Quote: “Laszlo’s experiment had worked. It worked so well that in the early 1990s he suggested that if his early specialization approach were applied to a thousand children, humanity could tackle problems like cancer and AIDS.” (Epstein 23)
Comment: Without going into deeper thought, this idea sounds great. You can solve so many problems with this thinking. But, I think it would also create many other problems. First, the world would be so miserable because no one is actually doing what they want. Secondly, every parent would try to specialize their kid to do something that would make a lot of money. But, not everyone can do that. We still need people to do jobs that aren’t as fancy as curing cancer.
Question: In your opinion, is this a good way of going about life? If you could go back in time and choose this way of life for yourself, would you?
Quote: “When narrow specialization is combined with an unkind domain, the human tendency to rely on experience of familiar patterns can backfire horribly—like the expert firefighters who suddenly make poor choices when faced with a fire in an unfamiliar structure.” (Epstein 32)
Comment: I thought this was an important quote to our class specifically because it brings almost a sigh of relief. At least to me. Specialization isn’t always the answer and it’s not always something to strive for. Specialization can be good in some cases, but in those same cases once the pattern is messed up even the slightest, it can lead to very challenging situations. But, you are more likely to solve those broken patterns with more experience. Which is why going out and trying different experiences and seeing different scenarios in your life can be very beneficial to you.
Question: Is it possible to specialize in one thing while also being able to go out and experience new things? Or do you have to start at a young age and dedicate your whole life to one thing?
Quote: “Laszlo’s experiment had worked. It worked so well that in the early 1990s he suggested that if his early specialization approach were applied to a thousand children, humanity could tackle problems like cancer and AIDS. After all, chest was just an arbitrary medium for his universal point” (Epstein 18).
Comment: I find it very weird that he decided to execute this experiment on his own children. Furthermore, the morals and ethics that come into play with forcing specialization on children when they are under five years old. They are unaware of what they want in life and forcing something upon them does not seem very ethical. His point still provides an interesting approach that if we had such specialization that we would be able to cure terrible diseases however, I feel as though this would create an unhappy and unilateral world. Kids being forced into their future at three years of age and not being able to explore for their own seems sad. Having the freedom and ability to live and explore for oneself allows society to move forward and for its citizens to thrive in different aspects of life.
Questions: Is it morally and ethically correct to force specialization on children at such a young age? Would it further hurt or benefit society that each person can only provide one specific entity to society?
Quote: “The player observes the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better” (Epstein 21).
Comment: This quote depicts the mind of some people that I believe is not quite beneficial. Repeating something over and over again is not going to give you the desired outcome, something has to change. Even if you can see your errors you have to change how you practice in order to produce a better outcome. Specialization in a specific area whether sports, academics, or others can be achieved by continuous deliberate practice. The term deliberate in the equation is truly important because one can practice all they want but that does not mean they are going to get better. Seeing your makes and learning from them, changing how you practice avoiding those mistakes truly makes one better. Engaging in the activity and being able to overcome the errors one makes is a beneficial skill to have. One is able to achieve an open mind which allows the growth mindset rather than a stagnant one.
Questions: How are we able to teach deliberate practice to ensure kids will learn from their mistakes and make the changes necessary to overcome their obstacles?
QUOTE: “The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them ‘wicked.’ 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” (Epstein pg. 21).
COMMENT: This quote caught my attention because I thought the “kind” vs. “wicked” environment was a very interesting topic, and I think this quote sort of explained the difference between the two. In a “kind” environment, you learn things through repetition. Trial and error, figuring out patterns and strategies – these are the kinds of things that you do in a kind environment. A “wicked” environment is more like the real world: there are some patterns but they aren’t always true, sometimes you will try a million different answers and they won’t necessarily be right. There is a clear “right” and “wrong” in a kind environment, while in a “wicked”, these morals can sometimes be swayed. When I think of “kind” and “wicked” domains in relation to school or academics, I think of math vs. English classes. Some kids like math classes because there is (almost?) always a right answer and the rest are wrong answers. With English classes (particularly interpretations of texts), there isn’t necessarily always a right or wrong way to interpret something, and there can be a million right answers and no wrong answers.
