Good Morning,
This week’s book is Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.
In Range, Epstein covers the idea of specialization vs. having a broad set of knowledge and experience, providing anecdotes of extraordinarily great people, and where they fall in terms of Range.
Intro: Roger vs. Tiger
The book begins with the stories of two athletes.
The first is a boy whose father put a putter in his hands at 7 months old. At two years old, the boy was on national television driving a golf ball with a club as tall as himself (video here). At four, his father would drop him off at a golf course and let him play 8 hours a day. By the time he was in college, he was already a famous athlete.
The second story isn’t as well known. This boy’s mother was a tennis coach, yet she never coached him. He played squash, he skied, wrestled, swam, played basketball, tennis, and soccer. Unlike the first boy’s father, this one’s parents never had a plan for him. In his teenage years when he grew an interest in tennis, if anything, his parents tried to nudge him away from it. By the time he decided to play tennis professionally, he realized he was behind the other kids who had been practicing up to this point. The other kids had worked with coaches and spent many more hours playing tennis. Later, at the age where most legendary players retired, he was still ranked #1 in the world.
The first story is of Tiger Woods, considered one of the greatest golfers of all time. The second is of a man who has dominated an era in tennis, Roger Federer.
Tiger’s father gave him an extraordinary head start: hours and hours of deliberate practice. Instead, Roger spent his early years sampling various sports, at a time where his future competition was going the Tiger route.
This chart reflects common intuition: the elites get there by putting in more hours of practice. And Tiger Woods’ story has become an example of this. Excellence requires deliberate practice, and the greats get it as early as possible.
But that doesn’t explain Roger’s story. Now, if we examine athlete’s early years, it shatters our intuitive beliefs.
It seems that the athletes who excel later on, actually put less time into their respective sports as kids. In fact, they only put in more hours once they join high school and college teams. The Roger path to become a great athlete is more effective than the Tiger one, it’s just not as well known. The athletes who are at the very top of their leagues actually have a diverse background in sports. Perhaps Roger wasn’t behind those kids who had coaches and more practice. Evidence shows us that his years of “wasted” time, was the real advantage which he held over the others.
Some Chapter Highlights:
A study of United States tech companies showed that the fastest growing start-ups had an average founder age of 45 when the company began.
Music legend Duke Ellington hated music lessons and favored drawing and baseball as a kid.
Maryam Mirzakhani, who had her sights set on being a novelist, became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, the most esteemed prize in mathematics.
Many others who will be discussed in this book, who did not achieve greatness through deliberate practice.
The Cult of the Headstart
Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian man whose family had largely been lost in the Holocaust, had an ambition to have a special family one day. He spent hours in college reading biographies of great thinkers like Socrates and Einstein. He believed traditional education could not make children into people of that caliber and decided he would make his own children geniuses.
When Laszlo was married and expecting his first child, he decided to make her a chess champion. Susan Polgar was only 4 years old when her father would take her to chess clubs where she would defeat grown men. At 17 she became the first woman to qualify for the men’s world championship (but wasn’t allowed to compete). Laszlo’s next two daughters Sofia and Judit were also chess prodigies. The youngest went the furthest, ranking 8th overall in the world.
Laszlo’s experiment seemed to have worked, as it did for Tiger Woods’ father. But this can only work in what psychologist Robin Hogarth calls kind environments. Chess and golf are kind because one can learn based on repetitive, expected results. Chess masters see their moves almost instantly because they recognize patterns and familiarities.
Susan Polgar herself wrote, “You can get a lot further by being very good in tactics and have only a basic understanding of strategy”.
However, when it came to issues like predicting financial and political trends, estimating employee performance, making decisions on the health of patients, narrow experience did not help. In fact, it could reinforce the wrong ideas. These are examples of wicked environments.
Garry Kasparov, a chess master who lost to IBM’s deep blue in 1997 said “today, the free chess app on your phone is stronger than me”. This is because kind environments can eventually be automated. IBM’s AI, Watson, was amazing at the game Jeopardy!, but failed spectacularly when it was used for cancer research. The difference between the two is that the answers to Jeopardy! are known. Memorizing solutions might be impressive, but it’s a tactic.
