"Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World"

[fiefoe]

This book by David J. Epstein certainly ranges about, and the subtitle covers only a small part of the topics inside. The chapters about effective learning strategies were probably the most applicable.

• The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.
• Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.
• The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments...In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.
• The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson.
• Chunking helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain-specific memory, from musicians playing long pieces by heart to quarterbacks recognizing patterns of players in a split second and making a decision to throw. The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear.
• As one oncologist put it, “The difference between winning at Jeopardy! and curing all cancer is that we know the answer to Jeopardy! questions.” With cancer, we’re still working on posing the right questions in the first place.
• Marcus gave me this analogy for the current limits of expert machines: “AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.
• 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.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.
• Some of the changes wrought by modernity and collective culture seem almost magical. Luria found that most remote villagers were not subject to the same optical illusions as citizens of the industrialized world, like the Ebbinghaus illusion. Which middle circle below looks bigger?
• premodern people are not as drawn to the holistic context—the relationship of the various circles to one another—so their perception is not changed by the presence of extra circles. To use a common metaphor, premodern people miss the forest for the trees; modern people miss the trees for the forest.
• Econ majors did the best overall. Economics is a broad field by nature, and econ professors have been shown to apply the reasoning principles they’ve learned to problems outside their area.
• Vivaldi’s creativity was facilitated by a particular group of musicians who could learn new music quickly on a staggering array of instruments. They drew emperors, kings, princes, cardinals, and countesses from across Europe to be regaled by the most innovative music of the time. They were the all-female cast known as the figlie del coro, literally, “daughters of the choir.” Leisure activities like horseback riding and field sports were scarce in the floating city, so music bore the full weight of entertainment for its citizens... The best figlie became Europe-wide celebrities, like Anna Maria della Pietà.
• The exceptional students developed more like the figlie del coro. “The modest investment in a third instrument paid off handsomely for the exceptional children,”
• He was eighteen when a candle in his wagon ignited a batch of celluloid flowers that his wife, Bella, had fashioned for a funeral. The wagon exploded into an inferno. Django was burned over half his body and ended up bedridden for a year and a half. For the rest of his life the pinkie and ring finger of his left hand, his fret hand, were dangling flesh, useless on the strings. Django was used to improvising. Like Pelegrina of the figlie del coro when she lost her teeth, he pivoted. He taught himself how to play chords with a thumb and two fingers. His left hand had to sprint up and down the neck of his guitar, the index and middle finger flitting waterbug-like over the strings. He reemerged with a new way of handling the instrument, and his creativity erupted.
• “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”
• In totality, the picture is in line with a classic research finding that is not specific to music: breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.
• when the students were playing multiple choice with the teacher, “what they’re actually doing is seeking rules.” They were trying to turn a conceptual problem they didn’t understand into a procedural one they could just execute. “We’re very good, humans are, at trying to do the least amount of work that we have to in order to accomplish a task,”
• In the United States, about one-fifth of questions posed to students began as making-connections problems. But by the time the students were done soliciting hints from the teacher and solving the problems, a grand total of zero percent remained making-connections problems. Making-connections problems did not survive the teacher-student interactions.
• Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning.
• Used for learning, testing, including self-testing, is a very desirable difficulty. Even testing prior to studying works, at the point when wrong answers are assured.
• Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful. The struggle is real, and really useful.
• It is what it sounds like—leaving time between practice sessions for the same material. You might call it deliberate not-practicing between bouts of deliberate practice.
• Space between practice sessions creates the hardness that enhances learning.
• If you are doing too well when you test yourself, the simple antidote is to wait longer before practicing the same material again, so that the test will be more difficult when you do.
• to identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list. All three impair performance in the short term.
• The economists suggested that the professors who caused short-term struggle but long-term gains were facilitating “deep learning” by making connections. They “broaden the curriculum and produce students with a deeper understanding of the material.”
