“The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking” by Peter Kaufman

"We’re trying to better understand how the world works so we can align ourselves with reality. We become the generalist, with a few big ideas from each discipline that we can combine to understand the forces at play."

You’ve likely experienced this first hand. An engineer will often think in terms of systems by default. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A business person might think in terms of opportunity cost and risk-reward. Through their disciplines, each of these people sees part of the situation, the part of the world that makes sense to th

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The quality of our thinking is largely influenced by the mental models in our heads. While we want accurate models, we also want a wide variety of models to uncover what’s really happening. The key here is variety. Most of us study something specific and don’t get exposure to the big ideas of other disciplines. We don’t develop the multidisciplinar

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– not to be a good academic, but to have a good, pragmatic grip on reality. He regularly explains to students which mental models have proven most useful to help him understand markets and human behaviour. He advocates looking out for the most powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of

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Many people seem to do work which is unrelated to their area of study or their prior roles. But dig a little deeper and it’s often the case that knowledge from the past informs their present. Marcel Proust put it best: “the real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” Interdisciplinary knowledge is what all... See more