 1994 talk “A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business” given to the USC Business School. Of course, Munger didn’t invent the idea either. Economist Joseph Schumpeter adapted a similar concept that Karl Marx had previously identified. Christensen first used the now ubiquitous phrase in his 1995 piece (co-authored with Joseph L. Bower) "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave" in the Harvard Business Review.

[ii] Shaky camera is a technique often associated with a ‘cinéma vérité’ style, but I don’t think that director Paul Greengrass and cinematographer Oliver Wood cared to produce a film the had a high degree of verisimilitude with any reality with which any of us are familiar. John Cassavetes was prominent in ushering in a hand-held camera revival to feature filmmaking in the 1970s, and I imagine Greengrass had his brand of stylized grittiness rather than a documentary approach—despite the fact that Greengrass does documentary work.

Runner, Doctor, or Investor: Passion is important. Some thoughts on Drs. Roger Bannister and J. Harris Walker

Born to Run

This week was the 60th anniversary of Roger Bannister's run to break the four-minute mile barrier. Bannister was my grandfather Harris Walker’s hero. He kept a print of the picture below in his house to commemorate Bannister’s amazing run breaking the previuosly unthinkable 4:00 mile . He loved athletics and watching track and field athletes compete—watching the Penn relays and the Olympics with him are some of my favorite memories. He loved to watch and talk about all kinds of athletes—from Carl Lewis to ‘Dan and Dave’ to Michael Johnson. He reserved special praise for Jim Thorpe, who he called the greatest athlete he ever saw, and Jesse Owens whose performance at the Berlin games likely remains the most impressive and important in Olympic history. 

My grandfather didn’t talk as much about Bannister, but every time he did it was obvious he revered him.

Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile

I’m sure there were many reasons for the connection Walker felt. Perhaps it was what they shared in common. Bannister went on to become a doctor just as my grandfather had; both took their medical training at arguably their nation’s finest (and stuffiest) schools—McGill and Oxford respectively; they competed as amateurs when that term meant something. Maybe my grandfather simply loved his competitive spirit—I wish I could have talked to him about Bannister arguing recently that, despite the fact that the fastest mile time on record now stands at three minutes and forty-three seconds contemporary efforts have only bettered his best time by 13 seconds as modern surface is worth four seconds compared to the cinder track that he ran on.

 

Or perhaps my grandfather’s admiration stemmed from knowledge that Bannister had taken much of his motivation in achieving the world’s first sub-four minute mile from his failure to medal at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. I got a sense of his disappointment at not getting the chance to compete in the Olympics listening to an interview my grandfather gave to his son Bill. 

J. Harris Walker won a lot of races...but none in the Olympics

Speaking about attending the Olympic trials in Montreal in 1936 he was allowed to attend while serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints he received special permission from his mission president to attend he said, “It was in a rainstorm. I got second in the Broad Jump. And I got third in the Pole Vault…The fellow that beat me in the Broad Jump went to the Olympics and missed his take off every time.[i]”

Getting what they deserved

Charlie Munger has offered a strategy for doing well in life that could double as a track training program. “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.”

Munger also famously argues for a discipline that allows people to be aggressive in taking advantage of favorable situations. What people need, he said, “is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.” Or, in a more succinct form my grandfather (who upon hearing from his wife that I found his phone salutations to be too terse, quit hanging up as soon as he was finished talking and started closing with, “okay, fine.” And then hanging up) would probably prefer: Preparation. Discipline. Patience. Decisiveness.

Bannister’s coach Franz Stampfl made a similar point in urging him to run on May 6, 1954—the night Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier. Bannister quoted Stampfl as saying, “Although the conditions are not ideal, if you don’t take this opportunity, you might not forgive yourself for the rest of your life.” Bannister said he was right. And he was.

At the time, two other runners, American Wes Santee and Australian John Landy were closing in on the four-minute mark. “It all came down to whoever had the first chance in tolerable weather,” Bannister said. 

Bannister took his chance. As a result, just about all of us have heard of him. 

