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She explained that she just did whatever seemed like it would teach her something and allow her to be of service at each moment, and somehow that added up to training.
As a new troop leader with less experience than her charges, she relied on shared leadership.
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.
at the grind of the surgical saw. “Nor
by turns
alight on
a priori
Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
Virtually every good thing in my life I can trace back to a misfortune, so my feeling is you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad when things happen. You do not know. You have to wait to find out.” My favorite fiction writers
Haruki Murakami
and suggested he bag legal studies and apply to drama school.
“I thought about the process that differentiates solutions, and it wasn’t part of any curriculum or on anybody’s résumé.
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.”
magnum opus,
push and shove
smacks of
“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.”
He argued, “Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers.
“empowering innovation”—one that creates both new customers and new jobs, like the rise of personal computers before it—because it brought video games to an entirely new (often older) audience.
“It understood that the barrier to new consumers using video game systems was the complexity of game play, not the quality of existing graphics.”
Andy Ouderkirk
“it became a lot easier to be broader than a specialist, to start combining things in new ways.”
when the going got uncertain, breadth made the difference.
collective experience across the same number of genres. Taylor and Greve suggested that “individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.”
dreamlike epic Spirited Away, which surpassed Titanic as the highest-grossing film ever in Japan, but his comics and animation career before that left almost no genre untouched. He ranged from pure fantasy and fairy tales to historical fiction, sci-fi, slapstick comedy, illustrated historical essays, action-adventure, and much more.
“they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests”;
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.
Dilettantes who were pitted against the experts were no more clairvoyant, but at least they were less likely to call future events either impossible or sure things, leaving them with fewer laugh-out-loud errors to atone for—if, that was, the experts had believed in atonement.
Experts remained undefeated while losing constantly. “There is often a curiously inverse relationship,” Tetlock concluded, “between how well forecasters thought they were doing and how well they did.”
There was also a “perverse inverse relationship” between fame and accuracy. The more likely an expert was to have his or her predictions featured on op-ed pages and television, the more likely they were always wrong.
they were not vested in a single approach.
The integrators outperformed their colleagues on pretty much everything, but they especially trounced them on long-term predictions.
they fashioned tidy theories of how the world works through the single lens of their specialty, and then bent every event to fit them.
Outcomes did not matter; they were proven right by both successes and failures, and burrowed further into their ideas.
Tetlock would start in one direction, then interrogate himself and make an about-face.
wide-ranging interests and reading habits but no particular relevant background—and
In year two, the Good Judgment Project randomly arranged the top “superforecasters” into online teams of twelve, so that they could share information and ideas. They beat the other university-run teams so badly that IARPA dropped those lesser competitors from the tournament. The volunteers drawn from the general public beat experienced intelligence analysts with access to classified data “by margins that remain classified,” according to Tetlock. (He has, though, referenced a Washington Post report indicating that the Good Judgment Project performed about 30 percent better than a collection of
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Not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, they had qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators—partners in sharing information and discussing predictions. Every team member still had to make individual predictions, but the team was scored by collective performance. On average, forecasters on the small superteams became 50 percent more accurate in their individual predictions. Superteams beat the wisdom of much larger crowds—in which the predictions of a large group of people are averaged—and they also beat prediction markets, where forecasters “trade” the
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He learned that specializing in a topic frequently did not bear fruit in the forecasts.
Often if you’re too much of an insider, it’s hard to get good perspective.”
Eastman described the core trait of the best forecasters to me as: “genuinely curious about, well, really everything.”
Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, she told me, “but you have to understand that they may have blinders on.
Would it be less than 10, between 10 and 13, or more than 13? The discussion started with a team member offering percentage predictions for each of the three possibilities, and sharing an Economist article. Another team member chimed in with a Bloomberg link and online historical data, and offered three different probability predictions, with “between 10
A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.”
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
It is not that we are unable to come up with contrary ideas, it is just that our strong instinct is not to.
The aversion to contrary ideas is not a simple artifact of stupidity or ignorance.
Kahan also documented a personality feature that fought back against that propensity: science curiosity. Not science knowledge, science curiosity.
The most science-curious folk always chose to look at new evidence, whether or not it agreed with their current beliefs.
