If you want to be really, really good at something, you should practice a lot. A whole lot. Right?
Not so fast, says David Epstein, author of Range and the guest on this episode. Epstein leads off with the intriguing story of what he’s called the Roger versus Tiger problem, contrasting the childhoods of each athletic superstar. Why isn’t the ‘deliberate practice’ model that seems to have been employed by Woods successful for more people? We’ve all heard the admonition to put in 10,000 hours. Instead, Epstein tells us, Federer’s path is the more common, and the better bet. (Plus, his mom sounds really cool!) Perhaps the biggest lesson I took from Epstein this week is that there are many ways to attain elite performance; there’s no perfect path. Indeed, as Epstein says, maybe quitting IS okay. (Now I’m not sure what my mother would think!)
So what did you take away from this week’s episode? Here are some questions to get you started:
1- What does Epstein mean when he says, “…society has overvalued specialists and undervalued generalists?” What is ‘match quality” and how does this concept help explain Epstein’s point?
2- Why do Roberts and Epstein recommend making changes in jobs more often that you might think? ‘We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.’ Why does Epstein suggest that when we feel we’re ‘stuck in a rut’ it’s really more like being ‘stuck’ in a hammock? What would constitute a credible fear of change in decisions such as job changes or moves?
3- What is analogical thinking, according to Epstein, and how is it different from what Daniel Kahneman calls ‘the inside view’?
4- Recall the tragic story of wildfire fighters who die getting overtaken by fire. What are we to learn from this story? How did this lesson apply equally in the story about NASA? Can you think of an example from your own life in which this lesson might apply (hopefully much less tragically)? Explain.
5- Epstein reminds us you can’t have perfect safety, and that in fact you don’t really want it, either; you have to have some kind of risk. What’s the difference between “mindless conformity” and “reckless deviance?” How can these two concepts help illustrate a better way to make important decisions? Again, can you think of any other examples- from your life or others’- that help illustrate these two types of errors?
READER COMMENTS
SaveyourSelf
Jun 6 2019 at 8:31am
1.a.What does Epstein mean when he says, “…society has overvalued specialists and undervalued generalists?”
Epstein is more than a bit misleading with this sentence. I suspect he is being intentionally disingenuous and inflammatory to spark interest in his later clarifications. He values specialists as much as anyone else. What he is really arguing is that strict, disciplined, focused specialization—particularly from an early age—is riskier (more likely to fail) compared with early diversification followed by later specialization. He’s arguing for a liberal arts education.
1.b.What is ‘match quality” and how does this concept help explain Epstein’s point?
Match quality is the fit between an individual’s interests, talents, and experiences relative to the job they are actually doing. David Epstein argues that the best way to find a good fit is to try many things before settling on any one of them. Interestingly, to me anyway, this is the same tactic you would employ to minimize at least one kind of sampling bias in statistics. I’m reaching back decades here to remember, but if you have only a very few data points, the risk of random chance misrepresenting the actual population you are interested in is high. Larger sample size (more data points) = less bias = more accurate models => smarter decisions. Epstein’s application of the same idea to dating is brilliant. I personally recommend something similar to any young people who will listen to me. I formed this idea after taking a statistics class in college.
“Date 30 people seriously before deciding who to marry. If you don’t, there is a good chance you will marry someone you think is perfect for you, only to run into someone even more perfect later on. Then you’re in a divorce pickle. The more people you date before getting married, the more likely you are to know a true positive outlier when you see him or her.”
This advice is not just statistical. It’s scientific. Scientific dating. Not very romantic (on the surface), but exceedingly practical. There was this notion of “going steady” when I was growing up. It was generally held by my classmates and myself as the only moral way to date. It was a awful mistake, on reflection, that led people to date less often, limiting what they could learn about themselves and about other people from dating. I think that the “going steady” ethos contributed to the high divorce rate later on in life. Ignorance is not bliss.
In science, like economics, everything is relative. There are no absolute frames of reference in our universe. So, in order to understand something, you have to have something else to compare it to. Is your federal government any good? Who knows? There’s only one. There’s nothing to compare it to. It could be the worst, but you can’t know until you have something to compare it to. “Something to compare it to…” can also be termed “competition.” Competition works, at least in part, because it gives people something to compare when they are evaluating options. Thus, competition is scientific because the scientific method requires, at a minimum, at least one comparison group. And this leads me, finally, to the conclusion that competitive markets are, for all practical purposes, problem solving machines of the scientific method. Which is to say that David Epstein’s approach to choosing jobs, choosing spouses, and choosing in general is more right than even he realizes.
SaveyourSelf
Jun 6 2019 at 9:28am
5.a.What’s the difference between “mindless conformity” and “reckless deviance?”
“Mindless conformity” can be thought of as allowing others to make your decisions for you. And “Reckless deviance” is making all decisions on your own without input from others. These can be thought of as extremes on a spectrum, though not necessarily a two dimensional spectrum.
5.b.How can these two concepts help illustrate a better way to make important decisions?
The optimal mix of independence vs. conformity seems to be adopting them both, but not at the same time. I’ve read quite a bit about this unusual method of decision making by committee where individual members are kept separate from one another, made to declare their opinions, and then brought together to average their opinions. Apparently, if you just bring people together and begin talking through ideas without first obtaining their thoughts in isolation, thought leaders emerge and everyone else conforms their opinions to those thought leaders. The “thought followers” can, when tested, literally forget they ever had opinions of their own. In fact, when tested, the followers often remember—incorrectly—that the opinions they adopted in the meetings were their opinions all along. Whatever they thought before the meeting is—at least sometimes—erased. Information is lost. Which is antithetical to the whole point of having a meeting in the first place.
5.c.Can you think of any other examples- from your life or others’- that help illustrate these two types of errors?
I’ve been writing comments on Econtalk regularly for years now. I read once in Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman that he found a personal bias in his grading of student’s essays. His students turned in books with multiple essays. He noticed that his grades on the multiple essays for each student rarely varied. It was as if his grade on the first essay dictated what the grades would be on all the essays that followed. So he stopped grading in series. He broke up the booklets and read essays in random order and blinded himself to the student’s other essay grades. And he found it made a huge difference in the grades. The variability in grades became far greater for each student, which he viewed as an improvement in precision and accuracy. And that story got me thinking. I looked at my own writing on Econtalk and noticed that, if I read through everyone’s comments before writing my own thoughts, my comments generally tended to be summaries of the best of the ideas of the other commenters. Which is good, I guess, but it meant my comments were redundant. I wasn’t contributing anything except kudos or criticisms. So I changed my style so that now I write my own essay and publish it before reading anyone else’s in the comments section. My ideas this way are noticeably more varied compared to those of others, more extreme and times, and more interesting. Then I read everyone else’s comments and, if motivated, I write a second comment that included consideration of the thoughts of the others. This is an improvement, I think, but there is risk in doing it this way. I sometimes write things that others have already mentioned. And sometimes my thoughts reveal my ignorance and not my brilliance on a particular subject. But I’ve maintained the discipline and taken my licks when they come and I think the forums have a little more information than they would otherwise because of it.
isomorphismes
Jun 22 2019 at 5:04am
This is something people bemoan about for more than half a century, yet everybody keeps paying specialists the big bucks and calling them when they have a problem. It’s hard to see the point as valid.
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