The Need for More Multidisciplinary Skills from Professionals: Educational Implications

Background

In a speech to a Harvard Law School Class of 1948 reunion, Munger asks how professional education could build broader, usable knowledge. He poses five questions:

1. Do broadscale professionals need more multidisciplinary skill?
2. Was our education sufficiently multidisciplinary?
3. What is the essential nature of best-form multidisciplinary education in elite soft science?
4. How far has elite academia progressed toward attainable best-form multidisciplinarity?
5. What educational practices would make progress faster?

Key Concepts

Munger identifies two subconscious mental tendencies that cause poor professional cognition:

• Incentive-caused bias: A natural drift toward what is good for the professional rather than the client.
• Man-with-a-hammer tendency: The proverb “To a man with only a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail.” The cure is to carry multiple tools from diverse disciplines.

He criticizes Bernard Shaw’s view that professions are merely conspiracies, emphasizing that subconscious biases are more dangerous. He also references Alfred North Whitehead’s “fatal unconnectedness of academic disciplines.”

Pilot Training Model

Munger proposes a model for elite education based on six features he draws from pilot training:

1. Wide formal education covering everything useful for piloting.
2. All knowledge raised to practice-based fluency, even for handling multiple hazards simultaneously.
3. Thinking both forward and in reverse (inversion).
4. Training time allocated to minimize later malfunctions.
5. Mandatory checklist routines.
6. Knowledge maintenance through regular simulator use to prevent skill atrophy.

This model, applied to broadscale problem solving, requires “multidisciplinary coverage of immense amplitude, with all needed skills raised to an ever-maintained practice-based fluency.”

Fundamental Organizing Ethos of Hard Science

Munger advocates imitating the ethos of hard science (math, physics, chemistry, engineering):

1. Rank and use disciplines in order of fundamentalness.
2. Master and routinely use the essential parts of all four foundational disciplines.
3. No cross-disciplinary absorption without attribution; prefer the most fundamental explanation.
4. Generate new principles through hypothesis testing, but never contradict established principles without proof.

He cites Feynman’s demonstration of how cold affected an O-ring’s resilience during the Challenger investigation as an example of applying basic physical reasoning.

Applications in Soft Science

Munger praises “take what you wish” practices that have improved fields like law (Roger Fisher’s negotiation) and economics (tragedy of the commons, behavioral economics). But he warns against importing ideologies or fads (e.g., Freudianism in literature, hard-form efficient-market theory in finance).

His recommendations include:

• Mandatory courses in psychology and accounting (even in law school).
• Problem-solving practice that crosses disciplines, like the shoe factory test described below.
• Use of business periodicals as “aircraft simulators” for lifelong learning.
• Avoiding ideologically extreme professors and students.

Personal Example

Munger describes his own “accidental educational experiment”: despite never taking formal courses in chemistry, economics, psychology, or business, he assimilated the hard science ethos and applied it to softer fields, gaining advantages in investing and decision-making.

He concludes that changing institutional incentives can overcome the inertia of unidisciplinary education, quoting Samuel Johnson: “Truth is hard to assimilate in any mind when opposed by interest.”