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July 4 - July 13, 2020
When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found that experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.
rather than relying on our own direct experiences, we make sense of reality through classification schemes, using layers of abstract concepts to understand how pieces of information relate to one another.
“Everyone is so busy doing research they don’t have time to stop and think about the way they’re doing it.”
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.
(There is a specific Japanese word to describe chalkboard writing that tracks conceptual connections over the course of collective problem solving: bansho.)
It can even help to be wildly wrong.
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.*
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.
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. 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
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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.
In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.
Focusing narrowly on many fine details specific to a problem at hand feels like the exact right thing to do, when it is often exactly wrong.
Netflix came to a similar conclusion for improving its recommendation algorithm. Decoding movies’ traits to figure out what you like was very complex and less accurate than simply analogizing you to many other customers with similar viewing histories. Instead of predicting what you might like, they examine who you are like, and the complexity is captured therein.
successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it.
Fix the organizational problems, and then worry about diversity. But she had decided that diversity was the primary organizational problem, so she took it further.
“I was unaware that I was being prepared,” she told me. “I did not intend to become a leader, I just learned by doing what was needed at the time.”
‘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.’”
we recognize that our desires and motivations sure changed a lot in the past (see: your old hairstyle), but believe they will not change much in the future. In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.
“I began painting pictures in Jan-1976—without any training. This is my painting. A person don’t know what he can do unless he tryes. Trying things is the answer to find your talent.”
“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 advice she received was to stick in an area she knew she didn’t like because she had already started, even though she wasn’t even that far in. It is the sunk cost fallacy embodied.
“T-people like myself can happily go to the I-people with questions to create the trunk for the T,”
“My inclination is to attack a problem by building a narrative. I figure out the fundamental questions to ask, and if you ask those questions of the people who actually do know their stuff, you are still exactly where you would be if you had all this other knowledge inherently. It’s mosaic building. I just keep putting those tiles together. Imagine me in a network where I didn’t have the ability to access all these people. That really wouldn’t work well.”
Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to innovate.
Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda painted the same idea elegantly: “I have a lot of apps open in my brain right now.”
There is a particular kind of thinker, one who becomes more entrenched in their single big idea about how the world works even in the face of contrary facts, whose predictions become worse, not better, as they amass information for their mental representation of the world. They are on television and in the news every day, making worse and worse predictions while claiming victory, and they have been rigorously studied.
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.
Foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect.
‘Is this the data that we want to make the decision we need to make?’”
“In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data”
In others words, he didn’t have the definitive intel he would have liked.
Under pressure, Weick explained, experienced pros regress to what they know best.
The Challenger managers made mistakes of conformity. They stuck to the usual tools in the face of an unusual challenge. Captain Lesmes dropped a sacred tool, and it worked.
“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.”
But among athletes who go on to become elite, broad early experience and delayed specialization is the norm.
Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise.
