Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

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 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. We take the inside view when we make judgments based narrowly on the details of a particular project that are right in front of us. Kahneman had a personal experience with the dangers of the inside view when he assembled a team to write a high school curriculum on the science of decision making. After a full year of weekly meetings, he surveyed the entire team to find out how long everyone thought the project would take. The lowest estimate was one and a half years, the highest two and a half years. Kahneman then asked a team member named Seymour, a distinguished curriculum expert who had seen the process with other teams, how this one compared. Seymour thought for a while. Moments earlier, he had estimated it would take about two more years. Faced with Kahneman’s question about other teams, he said he had never even thought to compare this instance to separate projects, but that about 40 percent of the teams he’d seen never finished at all, and not a single one he could think of took less than seven years. Kahneman’s group was not willing to spend six more years on a curriculum project that might fail. They spent a few minutes debating the new opinion, and decided to forge ahead trusting the about-two-years wisdom of the group. ...