Range

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (David Epstein)

• And 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.
• If the amount of early, specialized practice in a narrow area were the key to innovative performance, savants would dominate every domain they touched, and child prodigies would always go on to adult eminence. As psychologist Ellen Winner, one of the foremost authorities on gifted children, noted, no savant has ever been known to become a “Big-C creator,” who changed their field.
• When a group of Estonian researchers used national test scores to compare word understandings of schoolkids in the 1930s to those in 2006, they saw that improvement came very specifically on the most abstract words. The more abstract the word, the bigger the improvement. The kids barely bested their grandparents on words for directly observable objects or phenomena (“hen,” “eating,” “illness”), but they improved massively on imperceptible concepts (“law,” “pledge,” “citizen”).
• Their education is too narrow.” He does not mean this in the simple sense that every computer science major needs an art history class, but rather that everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.
• The study he conducted at the state university convinced him that college departments rush to develop students in a narrow specialty area, while failing to sharpen the tools of thinking that can serve them in every area. This must change, he argues, if students are to capitalize on their unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about.
• Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major—a trend that includes math and science majors—after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline.
• 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.
• 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.
• A study of music students aged eight to eighteen and ranging in skill from rank novices to students in a highly selective music school found that when they began training there was no difference in the amount of practice undertaken between any of the groups of players, from the least to the most accomplished. The students who would go on to be most successful only started practicing much more once they identified an instrument they wanted to focus on, whether because they were better at it or just liked it more. The instrument, it appeared, was driving the practitioner, rather than the reverse.
• psychologist Adam Grant noted that creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart. He pointed to a study that found an average of six household rules for typical children, compared to one in households with extremely creative children. The parents with creative children made their opinions known after their kids did something they didn’t like, they just did not proscribe it beforehand. Their households were low on prior restraint.
• the students have figured out how to get the right answers on their worksheets: shrewdly interrogating their teacher. She mistakes the multiple-choice game they are mastering for productive exploration.
• 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.
• 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. Teachers in every country fell into the same trap at times, but in the higher-performing countries plenty of making-connections problems remained that way as the class struggled to figure them out. In Japan, a little more than half of all problems were making-connections problems, and half of those stayed that way through the solving. An entire class period could be just one problem with many parts. When a student offered an idea for how to approach a problem, rather than engaging in multiple choice, the teacher had them come to the board and put a magnet with their name on it next to the idea. By the end of class, one problem on a blackboard the size of an entire wall served as a captain’s log of the class’s collective intellectual voyage, dead ends and all.
• If the teacher didn’t already turn the work into using-procedures practice, 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.
• One of those desirable difficulties is known as the “generation effect.” Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning.
• The study conclusion was simple: “training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.” Training without hints is slow and error-ridden. It is, essentially, what we normally think of as testing, except for the purpose of learning rather than evaluation—when “test” becomes a dreaded four-letter word.
• 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. In one of Kornell’s experiments, participants were made to learn pairs of words and later tested on recall. At test time, they did the best with pairs that they learned via practice quizzes, even if they had gotten the answers on those quizzes wrong. Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful. The struggle is real, and really useful. “Like life,” Kornell and team wrote, “retrieval is all about the journey.”
• Space between practice sessions creates the hardness that enhances learning. One study separated Spanish vocabulary learners into two groups—a group that learned the vocab and then was tested on it 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 retained 250 percent more. For a given amount of Spanish study, spacing made learning more productive by making it easy to make it hard.
• 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. Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.
• Here is the bright side: over the past forty years, Americans have increasingly said in national surveys that current students are getting a worse education than they themselves did, and they have been wrong. Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, “the nation’s report card,” have risen steadily since the 1970s. Unquestionably, students today have mastery of basic skills that is superior to students of the past. School has not gotten worse. The goals of education have just become loftier.
• Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes. For the venture capitalists, they knew more details about their own project, and judged that it would be an extreme success, until they were forced to consider other projects with broad conceptual similarities.
• In one of the most cited studies of expert problem solving ever conducted, an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: 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.”
• Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.
• “First act and then think.” Ibarra marshaled social psychology to argue persuasively that we are each made up of numerous possibilities. As she put it, “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.
• monozukuri—literally, “thing making.” He was a tinkerer.
• He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.”
• The same goes for airline crews. Teams that have experience working together become exceedingly efficient at delegating all of the well-understood tasks required to ensure a smooth flight. 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. Like surgeries and putts, the best flight is one in which everything goes according to routines long understood and optimized by everyone involved, with no surprises.
• University of Utah professor Abbie Griffin has made it her work to study modern Thomas Edisons—“serial innovators,” she and two colleagues termed them. Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now: “high tolerance for ambiguity”; “systems thinkers”; “additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains”; “repurposing what is already available”; “adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process”; “ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways”; “synthesizing information from many different sources”; “they appear to flit among ideas”; “broad range of interests”; “they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests”; “need to learn significantly across multiple domains”; “Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.”
• Viewing every world event through their preferred keyhole made it easy to fashion compelling stories about anything that occurred, and to tell the stories with adamant authority. In other words, they make great TV.
• 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. Asked a difficult question—for example, “Would providing more money for public schools significantly improve the quality of teaching and learning?”—people naturally come up with a deluge of “myside” ideas. 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.
• She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization’s toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable.
• 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.
• the instructor asked the class, rhetorically, for the single most important principle in decision making. His answer: to get consensus. “And I said, ‘I don’t think the people who launched the space shuttle Challenger agree with that point,’” Geveden told me. “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.” NASA still had its hallowed process, and Geveden saw everywhere a collective culture that nudged conflict into darkened corners.
• An enthusiastic, even childish, playful streak is a recurring theme in research on creative thinkers.
• In professional networks that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over. Efficient and comfortable, perhaps, but apparently not a creative engine.
• 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.
• As InnoCentive founder Alph Bingham told me, “breakthrough and fallacy look a lot alike initially.”