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‘bleeding heart’
The Calculus I teachers who were the best at promoting student overachievement in their own class were somehow not great for their students in the long run.
Teachers who guided students to overachievement in their own course were rated highly, and undermined student performance in the long run.
both sticky and capable of broad application.
practice, whereas 80 percent performed in a manner that proved the opposite. The feeling of learning, it turns out, is based on before-your-eyes progress, while deep learning is not. “When your intuition says block,” Kornell told me, “you should probably interleave.”
Shaquille O’Neal’s
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 environ...
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Teaching them how to hunt for and connect contextual clues to understand what they read can be.
Analogies were all he had.
His fastidious documentation of every meandering path his brain blazed is one of the great records of a mind undergoing creative transformation. It is a truism to say that Kepler thought outside
But what he really did, whenever he was stuck, was to think entirely outside the domain.
“I especially love analogies,” he wrote, “my most faithful masters, acquainted with all the secrets of nature. . . . One should make great use of them.”
Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common
“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.
“we need to be reminded of things that are only abstractly or relationally similar. And the more creative you want to be, the more important that is.”
that is, drawing only on the first analogy that feels familiar.
Most problem solvers are not like Kepler. They will stay inside of the problem at hand, focused on the internal details, and perhaps summon other medical knowledge, since it is on the surface a medical problem. They will not intuitively turn to distant analogies to probe solutions. They
The trouble with using no more than a single analogy, particularly one from a very similar situation, is that it does not help battle the natural impulse to employ the “inside view,” a term coined by psychologists
and a pair of economists theorized that starting out by making loads of diverse analogies, Kepler style, would naturally lead to the outside view and improve decisions.
And the more distant the analogy, the better it was for idea
Just being reminded to analogize widely made the business students more creative.
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.
Faced with an unexpected finding, rather than assuming the current theory is correct and that an observation must be off, the unexpected became an opportunity to venture somewhere new—and analogies served as the wilderness guide.
Dunbar witnessed important breakthroughs live, and saw that the labs most likely to turn unexpected findings into new knowledge for humanity made a lot of analogies, and made them from a variety of base domains.
In the face of the unexpected, the range of available analogies helped determine who learned something new.
that did not make any new findings during Dunbar’s project, everyone had similar and highly specialized backgrounds, and analogies were almost never used.
All forces align to incentivize a head start and early, narrow specialization, even if that is a poor long-term strategy.
giving away his clothes and money, and doting
about-face
Paul Gauguin,
merchant marine
home in
hang academically.
slot machine.
stick it out,
company-grade
The academy’s leaky officer pipeline began springing holes en masse in the 1980s, during the national transition to a knowledge economy. By the millennium,
A few years later, with more knowledge of their skills and preferences, choosing to pursue a different goal was no longer the gritless route; it was the smart one.
blue-chip
The only other guy in my class who held a university record was my gritty roommate, the other walk-on.
When I was seventeen and positive that I was going to go to the U.S. Air Force Academy to become a pilot and then an astronaut, I probably would have self-assessed at the very top of the Grit Scale. I got all the way to Chicago-area congressman Sidney Yates agreeing to provide a nomination.
Growing self-knowledge kept changing my goals and interests until I landed in a career the very lifeblood of which is investigating broad interests. When I later worked at Sports Illustrated,
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.
Gallup survey
“The more we have invested and even lost,” Konnikova wrote, “the longer we will persist in insisting it will all work out.”
sacrosanct