QUESTION: How do we adapt to a “wicked” environment? Most of the real world is a wicked environment so how do we improve at things that practice won’t necessarily make us better at?
#2
QUOTE: “[Chris Argyris] studied high-powered consultants from top business schools for fifteen years, and saw that they did really well on business school problems that were well defined and quickly assessed. But they employed what Argyris called single-loop learning, the kind that favors the first familiar solution that comes to mind. Whenever those solutions went wrong, the consultant usually got defensive. Argyris found their ‘brittle personalities’ particularly surprising given that ‘the essence of their job is to teach others how to do things differently’” (Epstein 30).
COMMENT: When reading this quote, I thought that as much as I hate to admit it, I do relate to the idea of single-loop learning. When doing assignments at school, I usually just do the first thing that comes to mind. This isn’t to say that I don’t think hard about the things I write or the problems I solve, it’s just that I normally trust my gut. I really just do what I think is expected of me and not necessarily what it is I want to do with each assignment. I found that in earlier years of school, being creative and doing things out of the instructions often led to me doing poorly on those assignments. Even if I did all that I was supposed to do but added a few things of my own, my teachers would get upset that it wasn’t done the way it was instructed. Now, I don’t put a lot of creativity into my work, which this quote reminds me of. These businessmen seem to be just giving the solutions they think are wanted and not really taking time to think out of the box.
QUESTION: How do you undo single-loop learning? In terms of getting jobs in the future, isn’t it better to just do what is expected of you so you’re more likely to have a stable career?
1. Quote: “They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employ what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward the previous solution that may no longer work. They’re still wasn’t avoiding the same old patterns. In the Wicked World, with defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.”
Comment: I liked this quote because it relates to the Growth mindset. For instance, it explains how by using previous experiences and skills that may not apply specifically to what someone is doing in the moment, those past experiences help them complete tasks better. Because they have involvement in other areas, it allows their brain to connect dots that others who are “specialists” in one field might not even be able to see. It allows them to look at things from different perspectives. For example, if someone has hobbies outside of their job such as painting, hiking or creative writing, they might be able to use those creative skills to think up different types of solutions to a work issue. As opposed to a coworker whose whole life revolves around their work and who has virtually no outside hobbies or passions. They might have a harder time using their imagination or thinking outside of the box about the issue because they do not exercise their creativity in other areas.
Question: what should someone trying to expand their horizons do to become more creative?
2. Quote: “They were both teachers and agreed that the school system was frustratingly one-size-fits-all, made for producing the “gray average mass,” as Laszlo put it… Susan was born in early 1969, and the experiment was on.”
Comment: I liked this quote for two reasons: the fact that Lazlo decided to homeschool his children because he believed the education system was making “one-size-fits-all” students and the fact that he did an experiment on his own kids. In my Philosophy class, we are learning about how some education systems’ goals are to foster obedient children, who will go to school and get a job, and will be good workers that will contribute to a productive society. We are learning about the importance of forging our own paths, not being afraid to ‘go against the grain’ and not being afraid to speak up against authority if they are doing something wrong. I think this is extremely important because uniqueness is becoming difficult to find in modern society, especially when it relates to stereotypical “9 to 5” jobs that are only interested in getting results, and not the wellbeing of their workers. I don’t think this is the case for all jobs or employers, but getting an education that values creativity and diversity is the first step towards avoiding becoming a part of the “gray average mass.” Also, I just thought it was a little strange that Lazlo’s goal in life was to have kids and make them into geniuses, instead of letting them just be happy kids and find their own interests for themselves.
Question: Why made Lazlo want to have kids who are geniuses?
1. Quote: After eight months of study, Laszlo took her to a smoky chess club in Budapest and challenged grown men to play his four-year-old daughter, whose legs dangled from her chair. Susan won her first game, and the man she beat stormed off. She entered the Budapest girls’ championship and won the under-eleven title. At age four she had not lost a game.” page 16. This may start a conversation just because of how interesting it is. This girl is only four years old and is winning against adults at chess. I don’t even know how to play, and if I did I probably wouldn’t be that good. This quote caught my attention very quickly. This quote caught my attention because it is crazy how this man raised their child to be as smart as she is. She is going to chess championships, and playing against adults who are a lot older than her when she is literally four years old. I think this quote is important to the story because it explains how smart she really is.
