More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
her son answered, “a Mercedes.” She was relieved when the reporter let her listen to a recording of the interview and they realized there’d been a mistake: the boy had said “Mehr CDs,” in Swiss German. He simply wanted “more CDs.”
now-ubiquitous ten-thousand-hours rule to expertise. The “rule” represents the idea that the number of accumulated hours of highly specialized training is the sole factor in skill development, no matter the domain.
The professed necessity of hyperspecialization forms the core of a vast, successful, and sometimes well-meaning marketing machine, in sports and beyond. In reality, the Roger path to sports stardom is far more prevalent than the Tiger path, but those athletes’ stories are much more quietly told, if they are told at all. Some of their names you know, but their backgrounds you probably don’t.
I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. 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.
smaller and smaller part of a large puzzle. One revelation in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis was the degree of segregation within big banks. Legions of specialized groups optimizing risk for their own tiny pieces of the big picture created a catastrophic whole.
Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.
recent study found that cardiac patients were actually less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology meeting, when thousands of cardiologists were away; the researchers suggested it could be because common treatments of dubious effect were less likely to be performed.
In those domains, which involved human behavior and where patterns did not clearly repeat, repetition did not cause learning. Chess, golf, and firefighting are exceptions, not the rule.
Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.
“kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess,
In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.
In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid
...more
Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
But the game’s strategic complexity provides a lesson: the bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization.
When we know the rules and answers, and they don’t change over time—chess, golf, playing classical music—an argument can be made for savant-like hyperspecialized practice from day one. But those are poor models of most things humans want to learn.
tennis is still very much on the kind end of the spectrum compared to, say, a hospital emergency room, where doctors and nurses do not automatically find out what happens to a patient after their encounter. They have to find ways to learn beyond practice, and to assimilate lessons that might even contradict their direct experience.
“cognitive entrenchment.”
His suggestions for avoiding it are about the polar opposite of the strict version of the ten-thousand-hours school of thought: vary challenges within a domain drastically, and, as a fellow researcher put it, insist on “having one foot outside your world.”
Scientists and members of the general public are about equally likely to have artistic hobbies, but scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation. A...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The Flynn effect—the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century—has
three points every ten years.
On tests that gauged material picked up in school or with independent reading or study—general knowledge, arithmetic, vocabulary—scores hardly budged. Meanwhile, performance on more abstract tasks that are never formally taught, like the Raven’s matrices, or “similarities” tests, which require a description of how two things are alike, skyrocketed.
scientists have suggested it may reflect the fact that premodern people are not as drawn to the holistic context—the relationship of the various circles to one another—so their perception is not changed by the presence of extra circles. To use a common metaphor, premodern people miss the forest for the trees; modern people miss the trees for the forest.
The more they had moved toward modernity, the more powerful their abstract thinking, and the less they had to rely on their concrete experience of the world as a reference point.
In Flynn’s terms, we now see the world through “scientific spectacles.” He means that 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.
As Flynn makes sure to point out, this does not mean that brains now have more inherent potential than a generation ago, but rather that utilitarian spectacles have been swapped for spectacles through which the world is classified by concepts.*
Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted for complexity, and that has manifested as flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world.
the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero.
“the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.”*
Science students learned the facts of their specific field without understanding how science should work in order to draw true conclusions.
Econ majors did the best overall. Economics is a broad field by nature, and econ professors have been shown to apply the reasoning principles they’ve learned to problems outside their area.* Chemists, on the other hand, are extraordinarily bright, but in several studies struggled to apply scientific reasoning to nonchemistry problems.
Almost none of the students in any major showed a consistent understanding of how to apply methods of evaluating truth they had learned in their own discipline to other areas. In that way, the students had something in common with Luria’s remote villagers—even the science majors were typically unable to generalize research methods from their own field to other fields.
“There is no sign that any department attempts to develop [anything] other than narrow critical competence.”
Professors, he told me, are just too eager to share their favorite facts gleaned from years of acceleratingly narrow study.
Mostly, though, students get what economist Bryan Caplan called narrow vocational training for jobs few of them will ever have. 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.
“Fermi problems,” because Enrico Fermi—who created the first nuclear reactor beneath the University of Chicago football field—constantly made back-of-the-envelope estimates to help him approach problems.* The ultimate lesson of the question was that detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.
They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.
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.
“Baroque,” is taken from a jewelers’ term to describe a pearl that was extravagantly large and unusually shaped.
The concerto was born—in which a virtuoso soloist plays back and forth against an orchestra—and
The Four Seasons is as close to a pop hit as three-hundred-year-old music gets. (A mashup with a song from Disney’s Frozen has ninety million YouTube plays.)
a plague in 1630 wiped out one-third of the population,
Audience members were not allowed to applaud in church, so after the final note they coughed and hemmed and scraped their feet and blew their noses in admiration.
hautbois [oboes],
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.
The instrument, it appeared, was driving the practitioner, rather than the reverse.
Those children identified as exceptional by [the school] turn out to be those children who distributed their effort more evenly across three instruments.”
Even once he became arguably America’s preeminent composer, he relied on copyists to decode his personal musical shorthand into traditional musical notation.
Perhaps the greatest improv master of all could not read, period—words or music. Django Reinhardt was born in Belgium in 1910, in a Romani caravan.
Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later.