• For knowledge to be flexible, it should be learned under varied conditions, an approach called varied or mixed practice, or, to researchers, “interleaving.” Interleaving has been shown to improve inductive reasoning. When presented with different examples mixed together, students learn to create abstract generalizations that allow them to apply what they learned to material they have never encountered before.
• The “desirable difficulty” coiner himself, Robert Bjork, once commented on Shaquille O’Neal’s perpetual free-throw woes to say that instead of continuing to practice from the free-throw line, O’Neal should practice from a foot in front of and behind it to learn the motor modulation he needed.
• Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem. That happens to be a hallmark of expert problem solving.
• But smells and heat are also detectable everywhere along their path, whereas the sun’s moving soul, Kepler wrote, is “poured out throughout the whole world, and yet does not exist anywhere but where there is something movable.” Was there any proof that such a thing could exist? ... Light “makes its nest in the sun,” Kepler wrote, and yet appears not to exist between its source and an object it lights up. If light can do it, so could some other physical entity.
• Kepler’s “moving power” was a precursor to gravity, an astounding mental leap because it came before science embraced the notion of physical forces that act throughout the universe.
• He needed a new analogy. Kepler read a newly published description of magnetism, and thought maybe the planets were like magnets, with poles at either end. He realized that each planet moved more slowly when it was farther in its orbit from the sun, so perhaps the planets and the sun were attracting and repelling one another depending on which poles were nearby.
• Boatmen in a whirling river can steer their boats perpendicular to the current, so maybe planets could steer in the sun’s current, Kepler surmised. A circular current could explain why all the planets move in the same direction, and then each planet steered through the current to keep from getting sucked into the center, which made the orbits not quite circular. But then who was captaining each ship?
• Each time he got stuck, Kepler unleashed a fusillade of analogies. Not just light, heat, odor, currents and boatmen, but optics of lenses, balance scales, a broom, magnets, a magnetic broom, orators gazing at a crowd, and more. He interrogated each one ruthlessly, every time alighting on new questions. He eventually decided that celestial bodies pulled one another, and larger bodies had more pull. That led him to claim (correctly) that the moon influenced tides on Earth.
• There was no concept of gravity as a force, and he had no notion of momentum that keeps the planets in motion. Analogies were all he had. He became the first discoverer of causal physical laws for phenomena in the heavens, and he realized it. “Ye physicists,” he wrote when he published his laws of planetary motion, “prick your ears, for now we are going to invade your territory.” The title of his magnum opus: A New Astronomy Based upon Causes.
• It’s on you to excise the tumor and save the patient, but the rays are either too powerful or too weak. How can you solve this? ... The answer is that you (the doctor) could direct multiple low-intensity rays at the tumor from different directions, leaving healthy tissue intact, but converging at the tumor site with enough collective intensity to destroy it. Just like how the general divided up troops and directed them to converge at the fortress,
• With the difficult radiation problem, the most successful strategy employed multiple situations that were not at all alike on the surface, but held deep structural similarities.
• Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes.
• In another example, students rated a university a lot better if they were told about a few specific science departments that were ranked in the top ten nationally than if they were simply told that every science department at the university was ranked among the top ten.
• Like the venture capitalists, their intuition was to use too few analogies, and to rely on those that were the most superficially similar. “That’s usually exactly the wrong way to go about it regardless of what you’re using analogy for,” Lovallo told me.
• For a deep structure example, you might put economic bubbles and melting polar ice caps together as positive-feedback loops.
• There was a group of students, however, who were particularly good at finding common deep structures: students who had taken classes in a range of domains,
• successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. Less successful problem solvers are more like most students in the Ambiguous Sorting Task: they mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated features, like the domain context. For the best performers, they wrote, problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.” As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.”
• there is often no entrenched interest fighting on the side of range, or of knowledge that must be slowly acquired. All forces align to incentivize a head start and early, narrow specialization, even if that is a poor long-term strategy.
