Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination.

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.

The Flynn effect—the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century—has now been documented in more than thirty countries.

a brilliant young Russian psychologist named Alexander Luria recognized a fleeting “natural experiment,” unique in the history of the world. He wondered if changing citizens’ work might also change their minds.

The greater the dose of modernity, the more likely an individual grasped the abstract concept of “shapes” and made groups of triangles, rectangles, and circles, even if they had no formal education and did not know the shapes’ names.

To use a common metaphor, 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.

“Even the best universities aren’t developing critical intelligence,” he told me. “They aren’t giving students the tools to analyze the modern world, except in their area of specialization. Their education is too narrow.” He does not mean this in the simple sense that every computer science major needs an art history class, but rather that everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.