RANGE

• "And he refused to specialize in anything, preferring to keep an eye on the overall estate rather than any of its parts...And Nikolay's management produced the most brilliant results". Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
• "No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors" Arnold Toynbee, A Study of history

ROVER vs. TIGER

• Ten-thousand-hours rule to expertise.
• Given explicit instructions about the best method, individually supervised by an instructor, supplied with immediate informative feedback and knowledge of the results of their performance and repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.
• Learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge.
• Learning about the advantages of breadth and delayed specialization has changed the way I see myself and the world.

THE CULT OF THE HEAD START

• Experts in a array of fields are remarkably similar to chess masters in that they instinctively recognize familiar patterns.
• Daniel Kahneman, studied human decision making the "heuristics and biases" model of human judgment.
• In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.
• Moravec's paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
• Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board.
• Bigger-picture planning in chess - how to manage the little battles to win the war - is called strategy.
• The bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
• "AI systems are like savants." They need stable structures and narrow worlds.
• Noted the danger of treating the wicked world as if it is kind.
• "Having one foot outside your world"
• The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment.

HOW THE WICKED WORLD WAS MADE

• Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted fro complexity, and that has manifested as flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world.
• Where the very thoughts of premodern villagers were circumscribed by their direct experiences, modern minds are comparatively free.
• A city dweller traveling through the desert will be completely dependent on a nomad to keep him alive. So long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.
• Everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.
• One good tool is rarely enough in a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world. As the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said when he described analyzing the world in a technological and social change, "No tool is omnicompetent"
• "Fermi problems". Constantly made back-of-the-envelope estimates to help him approach problems. The ultimate lesson of the question was that the detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.
• A rapidly changing, wicked world demands conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.
• The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.

WHEN LESS OF THE SAME IS MORE

• You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.
• Children do not practices exercises to learn to talk...Children learn to read after their ability to talk has been well established.

LEARNING, FAST AND SLOW

• They were trying to turn a conceptual problem they didn't understand into a procedural one they could just execute. "We're very good, humans are, at trying to do the least amount of work that we have to do in order to accomplish a task."
• The concept of "desirable difficulties", obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term. excessive hint-giving, does the opposite; it bolsters immediate performance, but undermines progress in the long run.
• "Generation effect". Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning.
• The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.
• Training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.
• "Spacing", or distributed practice.
• It is what it sounds like, leaving time between practice sessions for the same material.
• Space between practice sessions creates the hardness that enhances learning. Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.
• The economists suggested that the professors who caused short-term struggle but long term gains were facilitating "deep learning" by making connections.
• Focusing on "using procedures" problems worked well forty years ago when the world was flush with jobs that paid middle-class salaries for procedural tasks like typing, filing, and working on an assembly line. "Increasingly jobs that pay well require employees to be able to solve unexpected problems, often while working in groups...These shifts in labor force demands have in turn put new and increasingly stringent demands on schools".
• Interleaving has been shown to improve inductive reasoning.
• Interleaving is a desirable difficulty that frequently holds for both physical and mental skills.
• Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem.
• Kind learning environment experts choose a strategy and then evaluate; experts in less repetitive environments evaluate and then choose.
• Learning deeply means learning slowly.

FOOLED BY EXPERTISE

• And each continued to miss the value of the other's ideas.
• As each man amassed more information fo his own view, each became more dogmatic, and the inadequacies in their models of the world more stark.
• The average expert was a horrific forecaster.
• They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain.
• The Danish proverb that warns "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future" was right.
• Their understanding was correct; the timeline was just a bit off.
• The more likely an expert was to have his or her predictions featured on op-ed (opposite the editorial page) pages and television, the more likely they were always wrong.
• What is the chance that a member will withdraw from the European Union by a target date?
• Bright people with wide-ranging interests and reading habits but no particular relevant background.
• Every team member still had to make individual predictions, but the team was scored by collective performance.
• In the face of uncertainty, individual breadth was critical.
• The most lofty ideal of teams: they became more than the sum of their parts.
• They continued to share information, challenge one another, and update their forecasts.
• "Active open-mindedness". The best forecasters view their hypotheses in need of testing.
• The aversion to contrary ideas is not a simple artifact of stupidity or ignorance.
• The most science-curious folk always chose to look at new evidence, wether or not it agreed with their current beliefs. Less science-curious adults were like hedgehogs, they become more resistant to contrary evidence and more politically polarized as they gained subject matter knowledge.
• "Depth can be inadequate without breadth"
• 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.
• In search of lessons, especially for predictions that turned out bad.