Quote 2: “Psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrated a similar, learned inflexibility among experienced practitioners when he gave college students a logic puzzle that involved hitting switches to turn light bulbs on and off in a sequence, and that they could play over and over. It could be solved in seventy different ways, with a tiny money reward for each success. The students were not given any rules, and so had to proceed by trial and error. If a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked.” page 31
This quote may start a conversation just because of how cool it is.
This quote captured my attention. This quote captured my attention because it is very intriguing. These people just gave college students a game, with no rules, but if they did a correct sequence they would get money. They did the correct sequence, and instead of trying to find more, they just did the same exact sequence to get more money, even though they didn’t know what the sequence did.
Quote: “They were both teachers and agreed that the school system was frustratingly one-size-fits-all, made for producing “the gray average mass,” as Lazlow put it. (Epstein 16)
Comment: I felt a deep connection to this quote, and though early in the chapter, I feel it encompasses the theme of it entirely. Lazlow feels that the modern school system, one that has had very little alteration since its creation, doesn’t create geniuses; that of which he wanted to make his children. To me “the gray average mass” is one of the best interpretations of the mass production of doers, not thinkers, put into place by most school systems. From around the age of five, all the way through adulthood, we are placed in a system designed by those whose brains don’t work the way ours do. The systems are designed without any note to the generational and intellectual gap that exists between today’s adults, and the young minds who are being shaped by said adults. I truly believe that any and every child in school today has the potential for greatness. The only deciding factor is how much they conform to the school system, and accept their future as just another one of many.
Questions: How long has this idea been around? That we are taught to be no different than the next, that we should strive for an office job, slaving away long hours with no passion for what we do? What change could realistically be made here? Will it ever change?
Quote: “Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those ones end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.” (Epstein 35)
Comment: I think that this quote ties in with the other one I used. Here Epstein states that though it’s nice to think of the world as black and white, where every decision is made with one-hundred percent certainty, and success is awarded to those who are obedient, its not. The world is a big mess of colors, a piece of abstract art if you will. You cannot succeed by following the same path as everyone else, because truly, what is a big house, and a shiny new car if you’re left with an empty mind? The world is ever changing, always evolving to a place where success is defined by some odd variable. Fifty years ago it was how much property you owned, whereas today it’s how many Bitcoin you have in your crypto wallet. You cannot plan for a future that is so uncertain, and that’s why generalists triumph in a specialized world.
Questions: What is the best course of action in such an uncertain world?
Why are we limited to such targeted major’s in college if the world needs more generalists?
Quote:
“Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
Comment:
This quote captured my attention because of how straightforward it is, giving us a little explanation as to why narrow specialization may not be as good as some think. Epstein also uses the word “broadly”, which is one word we used when describing generalists last class. That really stuck with me because my whole life I kind of knew what a generalist was, but never sat and really tried to understand it and the benefits it has.
Once I discovered hockey, that’s the only sport I wanted to play. Without even realizing it, I wanted to start narrow specialization, much later than say Tiger or the Polgar’s, in a sport that does not compare to the specialized world of golf or chess. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’m glad my mom pushed me away from narrow specialization. Now that I understand this concept, I often see myself using many different skills that I helped develop playing other sports, like footwork from lacrosse or hand-eye coordination from baseball.
Questions:
If broad integration is our greatest strength as a human, what really draws them into narrow specialization? Is it the living proof of it, Tiger? Is it the thought of focusing all of your energy on that one thing?
Quote:
“When we know the rules and answers, and they don’t change over time– chess, golf, playing classical music– an argument can be made for savant-like hyper specialized practice from day one. But those are poor models of most things humans want to learn”
Comment:
This quote really resonated with me because I found myself actively comparing every bit of it to myself and the hockey world. Although the rules of hockey stay the same and patterns are good to recognize, it’s not nearly as important compared to the activities Epstein gave as an example. Rather than this, it’s much more instinctively thinking, much faster paced, and there are too many things that can happen at once to make a play solely off recognizing patterns. Uncoincidentally, I can confidently say that I know one person who had a legit narrow and hyper specialized approach to hockey out of the countless number of people I’ve met throughout my hockey journey. A big reason I agree with the fact that Epstein mentioned how poor of a model this is, is because you can’t predict bumps in the road with most things in the real world. I’ve always been told, what if you have a career ending injury, then what? In the case where one’s whole life was dedicated to one thing, this question would really leave them with nowhere to go.