Theory and practice

Richard Flathman studied with Michael Oakeshott. Flathman draws heavily on Oakeshott in his political theorizing. One significant area in which he departs from his teacher, though, is in the relationships between theory and practice. Oakeshott posited a sharp break between theory (or at least philosophy) and practice; he thought doing one expressly meant not doing the other. The best contribution theory hoped to offer our practice for Oakeshott was that it might on occasion remove a little crookedness from our thinking.

Flathman is more optimistic about how theory can influence our practice. He believes that the two are ‘imbricated’, that they overlap like the scales on a fish. Thinking carefully about what we do, by this view, can and regularly does change the way we do things. Often for the better.

Terry Nardin explains Oakeshott’s position concerning why the belief that science has practical value is mistaken and based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and practical activity. “Riding a bicycle may illustrate the principles of mechanics, but bike riders do not ‘apply’ these principles, and a skill in riding a bike is not to be confused with being able to explain them. A knowledge of physics may help us grasp the motions involved in cycling, but it is useless in mastering the skill.” The reason?: “scientific principles ‘belong to a separate performance, the performance of explaining’.” By this view, theory has no effect on practice, only practice does.

Applying theory to practice in competitive running

Running offers a couple of examples that provide some nice insight into Flathman’s and Oakeshott’s respective positions on the relationships between theory and practice.

A runner who qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials in the 400-meter hurdles (I think it was in 2000, but I’m not sure. If anyone remembers which or has video, please let me know—I’d love to see footage again) was studying physics. His technique was unusual to say the least. Unlike all of the other sprinters, this athlete jumped as high as he could over each of the race’s ten three-foot hurdles.

I can’t remember the specifics of his argument, but I do remember thinking that it was one of the silliest things I’d ever heard as NBC ran the preview piece prior to his heat. (As I recall, he didn’t qualify for the team).

Unlike the contemporary analytics movement that has numbers driving radical changes in the way executives and even coaches approach sport, this runner’s conclusions were not based in data and empirical observation, but grounded in theoretical physics. This was a prime example of what Oakeshott would call ‘ignoratio elenchi’—the runner committed a fallacy of irrelevance.

Bannister’s example is a better case of applying ‘theory’, or at least research findings and testable hypotheses, to practice. 

While a medical student at Oxford, Bannister used insights gleaned from his academic training to consider how the human body performed. I’m sure his competition in athletics helped him to formulate fruitful hypothesis regarding his studied field, too. The New Yorker piece mentions that Bannister “studied running’s physiological demands, measured his own oxygen-consumption levels, and produced papers with titles like ‘The Carbon Dioxide Stimulus to Breathing in Severe Exercise.’” 

Over time, “Bannister discovered that running consistent lap times demanded less oxygen than varying the pace. So he focused on his quarter-mile splits.” In what has since become a classic training method, Bannister would take lunch breaks with a stopwatch to time each of his ten laps. He’d take two minutes of rest in between each quarter-mile. In just under half a year, his average time dipped from 59 seconds from 63. 

Passion is important

When asked why he went into medicine, my grandfather replied, “I don’t know, but maybe my little brother dying, and nobody knowing what he died from motivated me. That might have had a little bit of influence.” From that beginning, he wound up loving what he did professionally. He continued to expand his knowledge—frustrated by getting stuck doing all the difficult surgeries as a doctor in a small practice in his hometown of Raymond, Alberta, Canada, Walker continually pursued opportunities to expand on his knowledge base. Midway through his career, he even took a plastic surgery residency in Salt Lake City, Utah, and wound up changing careers and moving countries.

Throughout his career, Walker brought the same passion for competing to his medical practice. 

J. Harris Walker war record from McGill University archives

I also wonder if Bannister was the same way. Initially intrigued by studying what the body could do and attracted to scientific investigation into what improvements might be made, he still spoke longingly about running even as a old man, after he suffered a fractured ankle that permanently robbed him of the ability to run at all. Bannister was quoted in a lovely piece in the New Yorker as saying, “I remember, as a child, the experience of taking a few steps tentatively, and then I would start running, and then I would feel a sense of magic that suffused my motion. That feeling became grafted on to competitive running and stayed with me, even afterward. I never forgot it.”

Near the end of the New Yorker piece, author Jesse Will describes Bannister, still obsessed with running, asking people lined up for his autograph at a book signing questions like, “Are you quite interested in sport?” or “Why, you look pretty athletic,” or “You run what distance?” followed by “What’s your time?” Questions I heard my grandfather ask many times over the years.

