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January 11, 2021
people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.
experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.
conundrum:
The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better.
Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers.
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.
When narrow specialization is combined with an unkind domain, the human tendency to rely on experience of familiar patterns can backfire horribly—like
Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.
premodern people miss the forest for the trees; modern people miss the trees for the forest.
The more they had moved toward modernity, the more powerful their abstract thinking, and the less they had to rely on their concrete experience of the world as a reference point.
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.
Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains.
The ability to move freely, to shift from one category to another, is one of the chief characteristics of ‘abstract thinking.’”
“the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.”
“There is no sign that any department attempts to develop [anything] other than narrow critical competence.”
everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.
They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about.
Everyone is so busy doing research they don’t have time to stop and think about the way they’re doing it.”
conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.
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.
“the distribution of effort across different instruments seems important. Those children identified as exceptional by [the school] turn out to be those children who distributed their effort more evenly across three instruments.”
Learning to play classical music is a narrative linchpin for the cult of the head start; as music goes, it is a relatively golflike endeavor.
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,
While improvising, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them.
Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later.
“Children do not practice exercises to learn to talk. . . . Children learn to read after their ability to talk has been well established.”
creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart.
“that some of the greatest musicians were self-taught or never learned to read music.
when you’re self-taught you experiment more, trying to find the same sound in different places, you learn how to solve problems.”
You’re just trying to find a solution to problems, and after fifty lifetimes, it starts to come together for you. It’s slow,”
“but at the same time, there’s something to learning that way.”
“desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term.
The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.
“retrieval is all about the journey.”
learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run.
students today have mastery of basic skills that is superior to students of the past.
“jobs that pay well require employees to be able to solve unexpected problems, often while working in groups. . . . These shifts in labor force demands have in turn put new and increasingly stringent demands on schools.”
for knowledge to be flexible, it should be learned under varied conditions, an approach called varied or mixed practice, or, to researchers, “interleaving.” Interleaving has been shown to improve inductive reasoning.
Interleaving is a desirable difficulty that frequently holds for both physical and mental skills.
interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem.
Desirable difficulties like making connections and interleaving make knowledge flexible, useful for problems that never appeared in training.
if programs want to impart lasting academic benefits they should focus instead on “open” skills that scaffold later knowledge.
Teaching them how to hunt for and connect contextual clues to understand what they read can be.
Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface. It is a powerful tool for solving wicked problems,
In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.
The outside view probes for deep structural similarities to the current problem in different ones. 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. It requires a mindset switch from narrow to broad.
Rather than beginning by generating options, they leap to a decision based on pattern recognition of surface features.
