Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.

Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.

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.

Do specialists get better with experience, or not?

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.

“wicked.”

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.

Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

But he was well versed in computers and adept at integrating streaming information for strategy decisions.

If savants were human tape recorders playing notes back, it would make no difference whether they were asked to re-create music that follows popular rules of composition or

Patterns and familiar structures were critical to the savant’s extraordinary recall ability.

But the centaur lesson remains: the more a task shifts to an open world of big-picture strategy, the more humans have to add.

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.

“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.

But they employed what Argyris called single-loop learning, the kind that favors the first familiar solution that comes to mind.

“How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules”—that

We have been using the wrong stories. Tiger’s story and the Polgar story give the false impression that human skill is always developed in an extremely kind learning environment.

But when the rules are altered just slightly, it makes experts appear to have traded flexibility for narrow skill.

They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment.

The more abstract the word, the bigger the improvement.

“The huge Raven’s gains show that today’s children are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so,”

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.

rather than relying on our own direct experiences, we make sense of reality through classification schemes,

Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones.

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.

The ability to move freely, to shift from one category to another, is one of the chief characteristics of ‘abstract thinking.’”

The goal is not just to transfer knowledge, but to raise fundamental questions and to become familiar with the powerful ideas that shape our society.”

Students come prepared with scientific spectacles, but do not leave carrying a scientific-reasoning Swiss Army knife.

The instrument, it appeared, was driving the practitioner, rather than the reverse.