Laszlo – like many people today – subscribed to the idea that head starts are necessary for greatness. What he didn’t account for is that the world is largely made of wicked environments, in which overtrained individuals may actually underperform.
Some Chapter Highlights:
In a study, college students were given a physical logic puzzle which could be solved 70 different ways. One group was paid for each correct solution. The second group was told to find the underlying logic of the puzzle. Every student in the second group found the general rule to all 70 solutions, while only one in the first group did. Rewarding short term success leads to a narrow range of solutions.
Nobel laureates are 21 times more likely to have amateur experience as performers compared to other scientists. Their success may be correlated to having a broad experience and skillset outside of the lab.
Garry Kasparov helped organize “advanced chess” tournaments. Every player is paired with a computer, which could calculate tactics better than grandmasters. This removed the tactical advantage and relied on actual strategy. Kasparov tied with players whom he dominated in regular matches. Further, teams of amateurs with computers even defeated masters with one supercomputer.
How the wicked world was made
In the 1980s, political science professor James Flynn had a revelation. He found that over time the average IQ score of people around the world increases. An average adult today would have ranked in the 98th percentile 100 years ago in terms of IQ. This is known as the Flynn Effect. Contrary to our intuition, this rise isn’t highly correlated with better education, life expectancies, or living standards etc. Scores hardly changed in school taught material (math, vocabulary etc.). Greater changes were in questions about relating abstract concepts.
In the 1920s and 30s, the Soviet Union drove social and economic change in remote areas. Pre-modern agricultural villages underwent industrial development, and the economy became more interconnected. This development was soon followed by schools to bring formal education to the areas. In 1931, psychologist Alexander Luria visited these areas to study the change in citizens’ overall intelligence. He visited modernized villages, and remote pre-modern villages as a control for his experiment.
When Luria gave the remote villagers tests to assess their classification abilities, they were usually unable to understand abstract concepts. For example, when asked to organize a variety of shapes into groups, “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.”
In contrast, the adults and children in the modernized villages were much better at these abstract experiments. They were able to infer based on contextunlike the previous generation. The change came from industrialization and modern schooling.
Modernization has shifted us from experience based thinking to abstraction and classification.
Despite these findings, Flynn found that today’s college education strongly favors hyperspecialization into one particular area of expertise. However, success still lies with those who have broad disciplines.
Some Chapter Highlights:
After obtaining highly specialized degrees, 75% of USA college graduates go into careers unrelated to their specialization.
James Flynn compared the GPAs of top USA university students to their performance on critical thinking tests. No correlation.
Chess masters and the pre-modern villagers succeed within their narrow worlds. However, when things change, their experience based tools fail them.
Fortunately, studies have found that training in thinking strategies can go a long way.
When less of the same is more
17th century Venice was an era where music dominated entertainment. During this time, there was a group whose performances attracted prominent people and leaders from all over Europe. The figlie del coro (“daughters of the choir”)were an all-female ensemble who played at a time where it was “unsuitable” for a woman to play many instruments. During a performance, they would play multiple instruments at a time, going back and forth. They weren’t the daughters of nobles or royalty. In fact, they were all orphan girls, from an ospedali (a hospital/orphanage).
At Venetian ospedalis, orphans were educated and put to work. Kids learned arithmetic, reading, and writing etc. while they also contributed to running the place. Part of the curriculum for girls was learning instruments in order to play at church ceremonies. Unlike most children, these girls were taught a wide variety of instruments rather than specializing in one. The result was playing for crowded rooms of people from all over the continent.
Many parents today choose instruments for their children at an early age and give them hours of practice and classes (the Tiger route). By contrast, well known cellist Yo-Yo Ma actually played violin and piano before the cello. He spent time on the first two before realizing he didn’t like them.
Music researcher John Slobada examined the applicants at a boarding school which accepted students by audition. He found that early learning did not help candidates. He also found that the most successful applicants gave an equal amount of time to at least 3 instruments.
Music legends such as Duke Ellington, Johnny Smith, Jack Cecchini, Dave Brubeck and many other actually did not learn from formal lessons. Many of them never even learned to read music. Jazz musician Django Reinhardt couldn’t read at all, neither music nor words. Yet, the author of the book ‘The Making of Jazz’ labeled Django: “without question, the single most important guitarist in the history of Jazz”.
