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Psychologist Gary Klein is a pioneer of the “naturalistic decision making” (NDM) model of expertise; NDM researchers observe expert performers in their natural course of work to learn how they make high-stakes decisions under time pressure. Klein has shown that experts in an array of fields are remarkably similar to chess masters in that they instinctively recognize familiar patterns.

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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15 reads

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One of Klein’s colleagues, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, studied human decision making from the “heuristics and biases” model of human judgment. His findings could hardly have been more different from Klein’s. When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found th...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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11 reads

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 Science Program. Northwestern’s website for the program features an alum’s description: “Think of the In...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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2 reads

Chris Argyris, who helped create the Yale School of Management, noted the danger of treating the wicked world as if it is kind. He studied high-powered consultants from top business schools for fifteen years, and saw that they did really well on business school problems that were well defined...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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4 reads

“The benefits to increased match quality . . . outweigh the greater loss in skills.” Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Flynn conducted a study in which he compared the grade point averages of seniors at one of America’s top state universities, from neuroscience to English majors, to their performance on a test of critical thinking. The test gauged students’ ability to apply fundamental abstract concepts f...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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4 reads

He emphasized that there is a difference between the chain of command and the chain of communication, and that the difference represents a healthy cross-pressure. “I warned them, I’m going to communicate with all levels of the organization down to the shop floor, and you can’t feel suspicious...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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On the final weekend of the 2018 Winter Olympics, Sasha Cohen, a 2006 silver medalist figure skater, wrote an advice column to retiring athletes. “Olympic athletes need to understand that the rules for life are different from the rules for sports,” she wrote. “Yes, striving to accomplish a si...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help.

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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The overall experiment results went like this: the more hints that were available during training, the better the monkeys performed during early practice, and the worse they performed on test day. For the lists that Macduff spent three days practicing with automatic hints, he got zero correct...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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6 reads

If that eighth-grade classroom followed a typical academic plan over the course of the year, it is precisely the opposite of what science recommends for durable learning—one topic was probably confined to one week and another to the next. Like a lot of professional development efforts, ea...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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4 reads

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education published a report by six scientists and an accomplished teacher who were asked to identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list. All three im...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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“Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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6 reads

In a study using college math problems, students who learned in blocks—all examples of a particular type of problem at once—performed a lot worse come test time than students who studied the exact same problems but all mixed up. The blocked-practice students learned procedures for each ty...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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In one of Kornell and Bjork’s interleaving studies, 80 percent of students were sure they had learned better with blocked than mixed practice, whereas 80 percent performed in a manner that proved the opposite. The feeling of learning, it turns out, is based on before-your-eyes progress, while...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. Less successful problem solvers are more like most students in the Ambiguous Sorting Task: they mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated f...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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“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.

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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“admonitions such as ‘winners never quit and quitters never win,’ while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.” Levitt identified one of his own most important skills as “the willingness to jettison” a project or an entire area of study for a better fit. Winston Churchill’s “nev...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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“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 J. EPSTEIN

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1 read

Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, she told me, “but you have to understand that they may have blinders on. So what I try to do is take facts from them, not opinions.”

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Just as Tetlock says of the best forecasters, it is not what they think, but how they think. The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness. They are also extremely curious, and don’t merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them. “Depth can ...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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“Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility,” Weick wrote. “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.”

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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For wildland firefighters, their tools are what they know best. “Firefighting tools define the firefighter’s group membership, they are the firefighter’s reason for being deployed in the first place,” Weick wrote. “Given the central role of tools in defining the essence of a firefighter, it i...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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For example, in 2015, forecasters were asked if Greece would exit the eurozone that year. No country had ever left, so the question seemed totally unique. But there were plenty of examples of international negotiation failures, exits from international agreements, and forced currency conversi...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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an influential book on expert judgment was published that Kahneman told me impressed him “enormously.” It was a wide-ranging review of research that rocked psychology because it showed experience simply did not create skill in a wide range of real-world scenarios, from college administrators ...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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the students settled into a worksheet for what psychologists call “blocked” practice. That is, practicing the same thing repeatedly, each problem employing the same procedure. It leads to excellent immediate performance, but for knowledge to be flexible, it should be learned under varied cond...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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39 reads

“the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it.”

