Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Text in black are quotes; text in green are my notes. I sometimes write in Spanish.

• Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area. #

• I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. #

  • Las personas con más experiencia puede ser las que más mente cerrada tienen. Como creen saber demasiado, dejan de intentar aprender de los demás.
  • Expertos con mucha experiencia y seguridad pueden ser peligrosos. Al contrario, alguien nuevo está siempre abierto y disponible para aprender más, sabiendo que probablemente esté equivocado en su pensamiento.
  • El punto máximo entonces es, tener mucha experiencia, pero seguir con mente abierta para detectar errores y aprender de ellos.

• I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning 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. #

• Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action. #

• 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. #

• 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. #

• In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. #

• Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses. #

• If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition. #

• Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly. #

• “AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds. #

• “cognitive entrenchment.” His suggestions for avoiding it are about the polar opposite of the strict version of the ten-thousand-hours school of thought: vary challenges within a domain drastically, and, as a fellow researcher put it, insist on “having one foot outside your world.” #

• Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack. #

• “No tool is omnicompetent.” #

• 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. #

• for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem. #

• “hypercorrection effect.” The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.* #

  • Entre más seguro estés de una respuesta incorrecta, más aprenderás cuando descubras que era incorrecta. Es por eso que es buena idea tomar exámenes de práctica antes de siquiera empezar a estudiar.

• The study conclusion was simple: “training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.” #

• For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run. #

• 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. #

• “Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.” #

• approach called varied or mixed practice, or, to researchers, “interleaving.” #

• Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem. #

• “The slowest growth,” the researchers wrote, occurs “for the most complex skills.” #

• When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations, it is called “far transfer.” #

• In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous. #

• successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. #

• As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.” #

• “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,” Dunbar concluded. #

• “Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are—their abilities and proclivities. #

• “The benefits to increased match quality . . . outweigh the greater loss in skills.” #

• Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit. #

• If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly. #

  • Imagina que te presentan una lista de 10 personas. Debes elegir solo a una, y será con quien pases el resto de tu vida. Puedes cambiar de decisión, pero es muy costoso. Y entre más tiempo pase entre tu decisión y el cambio, más costoso será. Qué complicado, ¿verdad? Pero es justo así como tenemos que elegir nuestras carreras. Y una vez que entramos, es muy difícil y costoso cambiarnos. Difícil para la mayoría porque entra la parte del ego, ¿cómo me voy a cambiar y demostrar a los demás que hice una mala elección, o que no puedo con esta carrera?

• “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone. #

• Van Gogh was an example of match quality optimization, Robert Miller’s multi-armed bandit process come to life. He tested options with maniacal intensity and got the maximum information signal about his fit as quickly as possible, and then moved to something else and repeated, until he had zigzagged his way to a place no one else had ever been, and where he alone excelled. #

• “I did not intend to become a leader, I just learned by doing what was needed at the time.” #

• “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” She repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience. #

  • Asegúrate de siempre traer contigo una canasta grande, pues nunca sabes cuando se te puede ofrecer agarrar algo de una nueva experiencia. Cuando estés aprendiendo, platicando, discutiendo, investigando, agrega algo nuevo a tu canasta. Saca ese nuevo aprendizaje de tu canasta y comparte, aplica, escribe, aprende más. Deja plasmado eso que tomaste en la canasta, y haz espacio para más cosas.

• “Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with getting a law or medical degree or PhD. But it’s actually riskier to make that commitment before you know how it fits you. And don’t consider the path fixed. People realize things about themselves halfway through medical school.” Charles Darwin, for example. #

• Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same. #

• Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.” #

  • Creo que a la mayoría nos apasiona algo, pero es muy común que ese algo no sea en lo que uno trabaja, o lo que uno hace la mayor parte del tiempo. Por eso es común ver gente desmotivada en su trabajo o en su vida en general. Y quizá no sea porque esa persona no es "apasionada" en general, sino porque no está en el ambiente que de verdad lo apasiona. Si mueves a esa persona al ambiente adecuado, probablemente se convierta en otra persona totalmente diferente. Llena de pasión.

• “We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. #

• “outside-in” thinking: finding solutions in experiences far outside of focused training for the problem itself. #

• “I visualized the problem as drinking a slushy,” he said. “You end up having to whip around the straw to stir it up. How could you make it so you don’t have to work so hard to get that slushy out?” #

• the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available. #

• “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.” #

• But there is a well-documented tendency people have to consider only familiar uses for objects, an instinct known as functional fixedness. #

• Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. #

• “When information became more widely disseminated,” Ouderkirk told me, “it became a lot easier to be broader than a specialist, to start combining things in new ways.” #

• Taylor and Greve suggested that “individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.” #

• When the National Transportation Safety Board analyzed its database of major flight accidents, it found that 73 percent occurred on a flight crew’s first day working together. #

• Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The results can be disastrous. #

• ‘But in a classroom the teacher typically gives us material we’re supposed to have.’ But it’s often the case in group meetings where the person who made the PowerPoint slides puts data in front of you, and we often just use the data people put in front of us. 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?’” #

  • En la escuela casi siempre los problemas que nos presentan tienen toda la información necesaria para resolverlos. Pero en la vida real usualmente tienes que trabajar con poca información o información de baja calidad. Tienes que tomar decisiones con esa información y asumir los riesgos que pueda causar.
  • Hacen falta más de este tipo de problemas en la escuela. Me imagino uno examen en que un problema no se pueda resolver con la información del examen mismo. El alumno tiene que preguntar al profesor, o simplemente explicar por qué es imposible resolverlo con tan poca información. Incluso el profesor podría promover el factor riesgo; tomar una decisión entendiendo los riesgos de la misma.

• In the face of an unfamiliar challenge, NASA managers failed to drop their familiar tools. #

• “When you don’t have any data,” Feynman said, “you have to use reason.” #

• “Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn’t be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions. I just had a feeling all along that there was something wrong with the culture. We didn’t have a healthy tension in the system.” #

• “You almost couldn’t go into a meeting without someone saying, ‘Let’s take that offline,’” he recalled, just as Morton Thiokol had done for the infamous offline caucus. #

• “The chain of communication has to be informal,” he told me, “completely different from the chain of command.” #

• “I told them I expect disagreement with my decisions at the time we’re trying to make decisions, and that’s a sign of organizational health,” he told me. “After the decisions are made, we want compliance and support, but we have permission to fight a little bit about those things in a professional way.” #

• The interface between specialties, and between creators with disparate backgrounds, has been studied, and it is worth defending. #

• Human creativity, he said, is basically an “import/export business of ideas.” #

• It echoes Oliver Smithies’s advice to bring new skills to an old problem, or a new problem to old skills. #

• To recap: work 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. #

• “Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,” Bush wrote, “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” #

• “What’s gone totally is that time to talk and synthesize. People grab lunch and bring it into their offices. They feel lunch is inefficient, but often that’s the best time to bounce ideas and make connections.” #

• 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. #

• As psychologist Howard Gruber wrote, “Ideas are not really lost, they are reactivated when useful.” #