LEARNING TO DROP YOUR FAMILIAR TOOLS

• She's focusing on loss mitigation
• She's being risk adverse.
• A well-known cognitive bias, overemphasizing the importance of a single, dramatic memory.
• A simple statistical analysis, known as logistic regression.
• But it's often the case in groups meetings where the person who made the PowerPoint slides puts data in front of you, and we often just use the data people put in front of us.
• Is this the data that we want to make the decision that we need to make?
• A professor of organizational psychology wrote that the missed data was such a rudimentary mistake.
• Business professors around the world have been teaching Carter Racing for thirty years because it provides a stark lesson in the danger of reaching conclusions from incomplete data, and the folly of relying only on what is in front of you.
• NASA's real mistake was to rely on quantitative data too much.
• Only those seven data points were relevant to how the O-rings could be damaged or fail.
• "Unable to quantify", "supporting data was subjective", "hadn't done a good technical job"; "just didn't have enough conclusive data"; 
• Mission Evaluation Room: "In God We trust, All Others Bring Data"
• Qualitative assessment.
• Experienced groups became rigid under pressure and "regress to what they know best". They behaved like a collective hedgehog, bending an unfamiliar situation to a familiar comfort zone.
• Their silence was taken as a consent.
• Research on aviation accidents, for example, found that "a common pattern was the crew's decision to continue with their original plan" even when conditions changed. dramatically.
• If I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it, I tend to defend it and not to listen to those who question it. If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listened I can change it.
• The process culminated with more concern for being able to defend a decision than with using all available information to make the right one.
• When you don't have any data, you have to use reason.
• Sometimes other guys are able to get really good questions out that I wouldn't normally think of. And you want to share as much information as possible, and there isn't a lot of time.
• It was outside the normal pattern.
• The objections he got were emotional and philosophical, not tactical.
• She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization's toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable.
• Cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily.
• Searching for a solution even if it deviated from standard procedure.
• Balancing the risks of mindless conformity and reckless deviation.
• Individualistic culture that encouraged content dissent and cross-boundary communication.
• Von Braun went looking for problems, hunches and bad news.
• The Columbia disaster engendered an even stronger ill-fated congruence between process accountability and group-focused norms.
• Allegiance to hierarchy and procedure had ended in a disaster.
• NASA was not functioning as "a learning organization".
• He wanted a culture where everyone had the responsibility to protest if something didn't feel right.
• The new administrator demanded the kind of individualism and opinionated debate that could serve as a cross pressure for NASA's robust process accountability.
• His expectations for teamwork: "I told them I expect disagreement with my decisions at the time we're trying to make decisions, and that's the sign of organizational health".
• I warned them, I am going to communicate with all levels of the organization down to the shop floor.
• I just cant't get enough understanding of the organization from listening to the voices at the top.
• The teams needed elements of both hierarchy and individualism to both excel and survive.
• Incongruence, as the experimental research testified, help people to discover useful cues, and to drop the traditional tools when it makes sense.
• No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.

DELIBERATE AMATEURS

• At the moment, it's a Saturday morning theoretical experiment.
• He encouraged students to think laterally, broaden their experience, and forge their own path in search of match quality.
• Take your skills to a place that's not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.
• "Amateur" from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor.
• The principle of limited sloppiness (manque de sérieux). Be careful not to be too careful or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.
• The mental meandering along with the wisdom of deep experience.
• You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don't train people in thinking or reasoning.
• The system maintains you in a trench. You basically have all these parallel trenches, and it's very rare that anybody stands up and actually looks at the next trench to see what they are doing, and often it's related.
• In professional networks that ends as a fertile soil for successful groups, individuals move easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over.
• The entire network looks different when you compare a successful team with an unsuccessful team. The larger ecosystems that foster the formation of successful team.
• Wehther collaborators mixed and matched vibrantly.
• New collaborations allow creators to take ideas that are conventions in one area and bring them into a new area, where they are suddenly seen as an invention.
• Teams that included members from different institutions were more likely to be successful than those that did not, and teams that included members based in different countries had an advantage as well.
• Bring new skills to an old problem, or a new problem to old skills.
• He saw that creative explosions in domains from fiction writing and poetry to ceramics and medicine followed burst of immigration.
• Work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and the more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.
• Cascade all leads by example.

EXPANDING YOUR RANGE

• So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind.
• Compare yourself to yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you fell behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help.
• Mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head start are overrated.
• “It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment” Oliver Wendell Holmes
• "Ideas are not really lost, they are reactivated when useful"