Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein argues that instead of aiming to hyper specialize, more people should be trying to gain multi-disciplinary experience. Instead of planning and implementing, they should be testing and learning. Specialization is necessary, but only after a sufficient test period.
In the past, people had to rely on their own experience to understand the world. But modern people are more scientific, more inclined to use abstract ideas and schemas to inform their understanding and are less reliant on their personal experiences. Premodern people missed the forest for the trees, while modern people miss the trees for the forest.
Flynn (they named the “Flynn effect” after him) conducted a study at one of the America’s top state universities to understand the correlation between GPA and critical thinking skills. He found that there was zero correlation.
Epstein, before being a journalist, was in grad school ad studied how changes in plant life might impact the subterranean permafrost. Years, later as an investigative journalist, he realized that he had committed statistical malpractice in one section of the thesis that earned him a master’s degree from Columbia University. Like many grad students, he only had to hit a button on the computer to do statistical analysis, he did not have to think deeply about how statistical analysis 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.”Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein
The point being – it is possible to hyperspecialize without having a true understanding of what you are doing. But the deeper point is that this is not a one-off event.
The economy is made up of people who are hyper specialists. In the crash of 2008, insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulated banks, securities, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers, but no one looks across these markets. Because everyone specializes, no one is trained to identify systemic issues.
Fermi problems force you to think broadly, without detailed prior knowledge. The problem with formal education is that people are not trained to solve Fermi problems at all.
The Inside View
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky counted the term “inside view.” When we make judgements, we take the inside view, based narrowly on the details of a particular project that is right in front of us.
Kahneman had a personal experience about the dangers of this tendency when he assembled a team to write a high school curriculum on the science of decision making. After a year of weekly meetings, he asked each person in the team how long they thought the project would take. The lowest estimate was one and a half years, and the highest estimate was two and a half years.
When Kahneman asked a team member, Seymour, who has considerable experience with designing curriculums how this one compared with other projects he had worked on, he thought for a while. Before this question, he thought it would take two years longer. Seymour said he hadn’t thought of comparing this project with the other he had worked on, but that about 40 percent of the teams he’d seen never finished at all, and not a single one he could think of took less than seven years.
Seymour realized that Kahneman’s group would never work on a project that might take six more years on a curriculum that might fail. After debating the new opinion for a few minutes, the group went ahead and trusted its average “about two years” estimate. They forged ahead and completed the project 8 years later. At which point, Kahneman was not even in the country or on the team anymore, and the agency that asked for the curriculum was no longer interested.
We are inclined to take the inside view, rather than considering the outside view. That is why entrepreneurs with a “me too” idea often do not consider the true likelihood that they will succeed or how long it will take them to build their business by comparing themselves to others. They will trust their own judgements that are based on unique surface features of their own business. The outside view is a very counter intuitive way of looking at things.
In a unique 2012 experiment, a business strategy professor, Lovallo and a few other researchers recruited Investors from large private equity firms who consider many projects in many different areas. The researchers theorized that if anyone would take the outside view it would be these guys.
The investors were told to assess a project they were working on with a detailed description of the steps to success and to return the project’s return on investment. They were then asked to write down their estimated ROI of similar projects to theirs which they knew about. In the end, the investors predicted that the return on their own project would be around 50 percent higher than the outside projects. They were asked to think more. They revised their estimates and were shocked at what they had done.
This phenomenon applies to many areas, from gambling on horse races to predicting who will win the election. The more internal details you learn about a scenario, the more likely you think it will be.
A Problem Well Put
In one of the most cited studies of expert problem solving ever conducted, an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it.Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein
Less successful problem solvers tend to mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated features. As Education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.”
Specializing Early
“Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are—their abilities and proclivities.Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein
In England and Wales, students must apply to a specific major and specialize early. In Scotland, students were given a two year sampling period, and then chose what they wanted to specialize in.
Malamud, an economist from Northwestern University, analyzed data for thousands of former students and found that college graduates in England and Wales were far more likely to leap out of their career fields than their later-specializing Scottish peers. Despite starting out behind in income because they had fewer specific skills, the Scots quickly caught up.
Quitters Never Win
Steven Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics asked his readers who were considering life changes to flip a digital coin. Heads – they make the change, tails – they do not. 20,000 people responded, agonizing over everything from online dating, getting a tattoo, having a child, or pondering a job change. Six months later, those who flipped heads and changed jobs were much happier than those who did not. According to Levitt, the study suggested that “winners never quit and quitters never win” is poor advice.
Winston Churchill’s “never give in, never, never, never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honor and good sense.”Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein
Young and Foolish
The expression “young and foolish” describes the tendency of young adults to gravitate to risky jobs, but it is not foolish at all. It is ideal. They have less experience than older workers, and so the first avenues they should try are those with high risk and reward, and that have high informational value. Attempting to be a professional athlete or actor or to found a lucrative start-up is unlikely to succeed, but the potential reward is extremely high. Thanks to constant feedback and an unforgiving weed-out process, those who try will learn quickly if they might be a match, at least compared to jobs with less constant feedback.Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein
Short term planning sounds like a terrible life strategy but it is ultimately the most efficient.
Sunk Costs
A recent international Gallup survey of more than two hundred thousand workers in 150 countries reported that 85 percent were either “not engaged” with their work or “actively disengaged.”Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein
In that condition, quitting takes more guts, but the problem is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” In The Confidence Game, professional poker player and psychology PhD Maria Konnikova explained that conmen know to begin by asking their marks for many small favors or investments before progressing to large asks. Once an investment has occurred, walking away becomes harder.
Van Gogh and Grit
Van Gogh was a paragon of persistence in the face of adversity. At each job he had, Vincent was convinced that if he worked harder than everyone around him, he would succeed. But then he would fail.
His interests constantly wavered. He first wanted to be an artist, devoted all his energy to one style and medium, then would abandon it soon thereafter.
“I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest” is Van Gogh in a nutshell, at least up until the final few years of his life when he settled on his unique style and creatively erupted.
Van Gosh was an example of match quality optimization. He tested options with maniacal intensity and got the maximum information signal about his fit as quickly as possible, and then moved to something else and repeated, until he had zigzagged his way to a place no one else had ever been, and where he alone excelled. His grit, his sticking to one thing was not very impressive, but it didn’t matter in the end.
The End of History Illusion
Francis Fukuyama originally coined the term “the end of history” as meaning the end of the war of ideas since liberal democracy has emerged as the most sustainable form of government.
The “end of history illusion” refers to a common pattern in people that was discovered by psychologist Dan Gilbert. Each person, no matter what their age, tends to think that they will not change much in the future even though they acknowledge that they have a changed a lot in the past.
As we age, we tend to become more agreeable, conscientious, less neurotic, and more emotionally stable. But we tend to become lower in openness.
Plan-and-Implement versus Test-and-learn
The “plan and implement” model is the idea that we should make long term plans and execute them without deviation, as opposed to the “test-and-learn” model. We are commonly told that geniuses opt for the “plan-and-implement” model, but this is not true. For example, the myth about Michelangelo was that he used to envision a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it and would simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. But he was a test-and-learn all-star. He constantly changed his plans. He left three-fifths of his sculptures unfinished, each time moving on to something more promising. And he was multiskilled, he was a sculptor, painter, master architect, and made engineering designs for fortifications in F