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[i] Interestingly, in the same interview, Walker also touched on the cinder tracks Bannister referenced, though, unlike Bannister, he probably benefitted from the surface relative to his competition. Walker said that the best race he had ever run was in 1932, the week after the Olympics. “I ran against Buster Brown from Edmonton. I ran against him in Calgary,” he said. “It was in the rain. That was in the days when we didn’t have asphalt tracks. We had cinder tracks, but in the rain it was muddy. Anyway, I ran against Buster Brown, who had got sixth the week before at the Olympics in Los Angeles. I knew he could beat me, or otherwise, I might have beat him. He beat me in the last stride. I was ahead of him the whole race and he beat me in the last stride. He just barely nosed me out at the tape.” He reported that both had run the 100 “in 10 flat, in the mud….That was when the world record was 9.3.” A powerfully-built athlete who would be persistently recruited to play professional rugby, Walker likely was bothered less by the muddy conditions and as a result made the race closer than it might have otherwise been.

Reading for judgment, not just information

Shane Parrish, who publishes the terrific blog Farnam Street, recently posted a piece on how to read profitably. He doesn't explicitly write it, but his argument (rightly) implies that one of our biggest problems is our habit of consuming information rather than reading. His diagnosis is specific, "we fail to remember a lot of the stuff we read because it’s not building on any existing knowledge."

When it comes to reading, Charlie Munger has plenty to add.

Think about how you consume information and the sources for what you read everyday. If we follow Michael Oakeshott in thinking that there are two components to understanding: 1) information and 2) judgment, it's amazing how much better our access is to the former. It's amazing how much better off we could be directly because of digital technologies.

Charlie Munger is famous for saying, "In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero." Newspapers and periodicals are two types of publication he mentions as being part of any person's intellectual diet (he, rightly, singles out 'soft science' academics as an area that focuses too narrowly on peer reviewed journals at the expense of newspapers and magazines like the Economist).

But, despite an unprecedented access to information, I'm not sure we're as far ahead regarding judgment. Talking about Facebook, Munger said, "I don't hate the technology, I hate the use of the technology." "I hate the idea of young people putting in permanent form the dumbest thoughts and the dumbest reports of action...I regard that as very counterproductive." Obviously, Facebook and other contemporary technology make more things possible rather than less. The only way technology can limit us is if we use it wrong. Munger talks about some older technologies he likes--ranging from the telephone to the Xerox machine--that are not exactly immune from abuse. But, unlike copiers (the video below notwithstanding), more than a few of our current technologies are built to be used in counterproductive ways.

Munger is an infamous curmudgeon. Still, it's hard to argue that people, including many beyond young demographic Munger targets, use technology to "endless gab on the internet" and other unproductive ways. As Parrish puts it, using technology in these ways is akin to "uncritically letting other people do the thinking for us."

Parrish would, instead, redirect our attention to a technology that Munger professes love for: the book (and I think even the eBook may qualify here). Parrish makes an interesting point: "one thing that most people don’t appreciate enough is that what you read makes a huge difference for how well you remember things." When we're reading about material that's difficult (and it's hard to get significantly smarter without reading tough stuff) those who have a significant intellectual foundation will do better than those who don't. Parrish writes, "We’re often trying to learn complex things (that change rapidly) without understanding the basic things (which change slowly or not at all)."

His prescription will be familiar to anyone who has ever read this blog: "to build a latticework of Mental Models. That is, acquire the core multi-disciplinary knowledge and use that as your foundation."

That knowledge is parallel to the physical foundation that Kelly Starrett thinks makes opens up infinite possibility in physical movement. Once people have the foundation down (what Starrett calls the capacity to "get organized"), then functional movement becomes possible in a range of activities. Munger has talked about the satisfaction that comes from sitting on one's ass for hours until a difficult problem is solved. And anyone who has ever done CrossFit recognizes this prescription. Seeing someone successfully complete a difficult movement or skill for the first time is a memorable event.

Crossfitters are good at many things. They're competitive and capable. Doing CrossFit leads to grittiness. And grit is a great determinate of success in just about every facet of life. One thing CrossFitters are warned against, though, is ego. Letting one's ego get in the way while doing CrossFit can lead to bad form and worse injuries. It's not much different in the intellectual realm.

