Todd's Review of Range by David Epstein

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
New York, Riverhead Books, 2019

Review by Todd I. Stark

This is a beautifully written and well justified discussion of the various specific things that are not taken into account by the widespread cultural emphasis on early specialization for success and our popular model of performance in terms of domain-specific expertise.

This takes the form of a single conclusion which I would paraphrase as: "we need to be able to play and explore widely and to color outside the lines for a while in order to become very good at solving the difficult problems we later encounter.  But our cultural obsession with specialization pushes counter to that." 

There is a constant tension of the author's confidence in his conclusion that generalists are uniquely valuable and desperately needed and his recognition that he is fighting an almost Quixotic uphill battle against powerful cultural trends and incentives for specialization. 

What he means by specialization and the factors closely tied to it:

1. Head Start: Encouraging children from an early age to narrowly pursue things they seem talented at or have an interest in.
    
2. Domain-Specificity: Training with heavy emphasis on the specific narrow range skills we know we will need in the target environment and assuming far transfer of skills from other activities will be limited or non-existent.
    
3. Disciplinary Focus: Viewing learning as consisting of accumulating facts and theories specific to a particular field or subfield of study in order to become highly skilled at working in that narrow field.
    
4. Persistence:  The idea that we should identify a passion early and stick with it no matter what because it’s what we’re good at and enjoy and so can become successful at it if we manage to persist.
    
5. Fast and Efficient Short-Term Learning:  The assumption that we are learning better when we feel familiar with the material quickly and that we are then learning more efficiently. 
   
   
    
   Against those powerful and popular specialization factors, Epstein presents several compelling lines of evidence:
    

1. Domain-Specificity varies with Kind vs. Wicked Learning:  The argument for early specialization and domain-specificity is based on the observation that we need a long period of deliberate practice to accumulate the patterns and skills specific to performing in that specific activity and that practicing or exploring other activities is unlikely to do anything helpful for our performance in our specialty.  Epstein counters that on closer inspection we find a crucial distinction between different kinds of domains and learning environments, where in some of them deliberate practice reliably makes us better but in others deliberate practice either helps much less or can even make us perform more poorly under some conditions.  So not all domains or learning environments are equally specific and the head start is not equally helpful in all activities. 
2. Creative Performance comes from early exploration and interdisciplinary learning:  Given the domain-specific view of expertise we tend to assume that in order for someone to perform at a high level in any activity, since they need expertise, they need to specialize in that activity.  Epstein counters that when we focus specifically on creative performance, we find that deep expertise can be invaluable but is not enough.  In order to come up with truly novel solutions to problems we need to make use of analogies that cross different domains while sharing deep structural similarities.  That means being familiar with a wider range of ideas and ways of thinking than just those in our specialty, and so Epstein says creative performance is found more in people with broader backgrounds.  Epstein argues that outstanding creative performance also tends to be associated with early exploration of different activities more than with early specialization. 
3. The Efficiency We Perceive from Narrow Immersion is Very Often Illusory: We tend to assume that when we feel more familiar with the activity or material that we are learning it.  That’s part of the strong intuitive appeal for immersion in an activity comes from, it feels like we are learning more when we are more immersed.  Epstein argues that the evidence from learning research show quite often exactly the opposite, that the learning we think we are doing under conditions of immersion is either much less or much shorter lived than we assume.  Robert Bjork’s concept of “desirable difficulty” in learning and the evidence base behind it plays a central role in this argument.   This, Epstein argues, tells us that “slow learning” which helps us make new connections between a wider range of experiences is much more conducive to learning in the long run than fast, efficient learning from immersion in a narrow subject matter.
4. Match Quality is Not Necessarily the Same as Early Passion: Part of the argument for early specialization is based on the assumption that people have certain interests and talents from early on and if they can find something that matches them well and start early, they can align their passion with a successful career in that activity.   Epstein argues that what we know about lifespan development tells us that people’s passions are not so fixed or narrow and finds a number of cases of exceptionally successful people who spent their lives exploring and trying different things before finding a match that was truly satisfying and successful for them.   

Range is an appeal to encourage exploration in our lives from early on and for experimenting and experiencing broadly in our learning, even though it may seem to be inefficient or slow.  Epstein does not deny the immense value of long deliberate specialized practice in “kind” domains or the value of having deep specialized experience in some areas, but he has also made a passionate and well-argued case for making better use of a completely different dimension of performance.  A dimension rooted in longer term developmental outcomes, more exploratory or playful learning, and an ongoing search for ever better matches between our interests and abilities and our activities. 