Questions:
Do you think people with a specialized approach take into account any possible bumps in the road? If yes, why do you think they still stick with this approach?
Quote. “On a normal day, the girls were at the gym by 7a.m. playing table tennis with trainers, then back home at 10:00 for breakfast, before a long day of chess. When Laszlo reached the limit of his expertise, he hired three coaches for his three geniuses in training”(17).
Comment. This is like Tiger Woods and his dad dropping him off all day to practice golf and that’s why it got my attention.
Question. Did he ever have any doubt that his kids wouldn’t like chess or that they would quit when they got older?
Quote. “The powerful lesson is that anything in the would can be conquered in the same way. It relies on one very important, and very unspoken, assumption: that chess and golf are representative examples of all activities that matter to you”(18).
Comment. This got my attention because I’m not sure what it means but I also understand it all at the same time.
Question. What is this lesson trying to tell me and other readers of this book?
Quote- “Laszlo’s experiment had worked. It worked so well that in the early 1990’s he suggested that if his early specialization approach was applied to thousands of children, humanity could tackle problems like cancer and AIDS” (18).
Comment- This quote is interesting to me because of how confident he is in his experiment. I like the response to the quote that says chess and golf have simple problems and rules. While something like cancer or AIDS is not just a simple step by step solution with rules you have to follow. It is important because this quote shows the ignorance of Laszlo. Sure he thinks that it may help solve the cures but he really took a simple task and compared it to a task no human has ever completed. I think Laszlo overestimates how people can grow. A child wont be able to even understand cancer or what it is or what causes it. It is silly to think a child will even comprehend something as complex as cancer at a young age. With chess it is different because there are rules that you need to follow.
Question- What would actually happen if we tried this experiment? Would it work?
Quote-”Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly” (29)
Comment – This quote is interesting to me because it explains the difference between Laszlo’s experiment and the generalization of chess players. It contrasted that you had to train chess from a young age and work hard and study chess all day. But these people with little to no chess experience can beat robots just by designing and implementing their own ideas to a program they can beat computer chess players. This proves that just by knowing how to solve problems and implement them into action, you can have the same amount of talent or skill or chess ranking as someone who has been training their whole life. This proves the whole point of the novel. The generalist will always succeed if they have the right skills. This quote is probably one of the most important in proving the importance of generalists in society.
Question- How will we see generalists in the later chapters of the novel, will they be winning in specialized tasks? Or will they be winning in multiple tasks?
Quote 1: “He decided that traditional education was broken, and that he could make his own children into geniuses, if he just gave them the right head start.” pg 15
Comment: This quote caught my attention immediately because it reminded me of Tiger’s father’s mindset with golf. Laszlo had the same idea that he could make his children specialists in a category if he trained them their whole lives, the entire time. If I were either of their children, personally I would want to spend my childhood and my free time doing what I wanted to do, not what my parents forced me to do. It is understandable to want your children to be intelligent, but I do not get why these two fathers think this way, why their children need to be the greatest. Even though their plans worked, and their children are both incredibly talented, famous, and have brought money to the family, but at what cost for them?
Question: Although it would be cool to have your children be talented in one category, why not multiple? Why wouldn’t you want your kids to have free will with what they want to do?
Quote 2: “When I asked Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player in history, to explain his decision process for a move, he told me, ‘I see a move, a combination, almost instantly,’ based on patterns he has seen before.” pg 19
Comment: I thought this quote was intriguing because the greatest chess player of all time studied different men’s plays based on their careers. With firefighters, 80 percent of them decide their move within seconds as if they were responding to flames and collapsing buildings. He made his plays in his games based on certain plays and moves he had seen in men from the past. With nonwartime naval commanders, 95 percent of them “chose a common course of action that was the first to come to mind.” He studied these moves and decisions based off natural human instinct, based on different careers. This way of thinking has to do with psychology, meaning that even though he is the greatest in history, he knows more than just chess, meaning he is probably not a specialist and has an education elsewhere.
