Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

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. Or, not always wrong. Rather, as Tetlock and his coauthor succinctly put it in their book Superforecasting, “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

Some had spent their careers studying a single problem. Like Ehrlich and Simon, they fashioned tidy theories of how the world works through the single lens of their specialty, and then bent every event to fit them.

“Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don’t have the balls to live in the real world.”