You don’t actually know where you’re going, so how could you ever feel behind? One approach: learn widely, and you may be surprised.
That’s a takeaway from sports journalist David Epstein’s 2019 book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.”
No surprise the book was comforting to many, gathering research into a pop science argument that we ought not specialize too early. It’s a nice gathering of academic work, though many of the examples looked more like a collection of remarkable people (of course Nobel laureates are also often artists). Still, I appreciated the take.
For parents: Let kids struggle in their learning (stop the hints). True and lasting learning looks like struggle. How to learn? Spacing out the learning, taking practice tests and using “making connections” questions — they all helped longterm but impaired short term.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Two models: “Deliberate practice” is the Tiger model vs “slow bakers” of Roger Federer
- Elite performers typically go through a “sampling” period up to nearly age 10-12 before specializing: Late specialization Is the key to success: “start later, intensify and be determined”
- Early career specializers earn more early but late specializers find better fit (and sample across roles to bring innovations)
- “The most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind,” because slower learning builds and lasts
- Mark Zuckerberg “young people are just smarter,” (My own reporting has shown how silly that is; and other reporting notes intelligence ranges)
- “One revelation in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis was the degree of segregation within big banks. Legions of specialized groups, optimizing risk for their own tiny pieces of the big picture created a catastrophic whole.”
- Cardiac patients had better odds when admitted during a cardiology conference because they weren’t around to give stents that no one needed
- Polgar chess snugly
- “Just how much of the world, and how many of the things humans want to learn and do, are really like chess and golf?”
- Kahneman and Klein co-author in 2009: “Whether or not experience inevitably lead to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chests and poker, players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.
- Robin Hogarth calls them “kind” or “wicked” learning environments
- Experts just get over confident; they are not better at picking (I’ve reported on this)
- Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans have opposite strengths and weaknesses
- Kasparov chess tournament with machines: machines on tactics and people on strategy: human-computer (centaur) teams outperform others
- Treffert: “islands of genius” shows that we use “chunking” to remember patterns
- AlphaZero trained itself in a “tabula rasa” (blank state) but in a constrained game environment that isn’t a true blank slate, with clear objectives
- “Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.”
- Chris Argyris Yale: “brittle personalities” of top business school consultants who deployed “single-loop Learning” in which they gave textbook advice and then couldn’t adapt to various alternatives
- “The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis.“ as Robin Hogarth put it much of the world is “Martian tennis.” For which we don’t know the rules and they’re shifting
- Ellen Winner, no savant became a “Big C creator” who changed their field — they repeat patterns
- Kahneman contrasts domains with “robust statistical regularities” like accounting and poker and surgery and those golf/chess examples , but they struggle when the game changes (new tax code or new surgical practice) ; Erik Dane this is “cognitive entrenchment”
- Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least 22 times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer
- “To him who observes them from a far, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they’re channeling and strengthening them.” Santiago Ramon y Cajal Spanish Nobel laureate
- Claude Shannon introduced binary code because 70 years earlier he was exposed to George Boole: he combined two different fields
- Christopher Connolly’s PhD showed those who maintained “career streams” could “avoid the same old patterns”
- Flynn effects on IQ
- Alexander Luria experiments with premodern societies: premodern miss the forest for the trees and modem miss trees for the forest because of the growth of classification schemes (shapes and mammals).. and Flynn’s research found something happening to college students outsid three specialization
- Jeanette Wing: “computational thinking” part of a wave of professors trying to avoid just narrow details but exposing students to thinking and cross industry analysis
- Fermi problems; what authors professor called random test questions that required leveraging various estimates (how many piano tuners in NYC?)
- Not learning from experience but learning without experience
- Figlie in 16th century Venice: an orphanage that developed remarkable women musicians
- Charles Limb research putting jazz pianists into an MRI machine showed that their brains focused on focused attention, inhibitor and self censoring turn down — they stop criticizing themselves
- “Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer”
- In American education, “making-connections” problems for students are advised but these “conceptual” problems are commonly transformed into “procedural” ones by savvy students who berate the teacher into giving clear rules to follow
- Japanese instruction did best at retaining many conceptual questions using blackboard Writing (bansho)
- “If the teacher didn’t already turn the work into using procedures, well-meaning parents will. They aren’t comfortable with bewildered kids, and they want understanding to come quickly and easily. But for learning that is both durable, (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.”
- “Desirable difficulties:” one reason students don’t do well on standardized tests jz they do too well in class (ie answer many procedural questions); try “generation effect” of the Socratic method of generating many ideas whether they’re right or wrong
- Kornell training if monkeys to order pictures: “Training with hints did not produce any lasting learning”
- “One study separated Spanish-vocabulary learners into two groups – a group that learned the vocab, and then was tested on at the same day, and a second that learned the vocab, but was tested on it a month later. Eight years later, with no studying in the interim, the latter group pertain to 150% more.” “Spacing” is powerful for durable learning
- “Knowledge mirage”
- How to learn? Spacing, testing (practice tests) and using “making connections” questions all helped longterm but impaired short term
- Air Force Academy cadets progress study on calculus for “deep learning” (teacher with high student evaluation and performance on calculus I did not have students who succeeded later; students punished the teachers that benefited them the most longterm)
- Robert Bjork in 1994 (“desirable difficulties”): above all the most basic messages, the teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning.”
