B000U5KFIC EBOK (55 page)

Third, thinking by inversion and through use of "check lists" is easily
learned-in broadscale life as in piloting.

Moreover, we can believe in the attainability of broad multidisciplinary skill for the same reason the fellow from Arkansas gave for his belief
in baptism: "I've seen it done." We all know of individuals, modern Ben
Franklins, who have (1) achieved a massive multidisciplinary synthesis
with less time in formal education than is now available to our numerous
brilliant young and (2) thus become better performers in their own disciplines, not worse, despite diversion of learning time to matter outside the
normal coverage of their own disciplines.

Given the time and talent available and examples of successful masters of multiple disciplines, what is shown by our present failure to minimize had effects from "man with a hammer" tendency is only that you
can't win big in multidisciplinarity in soft-science academia if you are so
satisfied with the status quo, or so frightened by the difficulties of
change, that you don't try hard enough to win big.

This brings us to our fourth question: Judged with reference to an optimized feasible multidisciplinary goal, how much has elite soft-science
education been corrected after we left?

The answer is that many things have been tried as corrections in the
direction of better multidisciplinarity. And, after allowing for some counterproductive results, there has been some considerable improvement,
net. But much desirable correction is still undone and lies far ahead.

For instance, soft-science academia has increasingly found it helpful
when professors from different disciplines collaborate or when a professor has been credentialed in more than one discipline. But a different sort
of correction has usually worked best, namely augmentation of a "take
what you wish" practice that encourages any discipline to simply assimilate whatever it chooses from other disciplines. Perhaps this worked best
because it bypassed academic squabbles rooted in the tradition and territoriality that had caused the unidisciplinary folly for which correction
was now sought.

In any event, through increased use of "take what you wish," many
soft-science disciplines reduced folly from "man with a hammer" tendency. For instance, led by our classmate, Roger Fisher, the law schools
brought in negotiation, drawing on other disciplines. Over three million
copies of Roger's wise and ethical negotiation book have now been sold,
and his life's achievement may well be the best, ever, from our whole
class. The law schools also brought in a lot of sound and useful economics, even some good game theory to enlighten antitrust law by better explaining how competition really works.

Economics, in turn, took in from a biologist the "tragedy of the
commons" model, thus correctly finding a wicked "invisible foot" in coexistence with Adam Smith's angelic "invisible hand." These days there
is even some "behavioral economics," wisely seeking aid from psychology.

However, an extremely permissive practice like "take what you wish"
was not destined to have 100 percent-admirable results in soft science.
Indeed, in some of its worst outcomes it helped changes like (1) assimilation of Freudianism in some literature departments, (2) importation
into many places of extremist political ideologies of the left or right that
had, for their possessors, made regain of objectivity almost as unlikely as
regain of virginity, and (3) importation into many law and business
schools of hard-form efficient-market theory by misguided would-be experts in corporate finance, one of whom kept explaining Berkshire Hathaway's investing success by adding standard deviations of luck until, at six
standard deviations, he encountered enough derision to force a change in
explanation.

Moreover, even when it avoided such lunacies, "take what you wish"
had some serious defects. For instance, takings from more fundamental disciplines were often done without attribution, sometimes under new names,
with little attention given to rank in a fundamentalness order for absorbed
concepts. Such practices (1) act like a lousy filing system that must impair
successful use and synthesis of absorbed knowledge and (2) do not maximize in soft-science the equivalent of Linus Pauling's systematic mining of
physics to improve chemistry. There must be a better way.

This brings us, finally, to our last question: in elite soft-science what
practices would hasten our progress toward optimized multidisciplinarity? Here again, there are some easy answers:

First, many more courses should be mandatory, not optional. And
this, in turn, requires that the people who decide what is mandatory must
possess large multidisciplinary knowledge maintained in fluency. This
conclusion is as obvious in the training of the would-he broadscale problem solver as it is in the training of the would-be pilot. For instance, both
psychology mastery and accounting mastery should be required as outcomes in legal education. Yet, in many elite places, even today, there are
no such requirements. Often, such is the narrowness of mind of the program designers that they neither see what is needed and missing nor are
able to fix deficiencies.

Second, there should be much more problem-solving practice that
crosses several disciplines, including practice that mimics the function of
the aircraft simulator in preventing loss of skills through disuse. Let me
give an example, roughly remembered, of this sort of teaching by a very
wise but untypical Harvard Business School professor many decades ago.

This professor gave a test involving two unworldly old ladies who
had just inherited a New England shoe factory making branded shoes and beset with serious business problems described in great detail. The professor then gave the students ample time to answer with written advice to
the old ladies. In response to the answers, the professor next gave every
student an undesirable grade except for one student who was graded at
the top by a wide margin. What was the winning answer? It was very
short and roughly as follows: "This business field and this particular business, in its particular location, present crucial problems that are so difficult that unworldly old ladies cannot wisely try to solve them through
hired help. Given the difficulties and unavoidable agency costs, the old
ladies should promptly sell the shoe factory, probably to the competitor
who would enjoy the greatest marginal-utility advantage." Thus the winning answer relied not on what the students had most recently been
taught in business school but, instead, on more fundamental concepts,
like agency costs and marginal utility, lifted from undergraduate psychology and economics.

Ah, my fellow members of the Harvard Law Class of 1948: if only we
had been much more often tested like that, just think of what more we
might have accomplished!

Incidentally, many elite private schools now wisely use such multidisciplinary methods in seventh grade science, while at the same time
many graduate schools have not yet seen the same light. This is one more
sad example of Whitehead's "fatal unconnectedness" in education.

