Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Very young people often have their goals set for them, or at least have a limited menu to choose from, and pursuing them with passion and resilience is the main challenge.

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

In Flynn’s terms, we now see the world through “scientific spectacles.” He means that rather than relying on our own direct experiences, we make sense of reality through classification schemes, using layers of abstract concepts to understand how pieces of information relate to one another. We have grown up in a world of classification schemes total

“In my opinion,” Gentner told me, “our ability to think relationally is one of the reasons we’re running the planet. Relations are really hard for other species.” Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and puts it in a new light, and allows humans to reason through problems they have never seen in unfamiliar

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.

“The huge Raven’s gains show that today’s children are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so,” Flynn concluded. They are more able to extract rules and patterns where none are given. Even in countries that have recently had a decrease in verbal and math IQ test scores, Raven’s scores went up. Th

As Alph Bingham noticed, for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before. (Think about the lab with only E. coli specialists from chapter 5.) If those fail, they’re stuck. For the most intractable problems, “our research shows that a domain-b

Or electrical engineer Claude Shannon, who launched the Information Age thanks to a philosophy course he took to fulfill a requirement at the University of Michigan. In it, he was exposed to the work of self-taught nineteenth-century English logician George Boole, who assigned a value of 1 to true statements and 0 to false statements and showed tha