02 July 2021
Range
Range
Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World
David Epstein

Highlights

[L]earning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind. [11]
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Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action. [12]
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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. [20]
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[T]he bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly. [29]
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In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack. [34]
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[P]remodern people miss the forest for the trees; modern people miss the trees for the forest. [44]
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The more they had moved toward modernity, the more powerful their abstract thinking, and the less they had to rely on their concrete experience of the world as a reference point. [44]
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Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.
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[A] city dweller traveling through the desert will be completely dependent on a nomad to keep him alive. So long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius. [Originally by Ibn Khaldun][47]
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The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one. [53]
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The sampling period is not incidental to the development of great performers—something to be excised in the interest of a head start—it is integral. [65]
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Charles Limb, a musician, hearing specialist, and auditory surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, designed an iron-free keyboard so that jazz musicians could improvise while inside an MRI scanner. Limb saw that brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self-censoring turned down when the musicians were creating. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself,” he told National Geographic. While improvising, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them.” [75]
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“It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.” [75-76]
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[B]readth 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. [76-77]
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“I could show somebody in two minutes what would take them years of screwing around on the fingerboard like I did to find it. You don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong. You don’t have that in your head. You’re just trying to find a solution to problems, and after fifty lifetimes, it starts to come together for you. It’s slow, but at the same time, there’s something to learning that way.” — Jack Cecchini [77]
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“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,” Richland told me. Soliciting hints toward a solution is both clever and expedient. The problem is that when it comes to learning concepts that can be broadly wielded, expedience can backfire. [83]
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[T]raining with hints did not produce any lasting learning. [87]
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Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is. [89]
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School has not gotten worse. The goals of education have just become loftier. [92]
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Knowledge increasingly needs not merely to be durable, but also flexible — both sticky and capable of broad application. [94]
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The feeling of learning, it turns out, is based on before-your-eyes progress, while deep learning is not. [95]
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Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures. In that way, they are just about the precise opposite of experts who develop in kind learning environments, like chess masters, who rely heavily on intuition. Kind learning environment experts choose a strategy and then evaluate; experts in less repetitive environments evaluate and then choose. [96]
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It is a truism to say that Kepler thought outside the box. But what he really did, whenever he was stuck, was to think entirely outside the domain. He left a brightly lit trail of his favorite tools for doing that, the ones that allowed him to cast outside eyes upon wisdom his peers simply accepted. “I especially love analogies,” he wrote, “my most faithful masters, acquainted with all the secrets of nature... One should make great use of them.” [102]
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“In my opinion,” Gentner told me, “our ability to think relationally is one of the reasons we’re running the planet. Relations are really hard for other species.” Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and puts it in a new light, and allows humans to reason through problems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts. It also allows us to understand that which we cannot see at all.” [103]
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In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous. [107]
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Our natural inclination to take the inside view can be defeated by following analogies to the “outside view.” The outside view probes for deep structural similarities to the current problem in different ones. The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the expert, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies. It requires a mindset switch from narrow to broad. [108-109]
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Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes. [110]
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When all the members of the laboratory have the same knowledge at their disposal, then when a problem arises, a group of similar minded individuals will not provide more information to make analogies than a single individual. [119]
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Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit. [130]
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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. They have less experience than older workers, and so the first avenues they should try are those with high risk and reward, and that have high informational value. [136]
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Persevering through difficulty is a competitive advantage for any traveler of a long road, but he suggested that knowing when to quit is such a big strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor, should enumerate conditions under which they should quit. The important trick, he said, is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available. [136]
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“Yes, striving to accomplish a single overarching goal every day means you have grit, determination and resilience. But the ability to pull yourself together mentally and physically in competition is different from the new challenges that await you. So after you retire, travel, write a poem, try to start your own business, stay out a little too late, devote time to something that doesn’t have a clear end goal.” In the wider world of work, finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way. [143]
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She explained that she just did whatever seemed like it would teach her something and allow her to be of service at each moment, and somehow that added up to training. [152]
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She had no long-term plan, only a plan to do what was interesting or needed at the moment. “I never envisioned” is her most popular preamble. [153]