• Miller showed that the process for match quality is the same. An individual starts with no knowledge, tests various possible paths in a manner that provides information as quickly as possible, and increasingly refines decisions about where to allocate energy. The expression “young and foolish,” he wrote, describes the tendency of young adults to gravitate to risky jobs, but it is not foolish at all. It is ideal.
• Each dark horse had a novel journey, but a common strategy. “Short-term planning,”
• The most momentous personality changes occur between age eighteen and one’s late twenties, so specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a person who does not yet exist.
• Rather than expecting an ironclad a priori answer to “Who do I really want to become?,” their work indicated that it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested—“Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?” Be a flirt with your possible selves.* Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. “Test-and-learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan-and-implement.”
• “I have been able to avail myself, in my process, of a number of advantages, which the greater number of those persons have not possessed, who have devoted themselves to the art of preserving provisions.” He placed food inside of thick champagne bottles, which he sealed to make airtight and then placed in boiling water for hours. Appert’s innovation begat canned food.
• Kaggle is like InnoCentive but specifically for posting challenges in the area of machine learning.
• Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor and machine learning researcher, told me. “Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.”
• “The disparity between the total quantity of recorded knowledge . . . and the limited human capacity to assimilate it, is not only enormous now but grows unremittingly,”... In 1960, the U.S. National Library of Medicine used about one hundred unique pairs of terms to index articles. By 2010, it was nearing one hundred thousand. Swanson felt that if this big bang of public knowledge continued apace, subspecialties would be like galaxies, flying away from one another until each is invisible to every other.
• Swanson wanted to show that areas of specialist literature that never normally overlapped were rife with hidden interdisciplinary treasures waiting to be connected.
• Ouderkirk wondered if layering many thin plastic surfaces on top of one another, each with distinct optical qualities, could create a film that custom-reflected and -refracted various wavelengths of light in all directions... In less than the width of a human hair, the film comprises hundreds of polymer layers exquisitely tailored to reflect, refract, or let pass specific wavelengths of light. Unlike typical optical films, or even mirrors, multilayer optical film can reflect light nearly perfectly, and no matter the angle at which it arrives. It can even enhance the light as it bounces around the layers before returning to the viewer. Hence the glitter. Normal glitter doesn’t reflect light well in every direction, but the breakthrough glitter dazzled in all directions at once.
• Inside cell phones and laptops, multilayer optical film reflects and “recycles” light that would normally be absorbed as it travels from a backlight to the screen, thus transmitting more light to the viewer, and drastically reducing the power needed to keep screens bright.
• When a 2010 cave-in trapped thirty-three Chilean gold-and-copper miners a half mile underground for sixty-nine days, pocket-sized projectors with multilayer optical film were lowered through a 4.5-inch hole so that the men could receive messages from their families, safety instructions, and, naturally, a Chile-Ukraine soccer match.
• The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions. In the sweep of humanity, that is not normal.
• “Good judges are good belief updaters,” according to Tetlock. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. That is called, in a word: learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.
• “Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility,” Weick wrote. “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.” For him, firefighters were an example, and a metaphor for what he learned while studying normally reliable organizations that clung to trusty methods, even when they led to bewildering decisions.
• Richard Feynman was one of the members of the commission that investigated the Challenger, and in one hearing he admonished a NASA manager for repeating that Boisjoly’s data did not prove his point. “When you don’t have any data,” Feynman said, “you have to use reason.”
• A team or organization that is both reliable and flexible, according to Weick, is like a jazz group. There are fundamentals—scales and chords—that every member must overlearn, but those are just tools for sensemaking in a dynamic environment. There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge. Even the most sacred tools. Even the tools so taken for granted they become invisible. It is, of course, easier said than done. Especially when the tool is the very core of an organization’s culture.
• The system maintains you in a trench. You basically have all these parallel trenches, and it’s very rare that anybody stands up and actually looks at the next trench to see what they are doing, and often it’s related.”*
• “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.”