Ego and CrossFit don't mix.

Shane Parrish writes for an audience that, presumably, uses technology better than the tweens who gab endlessly about the most unproductive activities they'll ever engage in. Still, writing to people who are using a difficult-to-abuse technology (books), he notes that reading uncritically and reading without cultivating a latticework of mental models is "the adult equivalent of regurgitating the definition of a bolded word in our high school textbook." Which leads to "the illusion of knowledge and overconfidence."

The greatest 3 second mind? Johnny Manziel as 'spontaneous genius'

As I mention in another post, Warren Buffett has often lauded Charlie Munger's unique ability to sift through everything irrelevant to an issue and see it clearly before anyone else has more than begun to wrap their mind around the terrain at hand. According to Buffett, Munger has "the best 30-second mind in the world. He goes from A to Z in one move. He sees the essence of everything before you even finish the sentence."

A fine article by Chris Brown in Grantland analyzing the top-rated quarterbacks in the 2014 NFL draft spurred some thinking about Munger's ability to quickly, accurately, and confidently get to the heart of the matter and execute (often under duress--though not usually a duress imposed by Jadaveon Clowney or any other 260 pound human who runs a 4.5 40-yard dash). 

For Brown, who views the quarterback--all spectacularly talented; all somehow flawed--as a sort of Rorschach test: what the viewer perceives in each of the top three (Blake Bortles, Teddy Bridgewater, and Johnny Manziel) says more about the evaluator rather than the quarterback. Brown gets to the heart of the matter in trying to determine which player is likely to have the best career, a notoriously difficult task, as Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, this way: “The single trait that separates great quarterbacks from good quarterbacks is the ability to make the great, spontaneous decision, especially at a crucial time,” wrote Walsh. “The play that was called has broken down and 22 players are moving in almost unpredictable directions all over the field. This is where the great quarterback uses his experience, vision, mobility and what we will call spontaneous genius. He makes something good happen.”

Johnny Football. Spontaneous Genius?

Spontaneous genius is a great term. It's also likely dangerous to any investor trying to emulate it. (I don't imagine Brett Favre would attract too much money as a portfolio manager). Munger certainly wouldn't try to make such complicated decisions so quickly. Still, the ability Brown sees in Manziel, I think, can tell us a lot about (or at least allow us to appreciate) Munger's ability to make really good decisions when evaluating really complex systems as Farnam Street's Shane Phillips articulates them.

Watching Munger isn't nearly as exciting as watching Johnny Football (as the clip below indicates), but paying attention to how Munger achieves his excellence is probably safer, more replicable for most of us, and will probably translate better to what most of us have to do every day.

Munger is famous for articulating a bunch of seemingly simple ideas that are, when you get down to them, quite difficult to apply. He advocates for developing a latticework of mental models to understand experience; a four filter process for running potential investments through, etc.

And his speeches and writing have offered a lot of insight into how that works. But most fall short of showing us much in terms of using that latticework. As Michael Oakeshott might put it, his writing goes a long way toward helping us understand the technical component of Munger's knowledge, but not so much for the practical aspects. 

Oakeshott writes, “Doing anything both depends upon and exhibits knowing how to do it. And though part (but never the whole) of knowing how to do it can subsequently be reduced to knowledge in the form of propositions (and possibly to ends, rules and principles), these propositions are neither the spring of the activity nor are they in any direct sense regulative of the activity.”

Oakeshott thinks that anyone, whether a carpenter, scientist, painter, judge, cook (or, yes, NFL quarterback) “in the ordinary conduct of his life, and in his relations with other people and with the world around him is a knowledge, not of certain propositions about themselves, their tools (including mental models), and the materials in which they work, but a knowledge of how to decide certain questions.” This knowledge, he goes on to argue, is “the condition of the exercise of the power to construct such propositions.” Looking for Munger’s writing or words to provide actual answers to concrete situations, in other words, is folly, because, as Oakeshott argues in another context, “a received philosophy is already a dead one.” That's why the exchanges between Jon Gruden and quarterbacks are so interesting: what a quarterback knows tells part of the story, but how he applies it is something else entirely. 

