Range Quotes

“it’s often the case in group meetings where the person who made the PowerPoint slides puts data in front of you, and we often just use the data people put in front of us.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Only years later—as an investigative journalist writing about poor scientific research—did I realize that I had committed statistical malpractice in one section of the thesis that earned me a master’s degree from Columbia University. Like many a grad student, I had a big database and hit a computer button to run a common statistical analysis, never having been taught to think deeply (or at all) about how that statistical analysis even worked. The stat program spit out a number summarily deemed “statistically significant.” Unfortunately, it was almost certainly a false positive, because I did not understand the limitations of the statistical test in the context in which I applied it. Nor did the scientists who reviewed the work. 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.” I rushed into extremely specialized scientific research without having learned scientific reasoning. (And then I was rewarded for it, with a master’s degree, which made for a very wicked learning environment.) As backward as it sounds, I only began to think broadly about how science should work years after I left it.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In 1931, amid that incredible transformation, 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. When Luria arrived, the most remote villages had not yet been touched by the warp-speed restructuring of traditional society. Those villages gave him a control group. He learned the local language and brought fellow psychologists to engage villagers in relaxed social situations—teahouses or pastures—and discuss questions or tasks designed to discern their habits of mind. Some were very simple: present skeins of wool or silk in an array of hues and ask participants to describe them. The collective farmers and farm leaders, as well as the female students, easily picked out blue, red, and yellow, sometimes with variations, like dark blue or light yellow. The most remote villagers, who were still “premodern,” gave more diversified descriptions: cotton in bloom, decayed teeth, a lot of water, sky, pistachio. Then they were asked to sort the skeins into groups. The collective farmers, and young people with even a little formal education, did so easily, naturally forming color groups. Even when they did not know the name of a particular color, they had little trouble putting together darker and lighter shades of the same one. The remote villagers, on the other hand, refused, even those whose work was embroidery. “It can’t be done,” they said, or, “None of them are the same, you can’t put them together.” When prodded vigorously, and only if they were allowed to make many small groups, some relented and created sets that were apparently random. A few others appeared to sort the skeins according to color saturation, without regard to the color. 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. The remote villagers, meanwhile, saw nothing alike in a square drawn with solid lines and the same exact square drawn with dotted lines. To Alieva, a twenty-six-year-old remote villager, the solid-line square was obviously a map, and the dotted-line square was a watch. “How can a map and a watch be put together?” she asked, incredulous. Khamid, a twenty-four-year-old remote villager, insisted that filled and unfilled circles could not go together because one was a coin and the other a moon.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“I 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. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to 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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“What Ibarra calls the “ plan-and-implement” model—the idea that we should first make a long-term plan and execute without deviation, as opposed to the “ test-and-learn” model—is entrenched in depictions of geniuses. Popular lore holds that the sculptor Michelangelo would see a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it, and simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. It is an exquisitely beautiful image.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“„Be careful not to be too careful“, Delbrück warned, „or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested...Be a flirt with your possible selves. Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. "Test and learn...”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“T-people like myself can happily go to the I-people with questions to create the trunk for the T,”
― 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

“Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon,” Dyson wrote in 2009. “They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.” As a mathematician, Dyson labeled himself a frog, but contended, “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.” The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.” Dyson’s concern was that science is increasingly overflowing with frogs, trained only in a narrow specialty and unable to change as science itself does. “This is a hazardous situation,” he warned, “for the young people and also for the future of science.” Fortunately, it is possible, even today, even at the cutting edge, even in the most hyperspecialized specialties, to cultivate land where both birds and frogs can thrive.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Compare aquilo que é hoje com aquilo que era ontem, não com as pessoas que são mais jovens do que é. Todos progredimos a um ritmo diferente, por isso não deixe que ninguém o faça sentir que se atrasou. Provavelmente, nem sequer sabe exatamente para onde vai, por isso sentir que está a ficar para trás não ajuda.”
― David Epstein, Range : Le règne des généralistes: Pourquoi ils triomphent dans un monde de spécialistes

“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. 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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The most momentous personality changes occur between age eighteen and one’s late twenties, so specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a person who does not yet exist.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“We know that early sampling is key, as is diversity.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“smells, boats, brooms, magnets—it began with”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“You have to carry a big basket to bring something home - Frances Hesselbein”
― David Epstein, Range : Le règne des généralistes: Pourquoi ils triomphent dans un monde de spécialistes (Business)

“The gains are startling: three points every ten years. To put that in perspective, if an adult who scored average today were compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th percentile.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The gains are startling: three points every ten years.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“vary challenges within a domain drastically, and, as a fellow researcher put it, insist on “having one foot outside your world.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“When Sloboda and a colleague conducted a study with students at a British boarding school that recruited from around the country—admission rested entirely on an audition—they were surprised to find that the students classified as exceptional by the school came from less musically active families compared to less accomplished students, did not start playing at a younger age, were less likely to have had an instrument in the home at a very young age, had taken fewer lessons prior to entering the school, and had simply practiced less overall before arriving—a lot less. “It seems very clear,” the psychologists wrote, “that sheer amount of lesson or practice time is not a good indicator of exceptionality.” As to structured lessons, every single one of the students who had received a large amount of structured lesson time early in development fell into the “average” skill category, and not one was in the exceptional group. “The strong implication,” the researchers wrote, is “that that too many lessons at a young age may not be helpful.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Like kind learning environments, a kind world is based on repeating patterns. “It’s perfectly fine,” she said, “if you stay in the same village or the same savannah all your life.” The current world is not so kind; it requires thinking that cannot fall back on previous experience. Like math students, we need to be able to pick a strategy for problems we have never seen before. “In the life we lead today,” Gentner told me, “we need to be reminded of things that are only abstractly or relationally similar. And the more creative you want to be, the more important that is.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In Tetlock’s twenty-year study, both foxes and hedgehogs were quick to update their beliefs after successful predictions, by reinforcing them even more strongly. When an outcome took them by surprise, however, foxes were much more likely to adjust their ideas. Hedgehogs barely budged. Some hedgehogs made authoritative predictions that turned out wildly wrong, and then updated their theories in the wrong direction. They became even more convinced of the original beliefs that led them astray. “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 answer to Alzheimer’s disease may come from a misfolding protein in a cucumber. But how are you going to write a grant on a cucumber? And who are you going to send it to? If somebody gets interested in a folding protein in a cucumber and it’s a good scientific question, leave them alone. Let them torture the cucumber.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“So when HIV arrived, society had right off the shelf a huge amount of knowledge from investments made in a curiosity that at the time had no use.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World