Worldly Wisdom: The Latticework

Analogy¹

The latticework is like a closet.

Without hangers, you can’t hang any clothes, and your closet can’t serve its purpose.

But, with hangers, you can become more organized and effective, making the most of the space in your closet. The more hangers you have, the more clothes you can hang. However, it isn’t enough to just have hangers because your closet can quickly become messy and disorganized, making it hard to find anything.

Ideas which you deeply understand represent the hangers, and these allow you to neatly “hang” other ideas on – over time helping you form mental models. However, while physical closets can quickly become full and disorganized, if you approach your learning process correctly, it is impossible to overstuff your mind. In fact, the more ideas you have in your head, the more hooks you have to hang ideas on. Ideas beget ideas and learning begets learning, and this is how and why people can experience exponential learning.

Importantly, you must take a multidisciplinary approach, concentrating on the most fundamental models with the largest sample sizes, synthesize these models, learn them to fluency, and practice them (all of them!) deliberately. The more basic knowledge you have, the less new knowledge you need.

Learn by trying to understand simple things in terms of other ideas – always honestly and directly.

– Richard Feynman

Creating this system of organized “idea hangers” is the latticework for which this book is named.²

Diagram³

Example

I played competitive tennis from a young age, eventually playing in college. From my tennis journey, I came to deeply understand a chemistry term known as a “phase transition.”

I spent months working on a specific skill with no outward (or, sometimes, even inward!) appearance of improvement until, one day, it just clicked, and I had it. When luck, preparation, effort, skill, and timing all align, fractions of a degree can make all the difference, sometimes leading to unexpected results.

This happened to me several times with tennis-specific skills, and it happens in chemistry when fractions of a degree in temperature cause liquids to turn to gas, gas to liquid, or, in extreme cases, to skip phases entirely and jump from gas to solid! In fact, for specific isotopes of helium, in specific temperature ranges, you can reach “superfluidity” which is a beautiful term to understand and apply to learning, improving skills, running a business, forming relationships, and much more (Friction).

Knowing and having experienced phase transitions firsthand has helped me better understand autocatalysis, chain re a ctions, critical mass, and more.

As it relates to the latticework, “phase transition” is the “hanger,” which helped me hang these other ideas on.

Tangent: Superfluidity

Superfluidity is the phenomenon wherein a substance undergoes a phase transition that completely removes viscosity, and the matter flows infinitely and without friction. The lack of friction is directly related to the infinite mobility of a superfluid – friction creates heat, and even slight heat can cause a superfluid to return to a normal fluid state. The lack of friction allows the perpetual motion of the superfluid to exist and serves as a “loophole” in thermodynamics. – Wikipedia

Isn’t this beautiful language as it relates to business and relationships? Don’t we also want to remove friction and create “infinite mobility” like a superfluid? Friction in any form – heat, noise, arguments, bottlenecks, lack of trust – is, by definition, suboptimal, undesirable, and disruptive to a superfluid state. But, by having a win/win culture and other incentives aligned, we too can achieve superfluidity, thereby reducing friction.

Plain English

A latticework is traditionally used in home improvement projects to create shade, decorate fences, support plants, and more. It creates a stable structure as each point connects and reinforces every other point. Using this metaphor for our own purposes, we can use a latticework structure to organize and reinforce ideas and mental models.

If successful in forming this mental structure, you’ll be able to attach new knowledge to previous knowledge, allowing you to more easily learn new concepts. Rather than having information floating around aimlessly in our heads, we’ll have a way to organize silos of information into interconnected webs of understanding. This process can also expose our blind spots because we’ll have a better grasp of where our gaps in understanding are, making it easier to actively search out and fill these voids (Circle of Competence).

In addition, since the solutions to major problems often exist at the crossroads of disciplines, having a diverse set of mental models to draw on can increase the likelihood of approaching a problem productively and efficiently, leading to optimal outcomes.