Question: If Kasparov is the greatest play of all time, why does he use other men’s plays to perfect his own?
“After eight months of study, Laszlo took her to a smoky chess club in Budapest and challenged grown Men to play his for-year-old daughter, whose legs dangled from the chair” (pg 16)
This quote captured my attention because his four year old daughter was beating grown men in chess. Chess is a very objective game to try and master, and how easy it was for his daughter to master the game is very impressive. My question for this quote is how can someone so young be able to master a game that takes so much thought?
“ The students were not given any rules, and so had to proceed by trial and error. If a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked. Later on, new students were added, and all were now asked to discover the general rule of all solutions, while only one of the students who had been getting rewarded for a single solution did.” (pg 31)
This quote stood out to me because it said “ They repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked”. That part of the quote stood out to me because the students were not focused on how they figured out the solutions, they were more focused on just getting more money. The one student that did they figured out the general goal for the solutions and they were the one that was getting rewarded. My question for this quote is, if the students didn’t know about the reward or were not getting rewarded after the questions, would they have focused on the general rule of the solutions and paid more attention to that rather than the reward?
QUOTE
“They were both teachers and agreed that the school system was frustratingly one-size-fits-all, made for producing “the gray average mass.” as Laszlo put it.” -Page 16.
COMMENT
This quote caught my attention specifically because I believe the structure of the school system is inherently broken and is designed to take away kids’ individuality and sculpt them into citizens who cannot think outside of the box. I believe that what’s ‘outside the box’ might threaten the way our society is structured, and that teaching people to think for themselves and test the foundation on which our society is built is not what higher officials want. Therefore, we spend hours sitting in neat rows, are taught that there is only one right answer and one way of thinking, that it is wrong to make mistakes and it’s not okay if you have a different way of learning than your peers. This produces the ‘gray average mass’ Laszlo describes in his quote– Where freethinkers do not exist and people beat themselves up for making mistakes as opposed to learning from them. Individuals who are accustomed to rigid rules have the potential to strive in this environment, but a vast majority of kids, (increasingly more so in recent generations) are struggling with anxiety and mental health disorders which make it hard for them to thrive under these circumstances.
QUESTION
If all schools were designed to embrace kids’ individuality and their unique ways of perceiving information, how might the modern world function? Would certain issues like environmental health and war be affected by this change?
QUOTE NO. 2
“The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is ‘Martian Tennis.’ You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.” Page 31.
COMMENT NO. 2
This quote caught my attention because I believe that the author is correct when they state that there are no obvious rules in life. Life is truly what you make of it, and the ‘rules’ by which you play can have a strong impact on the outcome of your life. Being fluid, well-rounded, resilient and in-tune with your surroundings may help you to succeed in this ever-changing world. Life hardly ever goes according to plan, the expectations that we have for certain situations and outcomes are rarely what genuinely happens. This ties in to the first quote I chose because I believe that kids can learn how to adapt to change and enhance their problem-solving skills if the school systems encouraged them to embrace their differences instead of producing uniform mindsets.
QUESTION NO. 2
Is someone who is not afraid to make mistakes in order to meet their goal necessarily more equipped to take on challenges than someone who strives for perfection?
Quote: “But when the rules are altered just slightly, it makes experts appear to have traded flexibility for narrow skill. In research in the game of bridge where the order of play was altered, experts had a more difficult time adapting to new rules than did nonexperts (Epstein 32)”.
Comment (150-200 words): This quote stood out to me merely because it shows experts rely on patterns and strategy especially if it comes to something they are good at. This can be relatable in some aspects, especially in sports, I remember being in dance for 12 years and deciding to switch to cheerleading. The switch for me was harder because dance movements are meant to be fluid and pretty, and cheer movements are sharp and fast as good as differences. The counts for cheer and dance are not the same where dance is 1,2,3,4 and cheer is 1,3,5,7. Looking deeper into this the book puts in this example to show us how these strategies and practices are so important to professionals and nonexperts or people who are more well-rounded in things and not just one thing are able to pick up on different things and rules and are not stuck in one mindset.
Question: Is being more well-rounded better than being specifically good at one thing ?
