Practical Thought About Practical Thought?

Practical Thought About Practical Thought?

An Informal Talk, July 20,1996

The title of my talk is "Practical Thought About Practical Thought?"-with a question mark at the end. In a long career, I have assimilated various ultrasimple general notions that I find helpful in solving problems. Five of these helpful notions I will now describe. After that, I will present to you a problem of extreme scale. Indeed, the problem will involve turning start-up capital of $2 million into $2 trillion, a sum large enough to represent a practical achievement. Then, I will try to solve the problem, assisted by my helpful general notions. Following that, I will suggest that there are important educational implications in my demonstration. I will so finish because my objective is educational, my game today being a search for better methods of thought.

The first helpful notion is that it is usually best to simplify problems by deciding big "no-brainer" questions first.

The second helpful notion mimics Galileo's conclusion that scientific reality is often revealed only by math as if math was the language of God. Galileo's attitude also works well in messy, practical life. Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhabit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

The third helpful notion is that it is not enough to think problems through forward. You must also think in reverse, much like the rustic who wanted to know where he was going to die so that he'd never go there. Indeed, many problems can't be solved forward. And that is why the great algebraist Carl Jacobi so often said, "Invert, always invert." And why the Pythagoreans thought in reverse to prove that the square root of two was an irrational number.

The fourth helpful notion is that the best and most practical wisdom is elementary academic wisdom. But there is one extremely important qualification: You must think in a multidisciplinary manner. You must routinely use all the easy-to-learn concepts from the freshman course in every basic subject. Where elementary ideas will serve, your problem solving must not be limited, as academia and many business bureaucracies are limited, by extreme balkanization into disciplines and subdisciplines, with strong taboos against any venture outside assigned territory. Instead, you must do your multidisciplinary thinking in accord with Ben Franklin's prescription in Poor Richard: "If you want it done, go. If not, send."

The fifth helpful notion is that really big effects, lollapalooza effects, will often come only from large combinations of factors. For instance, tuberculosis was tamed, at least for a long time, only by routine, combined use in each case of three different drugs. And other lollapalooza effects, like the flight of an airplane, follow a similar pattern.

It is now time to present my practical problem.

And here is the problem: It is 1884 in Atlanta. You are brought, along with twenty others like you, before a rich and eccentric Atlanta citizen named Glotz. Both you and Glotz share two characteristics: First, you routinely use in problem solving the five helpful notions, and, second, you know all the elementary ideas in all the basic college courses, as taught in 1996. However, all discoverers and all examples demonstrating these elementary ideas come from dates before 1884. Neither you nor Glotz knows anything about anything that has happened after 1884.

Glotz offers to invest two million 1884 dollars, yet take only half the equity, for a Glotz Charitable Foundation, in a new corporation organized to go into the non-alcoholic beverage business and remain in that business only, forever. Glotz wants to use a name that has somehow charmed him: Coca-Cola.

The other half of the new corporation's equity will go to the man who most plausibly demonstrates that his business plan will cause Glotz's foundation to be worth a trillion dollars 150 years later, in the money of that later time, 2034, despite paying out a large part of its earnings each year as a dividend. This will make the whole new corporation worth $2 trillion, even after paying out many billions of dollars in dividends.

You have fifteen minutes to make your pitch. What do you say to Glotz?

Here is my solution, my pitch to Glotz, using only the helpful notions and what every bright college sophomore should know.

The full pitch is not included in this excerpt. Its outline covers trademarks, global expansion, conditioned reflexes, social proof, and avoiding aftertaste, trademark dilution, envy, and drastic flavour changes. The talk then connects the exercise to multidisciplinary education.