An idea is more creditable when the results from the investigation come from various different realms.

– Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life

When I urge a multidisciplinary approach – that you have got to have the main models from a broad array of disciplines, and you have got to use them all – I’m really asking you to ignore jurisdictional boundaries. And the world isn’t organized that way. It discourages the jumping of jurisdictional boundaries. Big bureaucratic business discourages it. And, of course, academia itself discourages it. All I can say there is that, in that respect, academia is horribly wrong and dysfunctional. And some of the worst dysfunctions in businesses come from the fact that they balkanize reality into little individual departments and territoriality and turf protection and so forth. So, if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries. You don’t have to know it all. Just take in the best big ideas from all these disciplines. And it’s not that hard to do.
– Charlie Munger, A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom

Whitehead spoke of the fatal unconnectedness of academic disciplines wherein each professor didn’t even know the models of the other disciplines, much less try to synthesize those disciplines with his own. I think there is a modern name for this approach that Whitehead didn’t like, and that name is bonkers.
– Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Technical Description

A latticework is an openwork framework consisting of a criss-crossed pattern of strips of building material, typically wood or metal. The design is created by crossing the strips to form a grid or weave. Latticework may be functional – for example, to allow airflow to or through an area; structural, as a truss in a lattice girder; used to add privacy, as through a lattice screen; purely decorative; or some combination of these. – Wikipedia

Quotes

Not all knowledge is learned in one school.

– Hawaiian Proverb

Let me further develop the idea that a multidisciplinary attitude is required if maturity is to be effective. Here I’m following a key idea from the greatest lawyer of antiquity, Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero is famous for saying that a man who doesn’t know what happened before he’s born goes through life like a child. That is a very correct idea. Cicero is right to ridicule someone so foolish as not to know history. But if you generalize Cicero, as I think one should, there are a lot of other things that one should know in addition to history. And those other things are the big ideas in all the disciplines. And it doesn’t help you much just to know something well enough so that on one occasion you can prattle your way to an A in an exam. You have to learn many things in such a way that they’re in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them the rest of your life. If many of you try that, I solemnly promise that one day most will correctly come to think, “Somehow I’ve become one of the most effective people in my whole age cohort.” And, in contrast, if no effort is made toward such multi-disciplinarity, many of the brightest of you who choose this course will live in the middle ranks, or in the shallows.

– Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

I’ve long believed that a certain system which almost any intelligent person can learn – works way better than the systems that most people use. What you need is a latticework of mental models in your head. And, with that system, things gradually get to fit together in a way that enhances cognition. However, my particular approach seldom seems to get through, even to people of immense ability. Things usually die after going to the ‘Too-Hard’ pile.

– Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Another idea that was hugely useful to me was one I obtained when I listened in law school when some waggish professor said, “A legal mind is a mind that considers it feasible and useful, when two things are all twisted up together and interacting, to try to think about one thing without considering the other.” Well, I could see from that indirectly pejorative sentence that any such “legal” approach was ridiculous. And this pushed me further along in my natural drift, which was toward learning all the big ideas in all the big disciplines, so I wouldn’t be the perfect damn fool the professor described. And because the really big ideas carry about 95% of the freight, it wasn’t at all hard for me to pick up about 95% of what I needed from all the disciplines and to include use of this knowledge as a standard part of my mental routines. Once you have the ideas, of course, you must continuously practice their use. Like a concert pianist, if you don’t practice, you can’t perform well. So, I went through life constantly practicing a multidisciplinary approach.

– Charlie Munger, 2007 USC Gould School of Law Commencement Speech

I’m afraid that’s the way it is. If there are twenty factors and they interact some, you’ll just have to learn to handle it-because that’s the way the world is. But you won’t find it that hard if you go at it Darwin-like, step by step with curious persistence. You’ll be amazed at how good you can get.

– Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

I notice that when all a man’s information is confined to the field in which he is working, the work is never as good as it ought to be. A man has to get perspective, and he can get it from books or from people – preferably from both.