Review on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3I57PTPZXSYU4/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8

Book Review: NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Amazon review link.

The recent easy availability of science news has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we get the breaking news every time someone publishes anything even remotely interesting. On the other hand, it is even harder to perceive the consensus in scientific fields. We get the feeling of things changing and new data coming in, but not a good sense of the overall patterns and how they affect existing theories, because the process of consensus building in science happens over decades, not weeks.

The scientific consensus on child development and parenting has been gradually but insistently shifting over the past decade or so. The overall picture can't easily be seen from individual news stories, so books like NurtureShock which give some insight into the big picture are very important. NurtureShock to me represents the second huge bombshell in child development theory applicable to the average person. The first was presented in Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Revised and Updated, which argued persuasively and shockingly that most differences in parenting made little difference to long term outcomes in their children's lives. Harris insisted that children instead were mostly raised by socialization in their peer groups. NurtureShock doesn't argue the Nurture Assumption viewpoint at all (in fact it is largely consistent with Harris in most respects), but it focuses instead on the areas where parents really might be able make a difference.

What is the emerging new consensus according to NutureShock? The term is intended to reflect the shock that new parents feel when the fountain of natural wisdom about caring for children that they expect to serve them just doesn't appear. Our instincts are to love and care for our children, not to automatically know the right things to do. So we often turn to child development research. What does that tell us?

NurtureShock tells us that some of our commonsense is actually right afterall, and that some of the popular assumptions made about children are wildly off the mark. In particular, two big "myths" are identified. First, children are not just small adults, and we can't just apply the same principles to them that we apply to adults. Second, there are no supertraits that confer only good things: emotional intelligence, intelligence, gratitude, happiness, self-esteem, honesty, fairness, and so on can all have their dark side as well as their positive side. Negative elements can and do co-exist with high levels of positive traits.

For example, measured analytic intelligence (IQ) appears stable in adults, but changes in fits and spurts during childhood. This has significant implications for the use of childhood standardized testing to predict later ability.

Praising adults usually helps encourage them (as long as they believe it is sincere), but in children the effect is more often paradoxical. Children praised too much or for the wrong things actually end up worse off as a result.

Similarly, the once-trendy and still popular obsession with self-esteem turned out to have very little evidential support, and bullies often turn out to have very high self-esteem. Emotional intelligence is also not the panacea that some of its proponents originally suggested. Criminals appear to have a higher, not lower, level of emotional intelligence than the general population, and they use that ability to manipulate others. Popular kids in school use their skills at empathy not so much to be sympathetic, but to play social games that improve their status.

Even insisting on honesty is a mixed bag. Kids seem to learn to lie as a natural part of developing their thinking and social skills, it is related to intelligence. But you can't just ignore it because it is part of development, or it will become a habitual pattern for dealing with difficult social situations. Parents have to learn when and how to encourage honesty. Kids faced with the constant threat of punishment lie more to protect themselves rather than less, and they learn better to evade getting caught. They are generally more motivated to be honest to please parents than to avoid punishment.

The best thing about this book is that it doesn't just promote or adhere to a standard socio-political agenda for child raising the way many books do. This isn't just rehashed progressive or conservative childrearing strategies, it reinforces some of the best elements of each of the different models. We see that threats and punishment are a particularly ineffective way of dealing with dishonesty, but setting limits and enforcing rules is crucial to helping teens know they are cared for.

We find that, perhaps unsurprisingly, teens are particularly prone to boredom and often act out as a result, and that there is not too much we can do about it. They don't respond to small or moderate rewards, but then respond in an exaggerated way to large rewards. This extreme-based decision making pattern in teens varies greatly between individuals but in many leads to the distinctive kind of risk-taking judgment that teens often exhibit. Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of advice here, just perhaps a little understanding.

Among the most important findings in this book are those dealing with thinking skills, especially metacognition and "executive function" skills. Both educational research and brain science seem to be reinforcing the importance of helping children learn the skills for teaching themselves, controlling their own attention and motivation, and evaluating their own performance. Some of these skills are general, but many are specific to particular subjects, so teaching thinking skills cannot be separated from teaching subject matter, as was sometimes mistakenly done in the past. This is a very difficult topic, not one amenable to many easy heuristics, but it is crucial to education.

This is a very important book, rich with research examples and also practical examples from the authors. It will make you think twice about some of your instincts and some of the things you've accepted from popular belief, and that will in turn help make you a more flexible and skilled parent or teacher.