Oakeshott, in a case he could well make about football as much as language, argues, “‘Good’ English is not something that exists in advance of how English is written (that is to say English literature); and the knowledge that such and such is a sloppy, ambiguous construction, or is ‘bad grammar’, is not something that can be known independently and in advance of knowing how to write the language.” 

Chris Brown concludes his article by writing, "Bortles, Bridgewater, and Manziel can all play, but I’d call only one a “spontaneous genius.” Johnny Football tops my board … but maybe that says more about me than it does about him."

I do think it says a lot about Brown. Why take Manziel over Bridgewater? In Oakeshott's words, "Not to detect a man's style is to have missed three-quarters of the meaning of his utterances." Or his quarterbacking. It's pretty hard to miss Manziel's style. 

What Robert Grosseteste has to teach us about the universe...and multidisciplinary education

Robert Grosseteste: An interesting Thinker

A thirteenth-century depiction of the geocentric cosmos.
L'image Du Monde by Gossuin de Metz, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The Economist's Babbage blog recently published an interesting piece on Robert Grosseteste. Calling him “an intellectual giant,” the piece not only lauded the English scientist, philosopher, mathematician, and theologian, but it also turned some modern scholarship on his work into a morality tale. 

Robert Grosseteste is a terribly interesting figure. He was one of the earliest significant thinkers to read both Aristotle and his Islamic commentators.  His masterwork on light, De Luce, used Aristotle’s naturalistic approach in an attempt to develop unified physical laws to explain the universe’s origin and form. Of course, as a thinker of his time—Grosseteste served as Bishop of Lincoln—the universe he sought to explain was a medieval, geocentric universe; his thinking (or at least his explanations) in many ways bounded by the Catholic Church’s cosmological views. At least partially as a result, he avoided some of the more radical implications of his work. This avoidance can be seen most glaringly, for example, in that not one of his surviving treatises "discusses the possibility of other forms of universe, however close he came to implying it in his cosmogony." The Papal edict of 1277 banned teaching that more than one universe might exist. 

Still, the heavens and Earth he described are fascinating. 

De Luce, the first work to posit a single set of physical laws to account for the different structures of the heavens and Earth, predates Newton’s unifying concept of gravity by hundreds of years. His use of Aristotle’s approach departed significantly from his peers’ (and Aristotle’s) by turning the same physics of light and matter that explain why ordinary, Earth-bound objects onto the cosmos as a whole[i].

Though his approach was heavily influenced by Aristotle and the Greek’s naturalistic approach to discovery, Grosseteste offered an explanation that is sharply at odds with his predecessor’s famous nihilo ex nihilo—nothing can come from nothing. According to Grosseteste, an initial explosion of a primordial sort of light, lux expands the Universe into an enormous sphere, thinning matter as it goes.

Grosseteste, from this position, assumed that matter had a minimum density at which it becomes 'perfected' into a sort of crystalline form. This perfection occurs first at the outer edge of the cosmos, where matter crystallizes into the outermost sphere of the medieval cosmos. This perfect matter then radiates inward. But it’s no longer lux, but lumen, a different kind of light capable of producing a force that ‘pushes’ matter as it radiates. The research team points to the inward propagation of shock waves in a supernova explosion as an analogous process found in our contemporary understanding of physics.


At this point in his theory, the finite ratio of infinite sums returns as a 'quantization condition'.  The researchers from The Ordered Universe Project compare the way this rule allows for only a discrete set of solutions to the way our current understanding of atoms’ behavior is constrained by various energy levels. What that means is that applying Grosseteste’s theory to our universe will produce a finite number of spheres. There were nine perfect spheres in the medieval geocentric cosmos for which he had to account: the 'firmament', the fixed stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. Grosseteste’s theory called for taking this system and doubling the density of the second sphere, tripling the density of the third, and so on, to produce a nested set of spheres (see graphic below).

Artistic rendering of Robert Grosseteste's nine-sphere universe.

Ingeniously, Grosseteste’s theory postulates that as the center of the universe is approached unperfected matter becomes dense enough and the inwardly radiating lumen weak enough that no further ‘transitions’ (or ‘perfection’ of matter) are possible. He thus accounts for the Aristotelian distinction between the perfect heavens and the imperfect Earth and atmosphere.