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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In Tetlock’s twenty-year study, both foxes and hedgehogs 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. Some hedgeh...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same. Psychologist Dan Gilbert called it the “end...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Rather than adapting to unfamiliar situations, whether airline accidents or fire tragedies, Weick saw that experienced groups became rigid under pressuew and "regress to what they know best."

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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The “desirable difficulty” coiner himself, Robert Bjork, once commented on Shaquille O’Neal’s perpetual free-throw woes to say that instead of continuing to practice from the free-throw line, O’Neal should practice from a foot in front of and behind it to learn the motor modulation he nee...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.”

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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He learned that specializing in a topic frequently did not bear fruit in the forecasts. “So if I know somebody [on the team] is a subject area expert, I am very, very happy to have access to them, in terms of asking questions and seeing what they dig up. But I’m not going to just say, ‘Ok...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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forecasters can improve by generating a list of separate events with deep structural similarities, rather than focusing only on internal details of the specific event in question. Few events are 100 percent novel—uniqueness is a matter of degree, as Tetlock puts it—and creating the list forces a ...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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In four separate fires in the 1990s, twenty-three elite wildland firefighters refused orders to drop their tools and perished beside them. Even when Rhoades eventually dropped his chainsaw, he felt like he was doing something unnatural. Weick found similar phenomena in Navy seamen who ignored...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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When it became utterly ludicrous to carry the saw further, Rhoades still “could not believe” he was parting with it. He felt naked, just as Larry Mulloy said he would have without a quantitative argument for a last-second launch reversal. At NASA, accepting a qualitative argument was like bei...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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the game’s strategic complexity provides a lesson: the bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly. According to Gary Marcus, a psychology and neural scie...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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5 reads

When we know the rules and answers, and they don’t change over time—chess, golf, playing classical music—an argument can be made for savant-like hyperspecialized practice from day one. But those are poor models of most things humans want to learn.

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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50 reads

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 ...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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If you’re asked to predict whether a particular horse will win a race or a particular politician will win an election, the more internal details you learn about any particular scenario—physical qualities of the specific horse, the background and strategy of the particular politician—the more ...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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In the face of the unexpected, the range of available analogies helped determine who learned something new. In the lone lab that did not make any new findings during Dunbar’s project, everyone had similar and highly specialized backgrounds, and analogies were almost never used. “When all ...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Seth Godin, author of some of the most popular career writing in the world, wrote a book disparaging the idea that “quitters never win.” Godin argued that “winners”—he generally meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain—quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not th...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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85 percent were either “not engaged” with their work or “actively disengaged.” In that condition, according to Seth Godin, quitting takes a lot more guts than continuing to be carried along like debris on an ocean wave. The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost ...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Paul Graham, computer scientist and cofounder of Y Combinator—the start-up funder of Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Twitch—encapsulated Ibarra’s tenets in a high school graduation speech he wrote, but never delivered: It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but i...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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“The shortcut [for a lack of ideas] is competition in the realm of computing power,” Yokoi explained. “When it comes to that . . . the screen manufacturers and expert graphics designers come out on top. Then Nintendo’s reason for existence disappears.” He felt that the lateral and vertica...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Roger Boisjoly’s unquantifiable argument that the cold weather was “away from goodness” was considered an emotional argument in NASA culture. It was based on interpretation of a photograph. It did not conform to the usual quantitative standards, so it was deemed inadmissible evidence and disr...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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Geveden joined NASA in 1990, and was a keen observer of the culture. “When I was coming through NASA,” he said, “I had the intuition that there’s a real conformance culture.” Early in his tenure, he attended a team-building class offered by the agency. On the very first day the instructor ask...

DAVID J. EPSTEIN

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3 reads

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