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Dark horses were on the hunt for match quality. “They never look around and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to fall behind, these people started earlier and have more than me at a younger age,’” Ogas told me. “They focused on, ‘Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.’” [154]
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Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same. [156]
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Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts. Each “story of me” continues to evolve. [160]
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[W]e learn who we are only by living, and not before. [161]
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"I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward." (Paul Graham) [164]
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"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." (Pedro Domingos) [179]
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Academic departments no longer merely fracture naturally into subspecialties, they elevate narrowness as an ideal. [181]
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The more information specialists create, the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information—undiscovered public knowledge, as Don Swanson called it. The larger and more easily accessible the library of human knowledge, the more chances for inquisitive patrons to make connections at the cutting edge. [189]
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"Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers... Looking at me, from the engineer’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Look at this idiot,’ but once you’ve got a couple hit products under your belt, this word ‘idiot’ seems to slip away somewhere." (Gunpei Yokoi) [199]
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“Once a young person starts saying things like, ‘Well, it’s not really my place to say...’ then it’s all over.” (Gunpei Yokoi) [199]
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"It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper." The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. "We need birds and frogs working together to explore it." (Freeman Dyson) [200-201]
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"If they say, ‘It’s a great idea, go for it, makes sense,’ what is the chance you’re the first person to come up with it? Precisely zero." (Andy Ouderkirk, inventor at 3M) [202]
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"As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important." (Andy Ouderkirk, inventor at 3M) [207]
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Individual creators started out with lower innovativeness than teams—they were less likely to produce a smash hit—but as their experience broadened they actually surpassed teams: an individual creator who had worked in four or more genres was more innovative than a team whose members had collective experience across the same number of genres. Taylor and Greve suggested that “individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.” [210]
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Ideally, intellectual sparring partners “hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better”. [218]
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Often, if you're too much of an insider, it's hard to get good perspective. [225]
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Armed with a web browser, they don’t start searching for why they are probably wrong. It is not that we are unable to come up with contrary ideas, it is just that our strong instinct is not to. [227]
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Just as Tetlock says of the best forecasters, it is not what they think, but how they think. The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness. They are also extremely curious, and don’t merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them. “Depth can be inadequate without breadth,” wrote Jonathan Baron, the psychologist who developed measurements of active open-mindedness. [228]
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Starting with the details—the inside view—is dangerous. Hedgehog experts have more than enough knowledge about the minutiae of an issue in their specialty to do just what Dan Kahan suggested: cherry-pick details that fit their all-encompassing theories. Their deep knowledge works against them. Skillful forecasters depart from the problem at hand to consider completely unrelated events with structural commonalities rather than relying on intuition based on personal experience or a single area of expertise. [230]
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I would argue we don’t do a good job of saying, "Is this the data that we want to make the decision we need to make?" [241]
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"The experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice—whatever it happened to be—with forces that pushed in the opposite direction. If managers were used to process conformity, encouraging individualism helped them to employ “ambidextrous thought,” and learn what worked in each situation. If they were used to improvising, encouraging a sense of loyalty and cohesion did the job. The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction." [257]
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"Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn't be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions." (Rex Geveden, NASA's Gravity Probe B program manager) [262]
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“I try to teach people, ‘Don’t end up a clone of your thesis adviser,’” he told me. “Take your skills to a place that’s not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.” (Oliver Smithies) [271]
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“Do we really need to go through courses with very specialized knowledge that often provides a huge amount of stuff that is very detailed, very specialized, very arcane, and will be totally forgotten in a couple of weeks? Especially now, when all the information is on your phone. You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.” (Arturo Casadevall) [277]
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[W]ork that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. [282]
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“I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.” (Arturo Casadevall) [282]
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“When I went to medical school, I was taught that there were no human diseases caused by retroviruses, that retroviruses were a curiosity that occurred in some animal tumors. In 1981, a new disease emerges that nobody knows anything about. In 1984, it’s found to be a retrovirus, HIV. In 1987, you have the first therapy. In 1996, you have such effective therapy that people don’t have to die of it anymore. How did that happen? Was it because companies all of a sudden rushed to make drugs? No. If you really look back and analyze it, before that time society had spent some of its very hard-earned money to study a curiosity called retroviruses. Just a curiosity in animals. So by the time HIV was found to be a retrovirus, you already knew that if you interfered with the protease [a type of enzyme] that you could deactivate it. So when HIV arrived, society had right off the shelf a huge amount of knowledge from investments made in a curiosity that at the time had no use. It may very well be that if you were to take all the research funding in the country and you put it in Alzheimer’s disease, you would never get to the solution. But the answer to Alzheimer’s disease may come from a misfolding protein in a cucumber. But how are you going to write a grant on a cucumber? And who are you going to send it to? If somebody gets interested in a folding protein in a cucumber and it's a good scientific question, leave them alone. Let them torture the cucumber.” (Arturo Casadevall) [283-284]
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Going where no one has is a wicked problem. There is no well-defined formula or perfect system of feedback to follow. [289]
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Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. [290]