- “Over the past 40 years Americans have increasingly said in national surveys that current students are getting a worse education, and they did themselves, and they’ve been wrong”
- Kepler famously documented his use of analogy as he uncovered what became astrophysics
- Analogical thinking
- Drucker’s radiation problem
- Stanford international relations experiment with analogy between FDR or LBJ
- Kahneman and Tversky: avoid “inside-view” with analogical thinking
- Bent Flyvbjerg: 90% of major infrastructure projects worldwide go over budget (by avg 28%); project managers are too optimistic about their view. The more details we get the more we assume we are different than the average, so “outside view” analogical thinking encourages to compare across a “reference class” or many comparisons
- Ferdinand Dubin showed giving examples of distant analogies primes people to go wide
- Though this 2005 HBR piece argues metaphor limitations
- John Dewey (in his 1938 book Logic): “a problem well put is half-solved”
- “Match quality” is an economics term for how much person fits their job
- In late 1960s, Theodore Schultz argued higher education improved worker productivity but economics neglected the value of delaying career choices so people could sample and discover
- Ofer Malamud: did early or late specializes benefit? Natural experiment showed England and Wales college students forced to specialize early changed careers more often than Scots, who sampled more and though earned less early they caught up
- “Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself”
- Angela Duckworth’s contested 2016 book Grit: work ethic and knowing what you want
- Frances Hesselbein Girl Scouts
- Dark Horse Project: Ogas and others confirm that most people have circuitous career paths but think it’s an analmoly. It’s not. 50% of late baby boomers (born 1957-1964) has at least 11 jobs between ages 18-50
- “Each dark horse had a novel journey but a common strategy.”
- Dan Gilbert “end of history illusion,” we know we changed a lot in the past but in the future we won’t change as much
- “The most momentous personality changes occur between age 18 and ones late 20s, so specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a person who does not yet exist. It could work, but it makes for worse odds.”
- Ogas and Rose: if/then “context principle” of personality traits
- “Instead of asking if someone is gritty ask when they are”
- Not plan and implement life strategy but the test and learn
- InnoCentive
- Yokoi and Nintendo: “lateral thinking with withered technology”
- Freeman Dyson: visionary birds and focused frogs “ it is stupid to claim the birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or the frogs are better than birds because they see deeper… we need birds and frogs working together to explore it.”
- ((My point: book drifts a lot: from generalists to cross-disciplinary visionaries to creative education ; are there all actually generalists or just remarkable people? Put another way: do these people do this to become visionaries or are they visionaries so they do varied stuff?))
- Abbie Griffin in Serial Innovators book advise HR people that they will overlook true innovators because they are “pi-shaped people” who dive in and out of different specialities.
- Taylor and Greve: best predictor of better comic books is having worked in various genres: “Superman or Fantastic Four? “ “individuals add capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are”
- Paul ehlrich and Simon’s famous bet and battle: both ignored the other
- Tetlock Superforecasting: the more expertise someone gets the worst they can be at predicting but more confident
- Danish proverb: “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”
- Hedgehog vs integrator foxes
- Kahan: science curious more helpful than science knowledge
- Darwin was devout until his mentor and priest John Stevens Henslow suggested he read (cautiously) Principles of Geology by Lyell, which advocated for slow geological change.
- Einstein was a hedgehog, spending the last 30 years of his career on a single issue
- Carter Racing case study for Challenger is a business school classic
- NASA: in God, we trust, all others, bring data but in Chalenget hearing Richard Feynman said “ when you don’t have any data, you have to use a reason”
- Reason without data was rejected in famed pre Challenger launch call; photo evidence of “blow-by” release at an o-ring at 53-degrees made some want to avoid the cold temperature but they were overruled without heavy data. “ in the face of an unfamiliar challenge, NASA managers failed to drop their familiar tools.”
- Karl Weick noticed wilderness firefighters wouldn’t always drop their heavy tools and backpacks when fleeing a fire: dropping the tool would mean they’d lost control. Firefighter Paul Gleason said he doesn’t make decisions he does sense making, which can change. Wieck calls this “hunches held lightly”
- “Congruence” is well liked but doesn’t improve performance: effective organizations have range m, giving some ambiguity
- Incongruence: paper “balancing the risks of mindless conformity and reckless deviation”
- “Deliberate amateur”
- Max Delbruck: “the principle of limited sloppiness”
- Casadevall at Hopkins: r3 initiative: rigor, responsibility, reproducibility (journalism comparisons?)
- Northwestern/Stanford “thriving ecosystems had porous boundaries between teams” across industries
- Brian Uzzi import/export model of innovation: bring in new ideas; “hit” academic papers had many unusual references; those that have novel references often were in less prestigious journals and ignored Initally but over represented among those that are highly referenced
- Author remembers in 2006 that a U.S. senate subcommittee hearing on science and space that Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson dismissed research proposals that weren’t directly related to new commercial technology (though Louis Pasteur and Einstein’s biggest discoveries came from unusual places)
- Dean Keith Simonton: eminent creators produced a lot including many duds, occasionally a supernova success
- Alpha Bingham InnoCentive: “breakthrough and fallacy look a lot like initially”
