Range

2020-03-17

“Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein

My Summary

Broad experiences across domains would be super beneficial to anyone, but especially to humanity, whose next set of hard, intractable problems will most likely be solved by those who have “range”.

One of my favorite quotes, “…we often expect the hyper specialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked [intractable, broad] problems, [but] the results can be disastrous. [The solution are T-shaped people — those with deep (in at least 1 area) and wide knowledge].”

Foreword

• Cultivating range goes against today’s norms, but it has been proven time and again to be an effective way to learn and grow
• Specialization, a hammer, can turn everything into a nail, and without a breadth of understanding, limit your ability to move forward and find creative solutions

The Cult of a Head Start

• “Kind” learning environments (chess, golf, fire fighting) have consistent feedback loops and predictable patterns that support the experience yields expertise model (10,000 hours of something); but, as mentioned in “Thinking in Bets” (Annie Duke), these kinds of environments don’t correlate strongly to real-life which has much more randomness, hidden information, and luck
• “Wicked” learning environments have more parallels with poker — where years of experience can still yield you nothing if you make the wrong bet (despite all your training)
• Chunking is what allows the human brain to process lots of information quickly — it’s like pattern recognition of even memory palaces; however, chunking is only possible after lots of repetition
• Cognitive entrenchment, which is formed from years or singular focus and practice (similar to savants specialize knowledge), performs poorly when adaptations or changes to the narrow focus happen
• This seemed like a strong message: savants have never really contributed anything meaningful to their field
• Some of the world’s greatest discovery, like the combining of 0’s and 1’s to define true and false statements being merged with telephony and eventually computing, happened because of people with range (combining of a breadth of understanding)

How the Wicked World was Made

• People living in the pre modern world, when tested about abstract thinking, struggled; they classified everything in terms of tangible, real world experiences that they had
• Modern work requires abstraction and knowledge transfer from domain to domain
• You should be thought to think before being thought what to think about
• 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
• Fermi estimation: “how many piano tuners are there in New York City?”

When Less of the Same is More

• Sampling periods at a young age have been shown to greatly increase and assist ones ability to grow and become skillful
• Those growing up learning to play an array of instruments were more successful than those being trained by the tiger mom’s early start, single instrument technique
• Creativity is stifled by rigid rules that preempt action — the recommended way, in this book, is to let the learner wander and make mistakes and you can critique or comment afterward, if necessary

Learning Fast and Slow

• As humans, we often try to take broad conceptual concepts and turn them into something simple and procedural as a cost savings function for our brains; by doing this we are limiting our thinking and growth — we sell ourselves short with a simple, repetitive (computer-like) thinking
• Parents will say “let me teach the easier way, the shortcut” and that fast and easy solution is less useful than the broadly applied conceptual understanding; you want desirable difficulty, the shortcuts subvert real learning
• The (learning) struggle is real and very useful
• Teachers who pass their students along easily, may show benefit in the short term (on test scores and student approval), but hurt the students in the long wrong because they avoided (indirectly or directly) the discomfort and difficulty that produces better learning
• Interleaved practice, instead of block practice (1 thing at a time, like a block schedule), has been shown to better improve inductive reasoning and “range” — however you certainly won’t feel that way, it is one of those “desired difficulties”
• Deep learning is slow, it requires failure and is uncomfortable and counterintuitive

Thinking Outside if Experience

• Analogies that cross across domains can be very useful for conceptual problem solving
• Expert thinking is at play when you are able to see trends across domains versus immediately classifying problems or observations within some obvious domain; for example, classifying “melting ice caps” and “drug addictions” as “positive feedback loops” is relating two very different domains to a higher level analogy; on the other hand, relating “economic bubbles” and “federal reserve rate changes” as “economic phenomena” simply stays in one domain and doesn’t consider any sort of higher level analogy or way or classification

The Trouble with Too Much Grit

• Grit can be a quality which does create greatness, but knowing when to quit because something is not a good fit (versus you giving up because your being lazy, for example) may arguably be better
• The army learned the hard way that persistence in the face of persistence (for the hell of it) can get in the way from the extremely useful broad learning that drives today’s economy — this is why they lost some of their best cadets from West Point — those cadets realized they were talented and their talents could be useful across many broad things
• Don’t let the sunk cost bias of a career choice and academic choice keep you from the range that might unlock some life changing learnings and discovery
• The idea that a change of interest is a bad quality or that you should stick with something for the sake of proving perseverance is a one-size fits all strategy that can inhibit range

Flirting with Your Possible Selves

• Our personalities and preferences are always changing, and we can be especially different in our behavior depending on context — this should be an encouragement to not pigeonhole yourself
• Keep doing and doing and trying, then calibrate
• In other words, try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, and that is how you develop range

The Outsider Advantage

• Intractable problems are often better solved by solutions that come from outside the problem domain
• When you enter a problem as an outsider, in terms of your experience, you are able to see and connect things that those with “specialized blinders” cannot see

Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology

• Nintendo, prior to their raging success of games, was a struggling company trying to become profitable
• One of their early maintenance workers (for their card machines) was a true tinker and started creating “things” like a grabber tool which sold as a game and helped settle a portion of the company’s debt
• He was promoted and took his tinkering approach to thinking up the original game and watch devices by using existing, well-understood technologies (calculators and LCD screens) in new ways
• The game and watch went on to be a huge success and Nintendo continued to benefit from his “lateral thinking” (of existing technologies) combined with the vertical thinking of some brilliant engineers
• The virtue of lateral thinkers (those with range) and vertical thinkers (those with expertise) is similar to the A-hiring method’s promotion of T-shaped candidates; we need birds (that scan the sky bringing together disconnected things) and frogs (that get deep in the mud to understand specific topics)
• How many uses can you find for a brick? You’d probably start with the straight forward uses that fall into its known domain, but that lateral thinking really starts when you start thinking of it as a paper weight or dumbbell or other zany use
• A comic book study concluded that those who had the best chance at producing a breakthrough work were those authors or teams that had the widest breadth of genres
• The problem: we often expect the hyper specialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked [intractable, broad] problems, the results can be disastrous

Fooled by Expertise

• The deeper someone’s expertises the more likely they are to filter out opposing ideas in order to validate or only marginally change theirs
• The best judges or outcome predictors are those who are the best learners — that is, those who are quick to change their opinions based on new evidence

Learning to Drop Your Familiar Tools

• Don’t accept data blindly, especially small sets, often it is skewed by the presenter and/or may be missing additional data points
• Also, don’t hold data at such a high regard that you fail to acknowledge the wickedness (unpredictability, chance) of a problem — the best predictions aren’t always right
• Experienced groups become rigid under pressure (and unfamiliar situations) and fall back to familiar patterns and tools when often they should be doing the opposite — sometimes you must unlearn something before you can learn something new that could solve for the unfamiliarity
• Encouraged incongruence (instead of a linear chain of command) can be a very good thing; it increases information sharing
• A combination of hierarchy and individualism is a good way to fight against your comfortable tools
• There is no master key

Deliberate Amateurs

• Be careful not to be too careful
• Friday night and Saturday morning experiments were you just try things — don’t worry about measuring and being precise, just experiment
• Read something outside of your field everyday

Conclusion

• Start planning your projects!
• Nothing wrong with specialization, but it’s time to get broad!