Quote: “Those are the same twenty pieces of information, but over the course of your life, you’ve learned patterns of words that allow you to instantly make sense of the second arrangement, and to remember it much more easily. Your restaurant server doesn’t just happen to have a miraculous memory; like musicians and quarterbacks, they’ve learned to group recurring information into chunks (Epstein 26)”.
Comment (150-200 words): Almost like the quote I used before it shows we as people rely heavily on practice and patterns in our daily life. It takes time to learn a skill and be good at that certain skill. This quote made me think about daily occurrences in people’s lives and how we are used to growing accustomed to our practices, whether it’s work or school we fall into these patterns and routines without even realizing it. We are able to shape ourselves and choose these patterns according to what we do, yet sometimes we cannot choose these for ourselves. We are shaped by people around us, whether our parents put us in a certain sport at a young age or we get a job as a waitress based on our life situations. Life throws us these opportunities and whether we like it or not we fall into them into the patterns and routines we are given though life experiences.
Question: How can we be more willing to choose our own paths and fall into certain patterns?
13 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 6”
Quote: “Laszlo’s experiment had worked. It worked so well that in the early 1990s he suggested that if his early specialization approach were applied to a thousand children, humanity could tackle problems like cancer and AIDS.” (Epstein 23)
Comment: Without going into deeper thought, this idea sounds great. You can solve so many problems with this thinking. But, I think it would also create many other problems. First, the world would be so miserable because no one is actually doing what they want. Secondly, every parent would try to specialize their kid to do something that would make a lot of money. But, not everyone can do that. We still need people to do jobs that aren’t as fancy as curing cancer.
Question: In your opinion, is this a good way of going about life? If you could go back in time and choose this way of life for yourself, would you?
Quote: “When narrow specialization is combined with an unkind domain, the human tendency to rely on experience of familiar patterns can backfire horribly—like the expert firefighters who suddenly make poor choices when faced with a fire in an unfamiliar structure.” (Epstein 32)
Comment: I thought this was an important quote to our class specifically because it brings almost a sigh of relief. At least to me. Specialization isn’t always the answer and it’s not always something to strive for. Specialization can be good in some cases, but in those same cases once the pattern is messed up even the slightest, it can lead to very challenging situations. But, you are more likely to solve those broken patterns with more experience. Which is why going out and trying different experiences and seeing different scenarios in your life can be very beneficial to you.
Question: Is it possible to specialize in one thing while also being able to go out and experience new things? Or do you have to start at a young age and dedicate your whole life to one thing?
Quote: “Laszlo’s experiment had worked. It worked so well that in the early 1990s he suggested that if his early specialization approach were applied to a thousand children, humanity could tackle problems like cancer and AIDS. After all, chest was just an arbitrary medium for his universal point” (Epstein 18).
Comment: I find it very weird that he decided to execute this experiment on his own children. Furthermore, the morals and ethics that come into play with forcing specialization on children when they are under five years old. They are unaware of what they want in life and forcing something upon them does not seem very ethical. His point still provides an interesting approach that if we had such specialization that we would be able to cure terrible diseases however, I feel as though this would create an unhappy and unilateral world. Kids being forced into their future at three years of age and not being able to explore for their own seems sad. Having the freedom and ability to live and explore for oneself allows society to move forward and for its citizens to thrive in different aspects of life.
Questions: Is it morally and ethically correct to force specialization on children at such a young age? Would it further hurt or benefit society that each person can only provide one specific entity to society?
Quote: “The player observes the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better” (Epstein 21).
Comment: This quote depicts the mind of some people that I believe is not quite beneficial. Repeating something over and over again is not going to give you the desired outcome, something has to change. Even if you can see your errors you have to change how you practice in order to produce a better outcome. Specialization in a specific area whether sports, academics, or others can be achieved by continuous deliberate practice. The term deliberate in the equation is truly important because one can practice all they want but that does not mean they are going to get better. Seeing your makes and learning from them, changing how you practice avoiding those mistakes truly makes one better. Engaging in the activity and being able to overcome the errors one makes is a beneficial skill to have. One is able to achieve an open mind which allows the growth mindset rather than a stagnant one.
Questions: How are we able to teach deliberate practice to ensure kids will learn from their mistakes and make the changes necessary to overcome their obstacles?
