Peter D. Kaufman

Let's dive in.

Peter opens his talk by asking why multidisciplinary thinking is important.

The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, to understand is to know what to do.

What a great way of putting it.

When you truly understand something, you don't make mistakes.

Think about it this way.

Mistakes come from blind spots.

They come from a lack of understanding.

So the more we understand, the fewer mistakes we will make.

This is why Peter believes multidisciplinary thinking is critical because we understand more.

The world doesn't organize itself into neat academic departments.

Problems don't come with labels like economics or psychology or biology.

They come unlabeled and interconnected.

They're usually super messy.

The financial crisis of 2008, for example, wasn't really a financial problem.

It was a psychology problem, an incentives problem wrapped in a complexity problem.

The range of specialists couldn't see it because they could only see the world through one lens.

Peter illustrates the danger of such specialization with a Japanese proverb, the frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.

We see this constantly in our world today.

A brilliant engineer builds a complex product nobody wants because they don't understand human behavior.