Range Quotes

“In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Finland compared the surgery with “sham surgery”—that is, surgeons took patients with knee pain and a torn meniscus to operating rooms, made incisions, faked surgeries, and sewed them back up and sent them to physical therapy—they found that sham surgery worked just as well. Most people with a torn meniscus, it turns out, don’t have any symptoms”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Parents, Yates told me, increasingly come to him and “want their kids doing what the Olympians are doing right now, not what the Olympians were doing when they were twelve or thirteen,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In a 1997 showdown billed as the final battle for supremacy between natural and artificial intelligence, IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue evaluated two hundred million positions per second. That is a tiny fraction of possible chess positions—the number of possible game sequences is more than atoms in the observable universe—but plenty enough to beat the best human. According to Kasparov, “Today the free chess app on your mobile phone is stronger than me.” He is not being rhetorical. “Anything we can do, and we know how to do it, machines will do it better,” he said at a recent lecture. “If we can codify it, and pass it to computers, they will do it better.” Still, losing to Deep Blue gave him an idea. In playing computers, he recognized what artificial intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses. There is a saying that “chess is 99 percent tactics.” Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. 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. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” 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. 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. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“I know who I am when I see what I do.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

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

“There is a particular kind of thinker, one who becomes more entrenched in their single big idea about how the world works even in the face of contrary facts, whose predictions become worse, not better, as they amass information for their mental representation of the world. They are on television and in the news every day, making worse and worse predictions while claiming victory, and they have been rigorously studied.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The results can be disastrous.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“As Alph Bingham noticed, for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before. (Think about the lab with only E. coli specialists from chapter 5.) If those fail, they’re stuck. For the most intractable problems, “our research shows that a domain-based solution is often inferior,”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Making It to the Top in Team Sports: Start Later, Intensify, and Be Determined.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“difference between the chain of command and the chain of communication, and that the difference represents a healthy cross-pressure.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors. —Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. 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. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“A man, too, he exhorted, “doesn’t always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, I’m good for something, even so! . . . I know that I could be a quite different man! . . . There’s something within me, so what is it!” He had been a student, an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, a prospective pastor, and an itinerant catechist. After promising starts, he had failed spectacularly in every path he tried.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range;”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It is no wonder that organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to drop them.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“If you’re working on well-defined and well-understood problems, specialists work very, very well,” he told me. “As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.”
― 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

“Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breadth of experience did.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Starting something new in middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old. Researchers at Northwestern, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau studied new tech companies and showed that among the fastest-growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was forty-five when the company was launched.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“A nice idea, but here’s how it worked out in practice: a bank arm that specialized in mortgage lending started the homeowner on lower payments; an arm of the same bank that specialized in foreclosures then noticed that the homeowner was suddenly paying less, declared them in default, and seized the home. “No one imagined silos like that inside banks,” a government adviser said later. Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“learned the vocab and then was tested on it the same day, and a second that”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In the late 1960s, future Nobel laureate economist Theodore Schultz argued that his field had done well to show that higher education increased worker productivity, but that economists had neglected the role of education in allowing individuals to delay specialization while sampling and finding out who they are and where they fit.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“the more hints that were available during training, the better the monkeys performed during early practice, and the worse they performed on test day.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Geveden, in his own way, was in favor of balancing the typical, formal process culture with a dose of informal individualism, as Kranz and von Braun once had. “The chain of communication has to be informal,” he told me, “completely different from the chain of command.” He wanted a culture where everyone had the responsibility to protest if something didn’t feel right. He decided to go prospecting for doubts.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World