The Ordered Universe Project team added calculus and the computing technology to Grosseteste’s “remarkably precise…formulation of physics” and the six physical 'laws' he detected. The team were then expressed those laws in mathematical terms (including concepts that we now understand that were not understood in Grosseteste’s lifetime—such as opacity—so long as the concepts were consistent with his text even if those concepts were not explicitly found in Grosseteste’s original work).

The result is spectacular. 

The team of scholars was about to produce a “rich set of solutions” from Grosseteste’s work. “A narrow set of parameters did indeed produce the series of celestial perfected spheres and, within the Moon's orbit, a further four spheres corresponding to fire, air, water and earth — as the medieval world view demanded. But most choices of the four parameters yielded no spheres, or a disordered mess of hundreds of concentric spheres with no radial pattern to their densities. Other possible model universes contained infinite numbers of spheres, some with unbounded density.”

It’s amazing how interesting an old, obviously outdated view of the universe can be. While we’re all aware that any geocentric model of the universe has been rendered absolutely untenable by telescopic observations, the Ordered Universe Project researchers point out that in 1225, Grosseteste’s  “was the simplest theory consistent with the observations.” They also remind us that his magisterial effort points to the “limitations of our own current cosmological theory, with its reliance on intangible factors such as 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'.” 

Beyond the limits of our power for observation, I’m also interested in the way ideology shapes the way we interpret what we see. Charlie Munger points to the danger of ideology in ways that are instructive not just to understanding how astronomers like Tycho Brahe’s let their worldview influence their cosmological theories, but how all of us are subject to biases that shape what we think about what we see.

A ‘Model’ 21^st Century Workforce?

Charlie Munger is as interested—perhaps more interested—than anyone in cultivating multidisciplinary education. The Ordered Universe Project team’s work on Grosseteste holds some interesting implications for how we think about multidisciplinary education.  To return to the Economist’s invective against what it takes to be the ‘irksome’ view that “if schools simply focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)—at the expense of frivolous ‘non-scientific’ subjects—then a model 21st-century workforce would magically materialize.

The Economist, instead, argued that taking a cross-disciplinary approach will yield novel, interesting, and superior results than work done when researchers who think of themselves only as scientists use only scientific methods.

The researchers working on the project agree, arguing, “the translation of De Luce is an exemplar of the importance of collaborations between the arts and sciences, of thinking and learning together in new ways, and a reminder that the intellectual tradition we now call science has a long and rich history.” Their collaboration was ‘transformational,’ forcing the scholars “to engage with different ideas and problems.” Despite challenges in getting accustomed to the ways their colleagues thought and the different vocabularies they used to express their thoughts, they stated that, “our expectations changed. At the start of the project we had hoped for a sharper understanding of the text; we were surprised when new science emerged as well.”

Charlie Munger On Multidisciplinary Education

Munger’s address at the Fiftieth Reunion of Harvard Law School’s Class of 1948 is a clarion call to remake our (elite) educational institutions. What Munger wants is a truly multidisciplinary education. I won’t go into the details, but in that address he asks (and, not surprisingly, answers) five simple 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 50 years, how far has elite academia progressed toward attainable best-form multidisciplinarity?

5)   What educational practices would make progress faster?

Munger has, to my view, had an outsized influence on helping push elite institutions in this country nearer toward the multidisciplinary vision he has in mind. Places like Stanford and Duke not only attempt to provide a multidisciplinary education, they also attempt to tell everyone about it.  Yale offers a course in ‘grand strategy’. New York Times editorialist David Brooks articulates why ‘grand strategy’ is so important in his piece ‘Saving the System.’ His argument is interesting[ii], but I’m even more fascinated in the fact that ‘grand strategy’ is getting taught at all. And how institutions are recognizing, a la Charlie Munger, that what people learn (and what we try to teach them) needs to be more connected. Not too many people who aren’t Munger acolytes use the terms ‘latticework’ or ‘mental models,’ but they do gesture in his direction.

Multidisciplinary Education for Business Schools?

A recent Wall StreetJournal article highlighted a similar multidisciplinary trend in Business Schools. “Most business-school students are gunning for jobs in banking, consulting or technology.” The piece stated. “So what are they doing reading Plato?”