Third, most soft-science professional schools should increase use of
the best business periodicals, like the Wall Street, journal, Forbes, Fortune, etc. Such periodicals are now quite good and perform the function
of the aircraft simulator if used to prompt practice in relating events to
multidisciplinary causes, often intertwined. And sometimes the periodicals even introduce new models for causes, instead of merely refreshing old knowledge. Also, it is not just slightly sound to have the student
practice in school what he must practice, life-long after formal education is over, if he is going to maximize his good judgment. I know
no person in business, respected for verified good judgment, whose
wisdom-maintenance system does not include use of such periodicals.
Why should academia be different?

Fourth, in filling scarce academic vacancies professors of super
strong, passionate political ideology, whether on the left or right, should
usually be avoided. So also for students. Best-form multidisciplinarity
requires an objectivity such passionate people have lost, and a difficult
synthesis is not likely to be achieved by minds in ideological fetters. In
our day, some Harvard Law professors could and did point to a wonderful
example of just such ideology-based folly. This, of course, was the law
school at Yale which was then viewed by many at Harvard as trying to improve legal education by importing a particular political ideology as a
dominant factor.

Fifth, soft-science should more intensely imitate the fundamental organizing ethos of hard science (defined as the "fundamental four-discipline combination" of math, physics, chemistry, and engineering). This
ethos deserves more imitation. After all, hard science has, by a wide margin, the best record for both (1) avoiding unidisciplinary folly and (2)
making user-friendly a big patch of multidisciplinary domain, with frequent good results like those of physicist Richard Feynman when he so
quickly found in cold O-rings the cause of our greatest space-shuttle disaster. And previous extensions of the ethos into softer fare have worked
well. For instance, biology, starting 150 years ago with a descriptive mess,
not much related to deep theory, has gradually absorbed the fundamental
organizing ethos with marvelous results as new generations have come to
use better thinking methods containing models that answer the question:
Why? And there is no clear reason why the ethos of hard science can't
also help in disciplines far less fundamental than biology. Here, as I interpret it, is this fundamental organizing ethos I am talking about:

1. You must both rank and use disciplines in order of fundamentalness.

2. You must, like it or not, master to tested fluency and routinely use
the truly essential parts of all four constituents of the fundamental four-discipline combination, with particularly intense attention given to disciplines more fundamental than your own.

3. You may never practice either crossdisciplinary absorption
without attribution or departure from a "principle of economy"
that forbids explaining in any other way anything readily explainable from more fundamental material in your own or any
other discipline.

4. But when the step (3) approach doesn't produce much new and
useful insight, you should hypothesize, and test to establishment,
new principles, ordinarily by using methods similar to those that
created successful old principles. But you may not use any new
principle, inconsistent with an old one, unless you can now prove
that the old principle is not true.

You will note that, compared with much current practice in softscience, the fundamental organizing ethos of hard-science is more severe. This reminds one of pilot training, and this outcome is not a
coincidence. Reality is talking to anyone who will listen. Like pilot training, the ethos of hard science does not say "take what you wish" but "learn it all to fluency, like it or not.,, And rational organization of multidisciplinary knowledge is forced by making mandatory (1) full attribution for cross-disciplinary takings and (2) mandatory preference for the
most fundamental explanation.

This simple idea may appear too obvious to be useful, but there is an
old two-part rule that often works wonders in business, science, and elsewhere: (1) take a simple, basic idea and (2) take it very seriously. And as
some evidence for the value of taking very seriously the fundamental organizing ethos, I offer the example of my own life.

I came to Harvard Law School very poorly educated, with desultory
work habits and no college degree. I was admitted over the objection of
Warren Abner Seavey through intervention of family friend Roscoe
Pound. I had taken one silly course in biology in high school, briefly
learning, mostly by rote, an obviously incomplete theory of evolution,
portions of the anatomy of the paramecium and frog, plus a ridiculous
concept of "protoplasm" that has since disappeared. To this day I have
never taken any course, anywhere, in chemistry, economics, psychology
or business. But I early took elementary physics, and math and paid
enough attention to somehow assimilate the fundamental organizing
ethos of hard science, which I thereafter pushed further and further into
softer and softer fare as my organizing guide and filing system in a search
for whatever multidisciplinary worldly wisdom it would be easy to get.

Thus, my life became a sort of accidental educational experiment
with respect to feasibility and utility of a very gross academic extension
of the fundamental organizing ethos by a man who also learned well what
his own discipline had to teach.

What I found, in my extended attempts to complete by informal
means my stunted education, was that, plugging along with only ordinary
will but with the fundamental organizing ethos as my guide, my ability to
serve everything I loved was enhanced far beyond my desserts. Large
gains came in places that seemed unlikely as I started out, sometimes
making me like the only one without a blindfold in a high-stake game of
"pin the donkey." For instance, I was productively led into psychology,
where I had no plans to go, creating large advantages that deserve a story
on another day.

Today, I have no more story. I have finished my talk by answering my
own questions as best I could in a brief time. What is most interesting to
me in my answers is that, while everything I have said is non-original and
has long been obvious to the point of banality to many sound and well educated minds, all the evils I decry remain grossly overpresent in the best
of our soft-science educational domains wherein virtually every professor
has a too unidisciplinary habit of mind, even while a better model exists just across the aisle in his own university. To me, this ridiculous outcome implies that the soft-science departments tolerate perverse incentives. Wrong incentives are a major cause because, as Dr. Johnson so wisely observed, truth is hard to assimilate in any mind when opposed by interest. And, if institutional incentives cause the problem, then a remedy is feasible-because incentives can be changed.