Range Quotes

“Good judges are good belief updaters,” according to Tetlock. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. That is called, in a word: learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The aversion to contrary ideas is not a simple artifact of stupidity or ignorance. Yale law and psychology professor Dan Kahan has shown that more scientifically literate adults are actually more likely to become dogmatic about politically polarizing topics in science. Kahan thinks it could be because they are better at finding evidence to confirm their feelings: the more time they spend on the topic, the more hedgehog-like they become.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, she told me, “but you have to understand that they may have blinders on. So what I try to do is take facts from them, not opinions.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In 2017, Greg Duncan, the education economist, along with psychologist Drew Bailey and colleagues, reviewed sixty-seven early childhood education programs meant to boost academic achievement. Programs like Head Start did give a head start, but academically that was about it. The researchers found a pervasive “fadeout” effect, where a temporary academic advantage quickly diminished and often completely vanished. On a graph, it looks eerily like the kind that show future elite athletes catching up to their peers who got a head start in deliberate practice.
A reason for this, the researchers concluded, is that early childhood education programs teach “closed” skills that can be acquired quickly with repetition of procedures, but that everyone will pick up at some point anyway. The fadeout was not a disappearance of skill so much as the rest of the world catching up. The motor-skill equivalent would be teaching a kid to walk a little early. Everyone is going to learn it anyway, and while it might be temporarily impressive, there is no evidence that rushing it matters.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education published a report by six scientists and an accomplished teacher who were asked to identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list. All three impair performance in the short term.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Winston Churchill’s “never give in, never, never, never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The study conclusion was simple: “training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“the students of more experienced and qualified”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“we now see the world through “scientific spectacles.” He means that 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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful. The struggle is real, and really useful. “Like life,” Kornell and team wrote, “retrieval is all about the journey.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“When she compiled her findings, the central premise was at once simple and profound: we learn who we are only by living, and not before.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Flynn conducted a study in which he compared the grade point averages of seniors at one of America’s top state universities, from neuroscience to English majors, to their performance on a test of critical thinking. The test gauged students’ ability to apply fundamental abstract concepts from economics, social and physical sciences, and logic to common, real-world scenarios. Flynn was bemused to find that the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero. In Flynn’s words, “the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.”*”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“about-two-years wisdom of the group. Eight years later, they finished, by which point Kahneman was not even on the team or living in the country, and the agency that asked for the curriculum was no longer interested.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrated a similar, learned inflexibility among experienced practitioners when he gave college students a logic puzzle that involved hitting switches to turn light bulbs on and off in sequence, and that they could play over and over. It could be solved in seventy different ways, with a tiny money reward for each success. The students were not given any rules, and so had to proceed by trial and error.* If a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked. Later on, new students were added, and all were now asked to discover the general rule of all solutions. Incredibly, every student who was brand-new to the puzzle discovered the rule for all seventy solutions, while only one of the students who had been getting rewarded for a single solution did. The subtitle of Schwartz’s paper: “How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The progress of AI in the closed and orderly world of chess, with instant feedback and bottomless data, has been exponential. In the rule-bound but messier world of driving, AI has made tremendous progress, but challenges remain. In a truly open-world problem devoid of rigid rules and reams of perfect historical data, AI has been disastrous.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“We learn who we are only by living and not before.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“lateral thinking with withered technology”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“rapidly evolving short-term experiments”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The more we have invested and even lost...the longer we will persist in insisting it will all work out.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“quitting takes a lot more guts than continuing to be carried along like debris on an ocean wave. 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 it would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“we learn who we are only by living, and not before. Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“An inventor's depth and breadth were measured by their work history. The U.S. Patent Trademark Office categorizes technology into four hundred fifty different classes -- exercise, devices, electrical connectors, marine propulsion, and myriad more. Specialists tended to have their patents in a narrow range of classes. A specialist might work for years only on understanding a type of plastic composed of a particular small group of chemical elements. Generalists, meanwhile, might start in masking tape, which would lead to a surgical adhesives project, which spawned an idea for veterinary medicine. Their patents were spread across many classes. The polymaths had depth in a core area -- so they had numerous patents in that area -- but they were not as deep as the specialists. They aslo had breadth, even more than the generalists, having worked across dozens of technology classes. Repeatedly, they took expertise accrued in one domain and applied it in a completely new one, which meant they were constantly learning new technologies. Over the course of their careers, the polymaths' breadth increased markedly as they learned about "the adjacent stuff," while they actually lost a modicum of depth.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Jeannette Wing,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse from overpopulation.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Según Godin, los ganadores (entendiendo por tales a personas que han llegado a la cúspide de su dominio) abandonan a menudo y rápidamente, en cuanto detectan que un plan no es para ellos, y no se sienten mal al respecto. «Fracasamos cuando permanecemos en actividades que seguimos haciendo solo porque no tenemos agallas para abandonar.”
― David Epstein, Amplitud (Range): Por qué los generalistas triunfan en un mundo especializado