– Harvey Firestone, Men and Rubber

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

– Richard Feynman

The clash of domains is an especially fruitful source of idea. In fact, you’re doubly like to find good problems in another domain: people don’t have your expertise in your main field and since you’re totally ignorant of this new domain, you don’t even know what the status quo is. If you’re an undergrad, don’t take a class on entrepreneurialism. Get a summer job working at a biotech company or a new domain of your choice.

– Paul Graham, How to Get Startup Ideas

A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them. Consilience is a jumping together of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.

– EO Wilson, Consilience

JJ: In the series Melinda describes the inner working of your mind as “chaos.” How would you describe it?

BG: I think it’s the opposite of chaos. I’ll just take one dimension: timeline. If you name a point in time, or something that happened in history with, say, chemistry or relativity, I can attach knowledge to previous knowledge. So, when I read a new book, there are already patterns, and it’s just a lot simpler for me to build on that basis. It’s not just an endless set of things that I have no framework for.

– In Bill Gates’s Mind, a Life of Processing

It sounds strange to say that being a better artist might make me a stronger chess player or that listening to classical music can make you a more effective manager. And yet this is exactly the sort of thing that Feynman had in mind when he said that being a drummer made him a better physicist. When we regularly challenge ourselves with something new – even something not obviously related to our immediate goals – we build cognitive and emotional “muscles” that make us more effective in every way. If we can overcome our fear of speaking in public, or of submitting a poem to a magazine, or learning a new language, confidence will flow into every area of our lives. Don’t get so caught up in “what I do” that you stop being a curious human being. Your greatest strength is the ability to absorb and synthesize patterns, methods, and information. Intentionally inhibiting that ability by focusing too narrowly is not only a crime, but one with few rewards.

– Gary Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess

Ideas may come to us out of order in point of time. We may discover a detail of the façade before we know too much about the foundation. But in the end all knowledge has its place.

– Simon Flexner, Titan

What we call “Taste” is one of the most fascinating case studies for how inaccurate our view of our senses is: it is not produced by the tongue alone but is always an amalgam of taste, touch, and smell. Touch contributes to sauces tasting creamy and other foods tasting chewy, crisp, or stale. The only difference between potato chips that “taste” fresh or stale is a difference in texture…Taste, touch, and smell are not merely combined to produce experiences of foods or liquids; rather, the information from the separate sensory channels is fused into a unified experience of what we call taste and what food scientists call flavor. Flavor perception is the result of multisensory integration of gustatory, olfactory, and oral somatosensory information into a single experience whose components we are unable to distinguish…In sensory perception, multisensory integration is the rule, not the exception…Other surprising collaborations among the sense are due to cross-model effects, whereby stimulation of one sense boosts activity in another. Looking at someone’s lips across a crowded room can improve our ability to hear what they are saying, and the smell of vanilla can make a liquid we sip “taste” sweeter and less sour. This is why we say vanilla is sweet-smelling, although sweet is a taste and pure vanilla is not sweet at all.

– Barry C. Smith, This Will Make You Smarter

Research at Bristol University by educational psychologists Shafi and Rose showed that many mature students did not feel that their initial education instilled any excitement or even understanding of education; they had to wait to experience ‘life’ before realising the value of education and consequently returning to it later in life. This clear disconnect between the student and the modern education system is a result of what Whitehead referred to as ‘inert ideas’ – compartmentalised, fragmented information thrown at students at school without any unifying framework. As a result, students are not only less able to make sense of how these fragments of knowledge transmitted to them in various classes are relevant to each other, but more importantly, how they are relevant to their own lives. There is simply no context and therefore no internalisation. This predicament continues to this day. Children are sitting in classrooms, listening to lectures and reading books wondering what relevance geometry or medieval history or plate tectonics has for them.

– Waqas Ahmed, The Polymath

Interconnected Ideas⁴