One of Saturday morning’s great pleasures, an hour or so before Spanish class, is to settle down in Costa with a coffee and a hard copy of the Financial Times. And one of the best writers in that journal is Simon Kuper. He’s clear, he’s brief, he deals in the currency of short sentences and defined concepts. He’s also a polymath, covering subjects as diverse as politics, urban planning and football(he’s even done a very workmanlike guide to the affairs of Barcelona FC . [1] In fact, he’s exactly the sort of writer we ought to showcase here, because he believes in our core LSS values of evidence, reason, and reserved judgement.
How appropriate therefore that his last column was called Seven Intellectual Habits of the best thinkers., for there can be no better short guide. [2] The problem is that access is behind a paywall. As LSS is such an important institution, and our readers so avid for wisdom, we rang the Editor of the Financial Times a to demand that this be lifted as a Special Case., and that he/she/ they might like to buy us lunch to discuss the matter further. The young person on the switchboard thanked us very much and promised they would call us back. So far they have not done so(that was three days ago) but doubtless there were other callers. So, while we are waiting, we thought that we could offer you a distilled reproduction of Simon’s thoughts:
1 Read Books ” Their complexity is a check on pure ideology” People who simplify the world are the ones who fall for conspiracy theories or the offers of charlatans.
2 Don’t use screens much Apparently, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who invented CRISPR technology gets her best insights when she’s out weeding her tomato plants. Obviously you have to use screens a bit, or you couldn’t read this! But we get Simon’s drift: a little screen time is a lot.
3 Do your own work, not the world’s The same Doudna got a gig at Genentech, leading their research. She lasted two months before hightailing it back to Berkeley where the true intellectual freedom led her to the Nobel Prize. We agree: people who spend all their time on office politics actually accomplish very little that is either interesting or of value.
4 Be multidisciplinary Kuper cites the examples of Hayek, Godel, Van Neumann and others who all studied one thing, trained in another and did their best work in a third. Daniel Kahneman is cited as another multi-disciplinarian polymath of formidable intellectual power. Rather worryingly, our AI system has set his book as homework for us. Where’ are John and Sarah Connor when you really need them?
5 Be an empiricist who values ideas Kuper cites the case of Isaiah Berlin and his marvellous work the Hedgehog and the Fox , a masterpiece of political philosophy. Incidentally Winston Churchill got him mixed up with Irving Berlin and invited the wrong one to dinner.”My British Buddy” as Berlin himself would later remark in song.
6 Always assume you might be wrong Yep: in this country we are still trying to repair the effects of the blissful certainties of Brexit. You will doubtless have examples from your own lands
7 Keep learning from everyone “Only mediocrities boast as adults about where they went to University at 18.They imagine that intelligence is innate and static. In fact people become more or less intelligent through life depending on how hard they think. The best thinkers are always learning from others, no matter how young or low status” We quote Kuper rather fully here as the first part seems one of the most admirable and accurate summaries of the sorts of people one met on a daily basis during long decades in the Scientific Civil Service. Now there’s intelligence indeed.
[2]https://www.ft.com/content/c42cb640-a03c-441b-868f-d1a92d78bcb7
#wisdom #intelligence #FC Barcelona #isaiah berlin #daniel kahneman #thinking #financial times #simon kuper
Learning, Science and Society 
Good piece Keir. Sent from my iPhone
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thanks Jill he is a very intelligent man who writes clearly
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