I am an addict of the lectures that the Teaching Company in the U.S. issues as Great Courses. Decades ago, it mailed VHS tapes, and later DVDs, with many series of lectures on everything from Roman history to French Impressionist painting. I consumed them avidly, at one point watching while running on my treadmill at home. The idea was to double up—to get exercise while learning, say, ancient Greek irregular verbs. I am an economist. Efficient, yes?
No. The verbs are very hard and the running is hard, too. For the rest of the day I couldn’t force myself to do anything hard. I just sat around. The doubling had exhausted my capacity to discipline myself. Humans are like that. It limits their ability to be “rational, as the economist Herb Simon showed fifty years ago. Herb got a Nobel, but nobody took the argument seriously. Big mistake.
Now I’m back to the Teaching Company, though just watching the lectures, and not doing anything else at the same time. The Company gives you access on the internet to hundreds of lecture courses. If your English is good, do it. Brazilian entrepreneurs need to know that the Company has a viable business plan. Do it in Portuguese!
I go home from work and watch lectures. It’s become truly insane. In the past six months, I’ve done, or at least started, for example, three different lecture series by a professor of engineering from the U.S. Military Academy, about Everyday Engineering, a series about Greek and Roman buildings, and then one about Engineering Disasters. Great stuff. I’ve done courses on high school chemistry, organic chemistry, all sorts of history, differential equations, Fibonacci numbers, linguistics, brain science, Spanish, and German. And ancient Greek. Back to those hard irregular verbs.
So what? Deirdre is insane. You already knew that.
This: Along with Simon and a score of others, a great economist I’ve known is Vernon Smith. At age 97 he’s still going strong, still doing research in experimental economics, which he invented, and writing books on what we call humanomics. Vernon advises people to do one thing deeply, so you know what depth means. But then read widely. That’s for intellectual work, but it applies to physical work, too. Be a superb carpenter, but then fix things widely. Be a professional golfer, but then do other sports. Knit expertly, but then try other crafts.
Why? Because you spot analogies, between, say, one business and another, Chinese history and European, economics and language. Many of the biggest advances have come from outsiders looking into a field, or a deep expert looking out. The discoverers of DNA included James Watson, a physicist, and Rosalind Franklin, a physical chemist. “Textual criticism,” invented in the 15th century to correct errors by scribes in Greek and Latin texts, led in the 18th century to the “Higher Criticism,” of the Bible, and big theological developments. Trucks hauling coal in mines led to railways.
Economists call it arbitrage. Buy low, sell high. Normal people call it “becoming educated.”
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.
I call it being interested in everything.
But no, you can’t do anything else.
I like this a lot. You can frame it in a number of ways, like the clumsy “interdisciplinarity” or cross-fertilisation of ideas. I prefer to think of it, as an imprecise but effective shorthand, as “thinking round corners”.