Multidisciplinary
DLD 2012 has started today in Munich and runs until Jan. 24th. In it, people as diverse as Sheryl Sandberg, Arianna Huffington, the Dyson family and Hiroshi Mikitani share their views on what matters to them. The themes are varied and the program is packed with interesting talks and panels. In the age of multi-disciplinary events, this is one of the best.
Today’s post is just an image, a scan of an Isaac Asimov 1971 short note to kids apparently getting a new library somewhere. It’s brilliant. We complement it with our post citing “anti-libraries”.
Today we have both a big, weekend-reading type article and a smaller one. The small one is a summary of Warren Buffett’s impressions about Japan, which he visited in another trip to an Iscar (IMC) plant abroad. The larger one is a New Yorker profile on Peter Thiel, the “dystopian utopian” VC/ hedge fund investor who founded Paypal and was the first outside investor in Facebook. No easy takeaways but he remains one of the most provocative thinkers in our realm.
Two follow-ups to recent posts: Not to be outdone by our recent post about reading lists, Booz & Co.’s Best Business Books 2011 feature is a sprawling selection of books covering Management, Economics, Marketing, Ethics and other business-oriented fields. And it appears that the speed of light is indeed in question, as recent studies were able to repeat the first experiment’s results.
Read more about Follow-up: reading lists and the speed of light
The “Epicurean Dealmaker” comments to a Tim Harford article in the Financial Times – both worth the time. It highlights that science is increasingly about multidisciplinary collaboration, with its pros and cons. The risk is that scientists are becoming so specialized that no one can know enough about each piece of the puzzle, so it gets harder to check and to innovate. There will be no more Da Vincis, argues Tim Harford. In such a specialized world, the quest to achieve as much of a multidisciplinary knowledge as possible – as argued by Feynman in the introductory quote and by Charlie Munger repeatedly over the years – gains importance day by day.
Charlie Munger’s presentation at the Wesco annual meeting was his solo act, now possibly gone since Berkshire bought the rest of Wesco it didn’t already own. Even so he did a “farewell” meeting and we have a few links on it. Good reading material as always.
We highlight a very interesting article called “How Aha! Really Happens”. In it, the author argues that the notion of the brain’s two hemispheres being extremely specialized – “left” being rational/ analytical, “right” creative/ intuitive – has been proven inadequate since 1998, which means that companies focusing on “right-side brainstorming” exercises to foster innovation are not doing themselves many favors. The main point is this: “(…) our most-accepted approach to problem solving is grounded in an incorrect premise about the source of creativity in the brain.” The implications are very interesting.
The doctor profiled in this NYT article met Amos Tversky (who worked with Daniel Kahneman on prospect theory) and became a different type of doctor – “perhaps the leading debunker of preconceived notions in the medical world”. The real benefit of reading this article is that it shows what skepticism, curiosity, intellectual honesty and the drive to find some kind of “truth” can accomplish in any field, especially one that lends itself to empirical examination/ fact checking. Great reminder of PART of the required mindset of an analyst.
Munger’s classic speech in 1995 at the Harvard Law School is the quintessential example of the multitude of his mental models. In it Mr. Munger describes 24 “standard causes for human misjudgement” in separate, but then reminds us that these can combine to create potentially multiplied consequences. Since it can happen for good or bad, we’re better off informed and much smarter for the effort.
A few (seemingly) random thoughts and quotes on misdirection, disorientation and how to benefit from it. If that doesn’t convince the reader to click on “read more”, there’s a Charlie Munger quotation inside worth the read.
