Range Quotes

“training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It’s strange,” Cecchini told me at the end of one of our hours-long discussions, “that some of the greatest musicians were self-taught or never learned to read music.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Our advantage over our ancestors,” as he put it, is “from the cradle to the grave.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“But they employed what Argyris called single-loop learning, the kind that favors the first familiar solution that comes to mind. Whenever those solutions went wrong, the consultant usually got defensive. Argyris found their “brittle personalities” particularly surprising given that “the essence of their job is to teach others how to do things differently.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Investment in officer training has recently played out exactly backward: OCS trainees stay the longest, followed by ROTC trainees who did not receive any college scholarship, followed by ROTC trainees who received two-year scholarships, followed by ROTC trainees with three-year scholarships, followed finally by West Point graduates and full-scholarship ROTC trainees.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“it is particularly vexing to the Army that since the mid-1990s, about half of West Point graduates leave active military service after five years, which is as soon as they are allowed. It takes about five years just to offset the development costs for a trained officer. Three-quarters are gone before the twenty-year mark, which would bring them to their early forties having earned a lifetime pension.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Malamud analyzed data for thousands of former students, and found that college graduates in England and Wales were consistently more likely to leap entirely out of their career fields than their later-specializing Scottish peers.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“If the benefit of higher education was simply that it provided skills for work, then early-specializing students would be less likely to career switch after college to a field unrelated to their studies: they have amassed more career-specific skills, so they have more to lose by switching. But if a critical benefit of college was that it provided information about match quality, then early specializers should end up switching to unrelated career fields more often, because they did not have time to sample different matches before choosing one that fit their skills and interests.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“A class at the University of Washington titled “Calling Bullshit” (in staid coursebook language: INFO 198/BIOL 106B), focused on broad principles fundamental to understanding the interdisciplinary world and critically evaluating the daily firehose of information. When the class was first posted in 2017, registration filled up in the first minute.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“class at the University of Washington titled “Calling Bullshit” (in staid coursebook language: INFO 198/BIOL 106B), focused on broad principles fundamental to understanding the interdisciplinary world and critically evaluating the daily firehose of information. When the class was first posted in 2017, registration filled up in the first minute.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Less well known, though, is that Ma started on violin, moved to piano, and then to the cello because he didn’t really like the first two instruments. He just went through the sampling period a lot faster than the typical student. Tiger parents are trying to skip that phase entirely. It reminds me of a conversation”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“But their stories were largely forgotten, or thrown away, literally. When Napoleon’s troops arrived in 1797, they tossed manuscripts and records out the ospedali windows. When, two hundred years later, a famous eighteenth-century painting of women giving a concert was displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the mysterious figures dressed in black, in an upper balcony above the audience, went entirely unidentified.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It all raises the question: Just what magical training mechanism was deployed to transform the orphan foundlings of the Venetian sex industry, who but for the grace of charity would have died in the city’s canals, into the world’s original international rock stars?”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The ospedali governors noticed that a lot more people were attending church, and that the institutional endowments swelled with donations proportional to the quality of the girls’ music.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“After a plague in 1630 wiped out one-third of the population, Venetians found themselves in an especially “penitential mood,” as one historian put it. The musicians suddenly became more important.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It used a deceptive cable news report as a case study to demonstrate “how Fermi estimation can cut through bullshit like a hot knife through butter.” It gives anyone consuming numbers, from news articles to advertisements, the ability quickly to sniff out deceptive stats. That’s a pretty handy hot butter knife. I would have been a much better researcher in any domain, including Arctic plant physiology, had I learned broadly applicable reasoning tools rather than the finer details of Arctic plant physiology.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Fortunately, as an undergrad, I did have a chemistry professor who embodied Flynn’s ideal. 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”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“As statistician Doug Altman put it, “Everyone is so busy doing research they don’t have time to stop and think about the way they’re doing it.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The study he conducted at the state university convinced him that college departments rush to develop students in a narrow specialty area, while failing to sharpen the tools of thinking that can serve them in every area. This must change, he argues, if students are to capitalize on their unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about. Students come prepared with scientific spectacles, but do not leave carrying a scientific-reasoning Swiss Army knife.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Econ majors did the best overall. Economics is a broad field by nature, and econ professors have been shown to apply the reasoning principles they’ve learned to problems outside their area.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Conceptual schemes are flexible, able to arrange information and ideas for a wide variety of uses, and to transfer knowledge between domains.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Words that represent concepts that were previously the domain of scholars became widely understood in a few generations. The word “percent” was almost absent from books in 1900. By 2000 it appeared about once every five thousand words.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Because the touched-by-modernity teens had constructed meaningful thematic groups, they also had far superior recall when asked later to recount the items. 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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The farmers and students who had begun to join the modern world were able to practice a kind of thinking called “eduction,” to work out guiding principles when given facts or materials, even in the absence of instructions, and even when they had never seen the material before. This, it turns out, is precisely what Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests. Imagine presenting the villagers living in premodern circumstances with abstract designs from the Raven’s test.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Geometric shapes followed suit. 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.”
― 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. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World