Page 166 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

the journal of the krishnamurti schools no.25

I was clear that I wanted to create a tool-kit, a set of tools, orga-
nized neatly into a box, each tool with a defined purpose and a
master craftsman, the social change maker, the human being,
who was adept at its use. I was floundering till I came across an
extraordinary speech given by Charlie Munger , the vice chairman
1
of Berkshire Hathaway and lifelong friend of Warren Buffet. (I am
well aware of the irony of finding wisdom in the world’s richest
men, especially those who got rich by being investors in the stock
market!).
I suddenly had the ‘tool’. It turns out to be something called a
‘mental model’. Here is a quote from the talk that lays out what this
is about:

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you
can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and
try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a lattice-
work of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array
your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of
models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember
and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and
in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in
your head.

What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have
multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you’re
using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture
reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does. You
become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great
boob in medicine.

It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every prob-
lem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor
goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way

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