More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 27 - June 9, 2024
Prominent sports scientist Ross Tucker summed up research in the field simply: “We know that early sampling is key, as is diversity.”
Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.
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.
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.
Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
In a truly open-world problem devoid of rigid rules and reams of perfect historical data, AI has been disastrous.
“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.
“To him who observes them from afar,” said Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, “it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”
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.
everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.
On every exam, amid typical chemistry questions, was something like this: “How many piano tuners are there in New York City?” Students had to estimate, just by reasoning, and try to get the right order of magnitude. The professor later explained that these were “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 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.
Charles Limb, a musician, hearing specialist, and auditory surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, designed an iron-free keyboard so that jazz musicians could improvise while inside an MRI scanner. Limb saw that brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self-censoring turned down when the musicians were creating. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself,” he told National Geographic. While improvising, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them.
(There is a specific Japanese word to describe chalkboard writing that tracks conceptual connections over the course of collective problem solving: bansho.)
But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.
“Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.”
Learning deeply means learning slowly. The cult of the head start fails the learners it seeks to serve.
When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations, it is called “far transfer.”
“Ye physicists,” he wrote when he published his laws of planetary motion, “prick your ears, for now we are going to invade your territory.” The title of his magnum opus: A New Astronomy Based upon Causes.
The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the expert, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies.
Instead of predicting what you might like, they examine who you are like, and the complexity is captured therein.
successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it.
“When all the members of the laboratory have the same knowledge at their disposal, then when a problem arises, a group of similar minded individuals will not provide more information to make analogies than a single individual,” Dunbar concluded.
It would be easy enough to cherry-pick stories of exceptional late developers overcoming the odds. But they aren’t exceptions by virtue of their late starts, and those late starts did not stack the odds against them. Their late starts were integral to their eventual success.
Switchers are winners. It seems to fly in the face of hoary adages about quitting, and of far newer concepts in modern psychology.
Godin argued that “winners”—he generally meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain—quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it. “We fail,” he wrote, when we stick with “tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.” Godin clearly did not advocate quitting simply because a pursuit is difficult. Persevering through difficulty is a competitive advantage for any traveler of a long road, but he suggested that knowing when to quit is such a big strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor, should enumerate
...more
The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.
By that time, she was fine with proceeding in the absence of a clear long-term plan, since she had been figuring everything out as she went along her entire life.
Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same.
Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts.
the central premise was at once simple and profound: we learn who we are only by living, and not before.
Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
Pegau was basically describing the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.
you’re working on well-defined and well-understood problems, specialists work very, very well,” he told me. “As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.”
Often if you’re too much of an insider, it’s hard to get good perspective.”
The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing.
It is not that we are unable to come up with contrary ideas, it is just that our strong instinct is not to.
“Depth can be inadequate without breadth,” wrote Jonathan Baron, the psychologist who developed measurements of active open-mindedness.
The rules had always worked before. But with Challenger they were outside their usual bounds, where “can do” should have been swapped for what Weick calls a “make do” culture. They needed to improvise rather than throw out information that did not fit the established rubric.
Deviating from what Geim calls the “straight railway line” of life is “not secure . . . psychologically,” but comes with advantages, for motivation and for “questioning things people who work in that area never bother to ask.”
You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”
Whether they looked at research groups in economics or ecology, or the teams that write, compose, and produce Broadway musicals, thriving ecosystems had porous boundaries between teams.
it the most important work of his life. The further basic science moves from meandering exploration toward efficiency, he believes, the less chance it will have of solving humanity’s greatest challenges.
“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,” Bush wrote, “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”
Experimentation is not a tidy prescription, but it is common, and it has advantages, and it requires more than the typical motivational-poster lip service to a tolerance for failure. Breakthroughs are high variance.
Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you.
Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise.
I hope I have added ideas to that discussion, because research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated. As Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a century ago, of the free exchange of ideas, “It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
Once again: we learn who we are in practice, not in theory.
As psychologist Howard Gruber wrote, “Ideas are not really lost, they are reactivated when useful.”