WSJ mentioned a handful of schools in which the philosophy departments are “invading” the M.B.A. programs. Taking a page out of Munger’s book, (and spurred on by the global financial crisis) these institutions are trying to train business students to think beyond the bottom line. With “courses like ‘Why Capitalism?’ and ‘Thinking about Thinking,’ and readings by Marx and Kant,” these schools are asking their students to think about business in a broader context. Employers, they argue, are concerned with the spate of graduates who “are trained to solve single problems but often miss the big picture.”

Business School Courses and Readings

Munger has been famously critical of business schools, once responding to a question that asked about the wisdom in a particular business transaction by saying, “That was a foolish thing to do, but they can’t help it: some of them went to business school.”

What Would Munger Think About All This Multidisciplinarity?

You might think that Munger would be thrilled that his ideas are enjoying the popularity that they are. But I don’t. In fact, he might not even be thrilled if he thought all of these places were getting it right. Which I’d doubt. Munger is an unabashed elitist when it comes to multidisciplinarity in education (note the ‘Elite’ in his forth question. It’s not there by accident) and in psychology, stating, “I don’t think it’s good teaching psychology to the masses. In fact, I think it’s terrible.”

I understand Munger’s elitism. I do take issue with it—at least in part. But, setting that aside for now, I think he’d probably object on other grounds. And I’m inclined to agree with him on those.

I recently had the good fortune of corresponding with a man who has thought a lot about Munger’s ideas regarding multidisciplinary education. I didn’t ask about any particular attempt to realize Munger’s practice, but did ask what he thought about the possibility of doing so & wondered why more people don’t try.

No Dice.

He wasn’t sanguine about the effort. He thought the academic world is so woefully inadequate that when institutions try to be multi-disciplinary, their efforts “usually cause more harm than good.” He thought this was so because of academia’s tendency to divide the world into specialties. He understood this impulse, because not to do so would make the world and its complex systems too hard to understand. 

But this legitimate practice has a horrible side-effect: slicing up the world this way “fools most people into thinking that’s how the world works. It doesn’t, it’s holistic, linked, one,” he argued. “Universities think that by partially re-joining a couple of specialties back together, and labeling it as ‘multi-disciplinary’, they’ve accomplished something.  But they are still so very far from the true threshold of required understanding as to kidding themselves.”

So, what did he think it really takes to get the kind of latticework Munger wants?

He used a metaphor: the NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle. People who “can complete [the NYT crossword puzzle] must have massive knowledge across multiple domains: the English language, literature, pop culture, etc.  Bring anything less than that broad domain base of understanding, and it can’t be done.  This metaphor is a good one because people recognize this as a simple up or down proposition - you either have sufficient knowledge or you don’t.  If you don’t, no dice.”

As for all these recent attempts at institutionalizing multidisciplinarity? I’d suspect Munger would argue: no dice.

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[i] Aristotle’s distinction between the perfect celestial and imperfect earthly realms led to the problem of why, if atoms are point-like (as they were considered at the time to be), then how is it that materials have volume? Light, from this perspective, was considered a medium for filling space. Grosseteste’s theory provided an explanation for why matter had bulk and why that bulk was stable. His idea was that light operates on matter the way two infinite sums can produce a finite ratio. 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + ...etc. expresses an infinite sequence; 0.5 + 1 + 2 + 4 + …does, too. Grosseteste took the first of these and divided it by the second, to produce a finite value of 2. Though contemporary mathematicians point out that he didn’t work through the limits that are necessary to make this mathematically rigorous, the gist of his argument is clear—simultaneously adding to both numerator and denominator will produce a finite ratio.

[ii] The explicit argument in Brooks’s New York Times Op-Ed is that our liberal pluralistic system and the freedoms it affords aren’t natural—we’ve got to protect them. Moreover, because it’s difficult to “get people to die for a set of pluralistic procedures to protect faraway places,” finding ways to protect it isn’t an easy task. Worse, because there’s a bunch of bellicosity in a ton of places today, those interested in keeping the kind of political leader that wants to achieve regional dominance and establish cultural and political uniformity at bay will be increasingly difficult.