Specializing can take the passion and interest out of doing something. It bars people from being able to explore their options and might be holding back potential legends.
Some Chapter Highlights:
The figlie choirs inspired the masters of classical music after them. Mozart spent his early teenage years in an ospedali.
Sports scientist Ian Yates stated: “Parents want their kids doing what the Olympians are doing right now, not what the Olympians were doing when they were twelve or thirteen.”
Learning, Fast and Slow
When examining classrooms around the world, many differences can be found in teaching styles. However, in almost every classroom in every country, teachers ask two types of questions:
Using procedures: After teaching a method students were asked to use it to find answers (e.g. given the height and width of a rectangle, find the area).
Making connections: These are more broad questions which require students to think. (e.g. Why does this formula work? What are the implications of this information?)
The important difference was in what teachers did after they asked a making connections question. In the higher performing countries, teachers tended to let students struggle with these problems without giving them hints. It would take time but they would eventually arrive the solution.
Nate Kornell, a cognitive psychologist, said “What you want is to make it easy to make it hard”. He was referring to the concept of desirable difficulties,that challenging and slower learning is ultimately more effective.
One such desirable difficulty is the generation effect: struggling to generate an answer, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning.
Another is interleaving: rather than blocking together similar challenges, mix up different problems. For example, shuffle flash cards. Solve different problems rather than one type of problem multiple times. Interleaving is shown to improve inductive reasoning.
In order to learn effectively, learn slow, and challenge yourself. Current performance isn’t a measure of future knowledge.
Chapter Highlights:
Psychologist Robert Bjork once commented that Shaq (notoriously awful at the free throw line) should practice shooting from a step ahead and behind the line, to learn the motor modulation he needed.
A study taught two groups Spanish vocabulary. One group was taught and tested on the same day. The other tested a month later. The first group did better. However, 8 years later when the two groups were tested again, the second group recalled 250% more than the first.
Thinking Outside Experience
Plato and Aristotle developed a model for the solar system which was widely accepted for over 2000 years. German astronomer Johannes Kepler observed a passing comet, whose behavior didn’t reflect the Aristotelian system. He began to observe the planets more and try to explain the behavior he saw.
Kepler’s challenge was that all the information he had access to was entirely based on the system he began to doubt. He would need to somehow form entirely new intuitions and ideas, almost from scratch. The brilliance of his thinking, however, was that he wielded analogies to other unrelated concepts on his quest to understand planetary motion. He compared the dissipation of light through space, to heat and smells. He compared the planets orbiting the sun to boatmen caught in a whirlpool. He continued making these analogies, finding flaws, and moving to another analogy.
Kepler eventually arrived at the idea that celestial bodies pull one another, and the larger ones had a stronger pull. His wanderings and analogies helped him grasp a concept from scratch and led to the invention of astrophysics. He later wrote, “I especially love analogies, my most faithful masters… one should make great use of them”.
We learn many concepts through analogies: molecular motion with billiard balls, electricity through water flow etc. We even base many new concepts and inventions on seemingly unrelated, but well understood ideas, such as artificial intelligence borrowing from neuroscience when developing neural networks.
We typically rely on what we already know to solve problems, putting an inside view on things. But a narrow lens can limit us from using tools and knowledge right in front of us. Using experience or knowledge from only a single domain rarely helps solve problems in a wicked world.
Psychologist Kevin Dunbar began documenting the most effective molecular biology labs in the world, and found they use a modern version of Keplerian thinking. He spent months at a single lab, observing the way things were done. He found that the most interesting moments were lab meetings where the entire lab would come together to discuss a problem they were facing. These meetings were open ended, and he witnessed them having spontaneous, creative discussions. The most effective of these discussions were filled with analogies. Some comparing their problems to papers they had read, but also going beyond biology to compare the problems to seemingly unrelated concepts. He noted that the labs with the broadest knowledge bases thrived the most. Labs where everyone had a similar specialization were actually slower at solving problems and lacked creativity.
Employing the broad skills of relation and analogy, paired with diversity of knowledge is the key to navigating open ended problems in the wicked world.
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Part 2 will be posted tomorrow here on substack!
Thanks for reading,
Sid