Peter Kaufman on the Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking
This article is a part of my Best Reads of the Month section on my website www.mikegorlon.com. Each month I pick one or two articles or blog posts that I find on the internet which I thought were really insightful, interesting or moving. Then I share them with you. You can view the previous month’s articles by going to: https://www.mikegorlon.com/best-reads-of-the-month
December 2018: Peter Kaufman on the Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking
“To understand is to know what to do.” That is what the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said and is how Peter Kaufman started his 2018 speech given to the Cal Poly Pomana Economics Club about multidisciplinary thinking. I’ve been studying a lot about multidisciplinary thinking and trying to expand my mental models since I believe that understanding the big ideas in life and being able to apply them across various subjects is very beneficial to becoming a better decision maker and living a better life.
This transcript, transcribed by Richard Lewis of Latticeworkinvesting.com, is one of the great speeches I’ve ever read. I kid you not. It’s very informative and it increased what I know about multidisciplinary thinking even when I’ve been reading about it since I graduated college back in 2011. Peter Kaufman believes that one can be very good at business but still fail in life because of the inability to understand the big and important ideas in life. But increasing one’s understanding of those ideas and being able to apply them across various subjects will help us understand more so we know exactly what to do and in turn decrease the mistakes we make.
Here are some of the ideas I really enjoyed from the speech:
“So why is it important to be a multidisciplinary thinker? The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, ‘To understand is to know what to do.’ Could there be anything that sounds simpler than that? And yet it’s a genius line, to understand is to know what to do. How many mistakes do you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding.”
“All you have to do, if you want everything in life from everybody else, is first pay attention, listen to them, show them respect, give them meaning, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Convey to them that they matter to you. And show [them] you love them. But you have to go first. And what are you going to get back. Mirrored reciprocation. Right? See how we tie this all together? The world is so damn simple. It’s not complicated at all! Every single person on this planet is looking for the same thing. Now why is it that we don’t act on these very simple things?”
“For answering the question, why would people not go positive and not go first when there’s a 98 percent chance you’re going to benefit from it, and only a 2 percent chance the person’s going to tell you to ‘screw off’ and you’re going to feel horrible, lose face, and all the rest of that. And that’s real. That’s why we don’t do it. He said there’s huge asymmetry between the standard human desire for gain and the standard human desire to avoid loss.”