#1
QUOTE: “The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them ‘wicked.’ 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” (Epstein pg. 21).
COMMENT: This quote caught my attention because I thought the “kind” vs. “wicked” environment was a very interesting topic, and I think this quote sort of explained the difference between the two. In a “kind” environment, you learn things through repetition. Trial and error, figuring out patterns and strategies – these are the kinds of things that you do in a kind environment. A “wicked” environment is more like the real world: there are some patterns but they aren’t always true, sometimes you will try a million different answers and they won’t necessarily be right. There is a clear “right” and “wrong” in a kind environment, while in a “wicked”, these morals can sometimes be swayed. When I think of “kind” and “wicked” domains in relation to school or academics, I think of math vs. English classes. Some kids like math classes because there is (almost?) always a right answer and the rest are wrong answers. With English classes (particularly interpretations of texts), there isn’t necessarily always a right or wrong way to interpret something, and there can be a million right answers and no wrong answers.
QUESTION: How do we adapt to a “wicked” environment? Most of the real world is a wicked environment so how do we improve at things that practice won’t necessarily make us better at?
#2
QUOTE: “[Chris Argyris] studied high-powered consultants from top business schools for fifteen years, and saw that they did really well on business school problems that were well defined and quickly assessed. But they employed what Argyris called single-loop learning, the kind that favors the first familiar solution that comes to mind. Whenever those solutions went wrong, the consultant usually got defensive. Argyris found their ‘brittle personalities’ particularly surprising given that ‘the essence of their job is to teach others how to do things differently’” (Epstein 30).
COMMENT: When reading this quote, I thought that as much as I hate to admit it, I do relate to the idea of single-loop learning. When doing assignments at school, I usually just do the first thing that comes to mind. This isn’t to say that I don’t think hard about the things I write or the problems I solve, it’s just that I normally trust my gut. I really just do what I think is expected of me and not necessarily what it is I want to do with each assignment. I found that in earlier years of school, being creative and doing things out of the instructions often led to me doing poorly on those assignments. Even if I did all that I was supposed to do but added a few things of my own, my teachers would get upset that it wasn’t done the way it was instructed. Now, I don’t put a lot of creativity into my work, which this quote reminds me of. These businessmen seem to be just giving the solutions they think are wanted and not really taking time to think out of the box.
QUESTION: How do you undo single-loop learning? In terms of getting jobs in the future, isn’t it better to just do what is expected of you so you’re more likely to have a stable career?
1. Quote: “They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employ what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward the previous solution that may no longer work. They’re still wasn’t avoiding the same old patterns. In the Wicked World, with defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.”
Comment: I liked this quote because it relates to the Growth mindset. For instance, it explains how by using previous experiences and skills that may not apply specifically to what someone is doing in the moment, those past experiences help them complete tasks better. Because they have involvement in other areas, it allows their brain to connect dots that others who are “specialists” in one field might not even be able to see. It allows them to look at things from different perspectives. For example, if someone has hobbies outside of their job such as painting, hiking or creative writing, they might be able to use those creative skills to think up different types of solutions to a work issue. As opposed to a coworker whose whole life revolves around their work and who has virtually no outside hobbies or passions. They might have a harder time using their imagination or thinking outside of the box about the issue because they do not exercise their creativity in other areas.
Question: what should someone trying to expand their horizons do to become more creative?
2. Quote: “They were both teachers and agreed that the school system was frustratingly one-size-fits-all, made for producing the “gray average mass,” as Laszlo put it… Susan was born in early 1969, and the experiment was on.”
Comment: I liked this quote for two reasons: the fact that Lazlo decided to homeschool his children because he believed the education system was making “one-size-fits-all” students and the fact that he did an experiment on his own kids. In my Philosophy class, we are learning about how some education systems’ goals are to foster obedient children, who will go to school and get a job, and will be good workers that will contribute to a productive society. We are learning about the importance of forging our own paths, not being afraid to ‘go against the grain’ and not being afraid to speak up against authority if they are doing something wrong. I think this is extremely important because uniqueness is becoming difficult to find in modern society, especially when it relates to stereotypical “9 to 5” jobs that are only interested in getting results, and not the wellbeing of their workers. I don’t think this is the case for all jobs or employers, but getting an education that values creativity and diversity is the first step towards avoiding becoming a part of the “gray average mass.” Also, I just thought it was a little strange that Lazlo’s goal in life was to have kids and make them into geniuses, instead of letting them just be happy kids and find their own interests for themselves.
