MICHEL PIREU: First rule of practical wisdom is to understand how things work
Grasp the big ideas of fundamental academic disciplines to create interlaced mental models
In the 1990s, Charlie Munger, vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and a renowned thinker, explained his approach to gaining practical wisdom. "The first rule," he said, "is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you will think it does. And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines." What you need are the big, basic ideas of all the truly fundamental academic disciplines, say the folks at Farnam Street. "The stuff you should have learned in the ‘101’ course of each major subject but probably didn’t — the true general principles that underlie ...
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