Range Quotes

“As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests. “This breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain-specific expertise alone.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Scientists and members of the general public are about equally likely to have artistic hobbies, but scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Chris Argyris, who helped create the Yale School of Management, noted the danger of treating the wicked world as if it is kind. He studied high-powered consultants from top business schools for fifteen years, and saw that they did really well on business school problems that were well defined and quickly assessed. 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: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“When narrow specialization is combined with an unkind domain, the human tendency to rely on experience of familiar patterns can backfire horribly”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In a truly open-world problem devoid of rigid rules and reams of perfect historical data, AI has been disastrous. IBM’s Watson destroyed at Jeopardy! and was subsequently pitched as a revolution in cancer care, where it flopped so spectacularly that several AI experts told me they worried its reputation would taint AI research in health-related fields.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The latest video game challenge for artificial intelligence is StarCraft, a franchise of real-time strategy games in which fictional species go to war for supremacy in some distant reach of the Milky Way. It requires much more complex decision making than chess. There are battles to manage, infrastructure to plan, spying to do, geography to explore, and resources to collect, all of which inform one another. Computers struggled to win at StarCraft, Julian Togelius, an NYU professor who studies gaming AI, told me in 2017. Even when they did beat humans in individual games, human players adjusted with “long-term adaptive strategy” and started winning. “There are so many layers of thinking,” he said. “We humans sort of suck at all of them individually, but we have some kind of very approximate idea about each of them and can combine them and be somewhat adaptive. That seems to be what the trick is.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“the more a task shifts to an open world of big-picture strategy, the more humans have to add.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Chunking helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain-specific memory, from musicians playing long pieces by heart to quarterbacks recognizing patterns of players in a split second and making a decision to throw. The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In playing computers, he recognized what artificial intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It was a wide-ranging review of research that rocked psychology because it showed experience simply did not create skill in a wide range of real-world scenarios, from college administrators assessing student potential to psychiatrists predicting patient performance to human resources professionals deciding who will succeed in job training. In those domains, which involved human behavior and where patterns did not clearly repeat, repetition did not cause learning. Chess, golf, and firefighting are exceptions, not the rule.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The powerful lesson is that anything in the world can be conquered in the same way. It relies on one very important, and very unspoken, assumption: that chess and golf are representative examples of all the activities that matter to you. •”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“we are clearly not the same people at 75 as 15' Roberts told me, 'but there are traces that should be recognizable”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“There is no sign that any department attempts to develop [anything] other than narrow critical competence.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Enrico Fermi—who created the first nuclear reactor beneath the University of Chicago football field—constantly made back-of-the-envelope estimates to help him approach problems.*”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

“There he recognized that he could combine telephone call-routing technology with Boole’s logic system to encode and transmit any type of information electronically. It was the fundamental insight on which computers rely. “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both those fields at the same time,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. Nationally recognized scientists are much more likely than other scientists to be musicians, sculptors, painters, printmakers, woodworkers, mechanics, electronics tinkerers, glassblowers, poets, or writers, of both fiction and nonfiction. And, again, Nobel laureates are far more likely still. The most successful experts also belong to the wider world. “To him who observes them from afar,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules”—that is, by providing rewards for repetitive short-term success with a narrow range of solutions.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In narrow enough worlds, humans may not have much to contribute much longer. In more open-ended games, I think they certainly will. Not just games, in open ended real-world problems we’re still crushing the machines.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Their brilliance, just like the Polgar brilliance, relies on repetitive structures, which is precisely what made the Polgars’ skill so easy to automate.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In freestyle chess, he had to consider advice from teammates and various chess programs and then very quickly direct the computers to examine particular possibilities in more depth. He was like an executive with a team of mega-grandmaster tactical advisers, deciding whose advice to probe more deeply and ultimately whose to heed. He played each game cautiously, expecting a draw, but trying to set up situations that could lull an opponent into a mistake.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Those are the same twenty pieces of information, but over the course of your life, you’ve learned patterns of words that allow you to instantly make sense of the second arrangement, and to remember it much more easily. Your restaurant server doesn’t just happen to have a miraculous memory; like musicians and quarterbacks, they’ve learned to group recurring information into chunks.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World