10 things I learned from Range by David Epstein
1. While some people succeed through hyper specialization (Tiger Woods) other succeed through a range of experiences (Roger Federer)
2. Some disciplines are better than others for specializations because of repeated pattern recognition but in other more fluid situations specialization works against you.
In the examples of golf and chess they are very specific worlds with limited rules. Pattern recognition can help tremendously. He gives the example of fire fighting where pattern recognition can help someone who has had 1000s of housefires fight their next housefire, however, that same fire fighter in a forest fire or truck fire might end up making worse decisions because of their biases towards the housefire specialization.
3. Freestyle chess tournaments
These are chess tournaments that you can enter with any combination of human and computer players. The authors point is that the computers can do tactics much better than humans because they can study many millions of moves simultaneously. This allows the humans to focus on strategy. Gary Kasparov was involved in this project in the late 90s And he noticed that it leveled the playing field. It meant that somebody with less technical training could use a computer to become a much better player against the likes of Kasparov. The best teams at this time we're hybrids between humans and computers and the ones that perform the best with the humans that knew how to control the computers the best. This is happening in a big way right now with ChatGPT and other AI.
4. Conceptual cross disciplinary thinking is not taught in schools or universities
This is not exactly new knowledge, but their art some small efforts to improve this. Universities that try a core curriculum to introduce students to methods across all the sciences and humanities are attempting to do this.
5. Fermi Estimation
"problem designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximation of extreme scientific calculations, and such a problem is usually a back-of-the-envelope calculation."
6. Ospedale della Pietà
The extremely skilled musicians that performed Vivaldis music. They played at a virtuosic level on many instruments and started life as abandoned children, mostly of prostitutes.
7. Jimi Hendrix was a fan of Django Reinhardt
8. Learning slowly with struggling and errors is better than Learning quickly with hints
I saw this as a teacher, and I have experienced it firsthand. I have found that the skills that I enjoy the most and have maintained the longest are ones where I was willing to really struggle at first. Things like learning how to use tools, play music, Computer programming. All of these took lots of struggling an exploration.
Doing poorly now is setting up for doing better in the future.
9. Analogy thinking is important for deep understanding and solving problems you have not seen before
Multiple analogies are even better: combining 2 or more into a description of a problem and its solution.
10. People that are close to a project frequently dramatically overestimate how well it will go
for example, you may think that your road project could be finished in two years. However, when you look at analogies between very similar road projects and see that they all take between seven and nine years, if you take the approach of looking at analogous projects, you will frequently be able to correct your optimism.
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