635One study showed that early career specializations jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializations made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.
9
636I 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.
11
637The most effective learning looks inefficient. It looks like falling behind.
11
638Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that "young people are just smarter" and yet a tech founder who is 50 years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is 30, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a 20 year old.
11
639When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found that experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence, but not skill.
19
640Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise depends 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 how patients or employees might perform.
20
641The 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 over and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.
In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete. There may or may not be repetitive patterns, and they might not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.
20-21
642As psychologist Ellen Wimmer, one of the foremost authorities on gifted children noted, no savant has ever been known to become a "Big-C" creator who changed their field.
32
643Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least 22 times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. Nationally recognized scientists are 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.
33
644The Flynn effect, the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the 20th century, has now been documented in >30 countries. The gains are startling: three points every ten years. To put that into perspective, if an adult who scored average today were compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th percentile.
39
645The correlations between the tests of broad conceptional 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."
48
646How poorly college students do at stuff.
"There is no sign that any department attempts to develop anything than narrow critical competence"
48-49
647Three quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major--a trend that includes math and science majors--after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline.
50
648Fermi Problems
52
649Today, the massively multi-instrument approach seems to go against everything we know about how to get good at a skill like playing music. It certainly goes against the deliberate practice framework, which only counts highly-focused attempts at exactly the skill to be performed. Multiple instruments, in that view, should be a waste of time.
64
650Parents, 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 12 or 13," which included a wider variety of activities that developed their general (???) and allowed them to probe their talents and interests before they focused narrowly on technical skills.
65
651"It seems very clear," the psychologist 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 structed 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 too many lessons at a young age may not be helpful."
67
652We're very good, humans are, at trying to do the least amount of work that we have to in order to perform a task.
83
653Memorized Algorithms
84-85
654The overall experiment results went like this: The more hints that were available during training, the better monkeys performed long early practice, and the worse they performed on test day. For the lists that Macduff spent 3 days practicing with automatic hints, he got zero correct. It was as if the pair had suddenly unlearned every list that they practiced with hints. The study conclusion was simple--"Training with hints did not produce any lasting learning."
87
655Repetition is less important than struggle
89
656In a wicked world [domain] relying on experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.
107
657Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes.
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658Gentrer (?) and colleagues gave the ambiguous sorting task to Northwestern students from an array of majors and found that all of the students figured out how to group phenomena by domains. But fewer could come up with groupings based on causal structure.
There was a group of students, however, who were particularly good at finding common deep structures. Students who had taken classes in a range of domains, like those in the Integrated Success Program
114
659As education pioneer John Dewey put it in "Logic, the theory of Inquiry" a problem well-put is half-solved.
115
660Seth Godin...wrote a book about disparaging the idea that "quitters never win." Godin argued that "Winners"--negatively meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain--quit first and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it. We fail when we stick with tasks we don't have the guts to quit.
136
661The trick is staying attended (?) to whether switching is simply a failure of performance, or astute recognition that better works(?) are available.
136
662The "End of History" illusion: From teenagers to senior citizens, we recognize that our desires and motivations changed a lot in the past, but believe they will not change much in the future. In Gilbert's terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.
156
663We learn who we are only by living, and not before.
161
664We 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.
161
665Einstellung effect--A psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.
177
666Freeman Dyson styled it this way--we need both focused frogs and visualizing birds. Birds fly high in the air and surveyed broad vistas of mathematics out to the horizon. Frogs live in the mud below and only see the flowers that grow nearby.
200
6673M and Best Inventors. Et seq.
203
668There is no statistically significant relationship between R&D spending and performance. (Save for the bottom 10% of spenders)
206
669If you're working on well-defined and well-understood problems, specialists work very, very well. As ambiguity and uncertainy increases, which is the norm for systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.
207
670Individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.
210
671In kind environments, where the goal is to recreate prior performance with as little deviation as possible, teams of specialists work superbly.
210
672The average expert was a horrific forecaster. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, advanced degrees, and even (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that some future event was impossible or nearly impossible, it occurred 15% of the time. A sure thing failed to transpire a quarter of the time.
219
673There was also a 'perverse inverse relationship' between fame and accuracy. The more likely an expert was to have his or her predictions featured in op-ed pages and television, the more likely they were always wrong. Or, not always wrong. Rather, as Tetlock and his coauthors succinctly put it in their book "Superforecasting," roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.
220
674Incredibly, the hedgehogs (narrow) experts performed especially poorly on long-term predictions within their domain of expertise. They actually got worse as they accumulated credentials and experience in their field. The more information they had to work with, the more they could fit any story to their worldview.
...Viewing every world event through their preferred keyhole made it easy to fashion compelling stories about anything that occurred and to tell the stories with adamant authority. In other words, they make great TV
221
675Researchers in Canada and the US began a 2017 study by asking a potentially diverse and well-educated group of adults to read arguments confirming their beliefs about controversial issues. When participants were then given a chance to get paid of they read contrary arguments, 2/3 decided they would rather not even look at the counterarguments, never mind seriously entertain them.
227
676In Tetlock's 20-year study, both foxes (wide) and hedgehogs (narrow) 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.
231
677The experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice--whatever it happened to be--with forces that pushed in the opposite direction.
257
678Patients with heart failure or cardiac arrest were less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology conference, when thousands of top cardiologists were away.
266
679Torn Meniscus--Sham Surgery
266
680The word amateur...comes from the latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor.
274
681A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun.
274
682The guild system in Europe arose in the middle ages as artisans and merchants sought to maintain and protect specialized skills and trades. Although such guilds often produced highly-trained and specialized individuals who perfected their trade through prolonged apprenticeships, they also encouraged conservatism and stifled innovation.
278
683Thriving ecosystems have porous boundaries between teams.
281
684Most (scientific) papers relied purely on conventional combinations of previous knowledge. They cited work from other journals that often appeared together in other studies lists of references. The "hit" papers, those that over the next decade were used by a huge number of other scientists featured ample conventional combinations, but also added an injection of unusual knowledge combinations.
281
685To recap: Work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.
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