Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

The subtitle of Schwartz’s paper: “How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules”—that is, by providing rewards for repetitive short-term success with a narrow range of solutions.

vary challenges within a domain drastically, and, as a fellow researcher put it, insist on “having one foot outside your world.”

premodern people are not as drawn to the holistic context—the

“how Fermi estimation can cut through bullshit like a hot knife through butter.”

“As far as anyone teaching me, there was too many rules and regulations. . . . As long as I could sit down and figure it out for myself, then that was all right.”

That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example.

Metcalfe and colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated a “hypercorrection effect.” The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer.

Most problem solvers are not like Kepler. They will stay inside of the problem at hand, focused on the internal details, and perhaps summon other medical knowledge, since it is on the surface a medical problem. They will not intuitively turn to distant analogies to probe solutions. They should, though, and they should make sure some of those analogies are, on the surface, far removed from the current problem. In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.

“Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.”

He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer.

As the company grew, he worried that young engineers would be too concerned about looking stupid to share ideas for novel uses of old technology, so he began intentionally blurting out crazy ideas at meetings to set the tone. “Once a young person starts saying things like, ‘Well, it’s not really my place to say . . .’ then it’s all over,” he said.

The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.

NASA’s culture “emphasized chain of command, procedure, following the rules, and going by the book. While rules and procedures were essential for coordination, they had an unintended negative effect.” Once again, “allegiance to hierarchy and procedure” had ended in disaster. Again, lower ranking engineers had concerns they could not quantify; they stayed silent because “the requirement for data was stringent and inhibiting.”