Range – David Epstein – Review

In a world driven towards specialization, what’s the value created by a generalist in the real world. Jack of all trades but master of none is a statement to undermine the importance of a generalist by projecting them as superficial, however there are enough evidences that showcase them as essential elements to solve complex problems purely by them function of breath, which is what David Epstein terms as range.

There are critical questions that David tries to answer,

Does one need to narrow down early in his career and specialize?

Are experts able to solve all the problems related to their field? If so, why do you need organizations like Wazoku crowd which flags unsolved industry related problems with the expectation that someone from the public can solve it.

Are we expected to experience kind or wicked environments through the course of our lifetimes?  If it’s a kind environment, can’t AI perform better than humans?

As a toddler, Tiger Woods exhibited enormous talent when he entered his first Golf tournament and ended up winning the under 10 division. His father understood the enormity of his son's talent and narrowed down his focus to becoming a professional golf player. As it turned out, Tiger emerged a champion player with a clear head start. While on the other hand, we have an energetic Swedish kid who dabbled on sports ranging from basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis and soccer to name a few. It’s only as a teenager that he started taking tennis seriously, in fact his mother who happened to be a tennis coach herself never bothered teaching him. The champion player is none other than Roger Federer whose greatness is hard to match.

Ester Ledecká is a Czech athlete who won Gold medal in both in snowboarding and skiing at 2018 winter Olympics. Now, what’s so great about the victory, she is the first women in history to win gold medals in two separate disciplines. Both the sports are of contradicting nature, while snowboarding is hard to learn but easy to master, skiing is the exact opposite in terms of learning curve. In pursuit of greatness, why would a professional player focus on breadth of skillset rather than depth? Similarly, Ukrainian boxer, Vasly Lomachenko took the least amount of fights to win world titles in three different weight classes. Winning a boxing world title in a single category itself can consume an individual beyond measure, Vasly has been successful in thumping three of them. 

From the given sports examples, it’s evident that breadth in experience isn’t a bad strategy and does prepare an individual to deal with unforeseen circumstances.

Another tangent of discussions relates to how an individual’s genetic makeup can be a determinant in attaining success. The case of Jill Vs Priscilla offers a perplexing perspective on that regard. Jill and Priscilla were cursed with the same genetic dysfunction named as lipodystrophy while the former happened to be in wheelchair for her entire life, Priscilla went on to become track & field athlete earning herself a bronze medal in 2008 Olympics. If genes are a precursor to success, how do we explain such contrasting life experiences and accomplishments.

Chunking is an interesting concept that’s exhibited by professional chess players. An experiment was conducted wherein midgame chessboards positions were flashed to chess players for just three seconds and then asked to recreate the set up accurately. Apparently, grandmasters were able to accurately set up chessboards multiples times without a flaw, while masters could do it half the number of times and lesser club players never able to do it. Based on the experiment, we can conclude that grandmasters posses photographic memory which enables to be on top of the game.

However, when the same chess board was presented with pieces in an arrangement that would never happen in a real game, none of the grandmasters could re-create the board accurately, even when the pieces were lesser their struggle was apparent. The concept is termed as chunking, wherein grandmasters with extensive amount of practice have picked the ability to identify multiple game positions in fraction of a second. Familiar patterns represented meaningful chunks of pieces which the mind identifies and plans for a counter move in quick time. Thereby proving that grandmasters didn’t possess photographic memory after due consideration of the fall of events.

To emphasize a broader point, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov back in 1997 establishing the supremacy between human and artificial intelligence. Deep Blue can evaluate over 200 million positions per second which is a fraction of possible chess piece arrangements but clearly a league apart from the greatest human capacity. In a kind environment with clearly defined rules, an AI performs much better.  

An interesting take comes from the fictional story Alice in Wonderland, when asked by Gryphon to express her story, she picked the narration from the morning of the same day. As Alice succinctly puts it, “There is no use going back to yesterday, I was a different person back then.” We are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when personality changes more than we anticipate with time, experience and real-life situations.

Broadly, I agree with David’s point of view that taking life with an open mind, creating breadth of experiences, trying out disparate roles can enable an individual to navigate real-life situations with much better alacrity.