Question: Why made Lazlo want to have kids who are geniuses?
1. Quote: After eight months of study, Laszlo took her to a smoky chess club in Budapest and challenged grown men to play his four-year-old daughter, whose legs dangled from her chair. Susan won her first game, and the man she beat stormed off. She entered the Budapest girls’ championship and won the under-eleven title. At age four she had not lost a game.” page 16. This may start a conversation just because of how interesting it is. This girl is only four years old and is winning against adults at chess. I don’t even know how to play, and if I did I probably wouldn’t be that good. This quote caught my attention very quickly. This quote caught my attention because it is crazy how this man raised their child to be as smart as she is. She is going to chess championships, and playing against adults who are a lot older than her when she is literally four years old. I think this quote is important to the story because it explains how smart she really is.
Quote 2: “Psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrated a similar, learned inflexibility among experienced practitioners when he gave college students a logic puzzle that involved hitting switches to turn light bulbs on and off in a sequence, and that they could play over and over. It could be solved in seventy different ways, with a tiny money reward for each success. The students were not given any rules, and so had to proceed by trial and error. If a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked.” page 31
This quote may start a conversation just because of how cool it is.
This quote captured my attention. This quote captured my attention because it is very intriguing. These people just gave college students a game, with no rules, but if they did a correct sequence they would get money. They did the correct sequence, and instead of trying to find more, they just did the same exact sequence to get more money, even though they didn’t know what the sequence did.
Quote: “They were both teachers and agreed that the school system was frustratingly one-size-fits-all, made for producing “the gray average mass,” as Lazlow put it. (Epstein 16)
Comment: I felt a deep connection to this quote, and though early in the chapter, I feel it encompasses the theme of it entirely. Lazlow feels that the modern school system, one that has had very little alteration since its creation, doesn’t create geniuses; that of which he wanted to make his children. To me “the gray average mass” is one of the best interpretations of the mass production of doers, not thinkers, put into place by most school systems. From around the age of five, all the way through adulthood, we are placed in a system designed by those whose brains don’t work the way ours do. The systems are designed without any note to the generational and intellectual gap that exists between today’s adults, and the young minds who are being shaped by said adults. I truly believe that any and every child in school today has the potential for greatness. The only deciding factor is how much they conform to the school system, and accept their future as just another one of many.
Questions: How long has this idea been around? That we are taught to be no different than the next, that we should strive for an office job, slaving away long hours with no passion for what we do? What change could realistically be made here? Will it ever change?
Quote: “Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those ones end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.” (Epstein 35)
Comment: I think that this quote ties in with the other one I used. Here Epstein states that though it’s nice to think of the world as black and white, where every decision is made with one-hundred percent certainty, and success is awarded to those who are obedient, its not. The world is a big mess of colors, a piece of abstract art if you will. You cannot succeed by following the same path as everyone else, because truly, what is a big house, and a shiny new car if you’re left with an empty mind? The world is ever changing, always evolving to a place where success is defined by some odd variable. Fifty years ago it was how much property you owned, whereas today it’s how many Bitcoin you have in your crypto wallet. You cannot plan for a future that is so uncertain, and that’s why generalists triumph in a specialized world.
Questions: What is the best course of action in such an uncertain world?
Why are we limited to such targeted major’s in college if the world needs more generalists?
Quote:
“Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
Comment:
This quote captured my attention because of how straightforward it is, giving us a little explanation as to why narrow specialization may not be as good as some think. Epstein also uses the word “broadly”, which is one word we used when describing generalists last class. That really stuck with me because my whole life I kind of knew what a generalist was, but never sat and really tried to understand it and the benefits it has.
Once I discovered hockey, that’s the only sport I wanted to play. Without even realizing it, I wanted to start narrow specialization, much later than say Tiger or the Polgar’s, in a sport that does not compare to the specialized world of golf or chess. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’m glad my mom pushed me away from narrow specialization. Now that I understand this concept, I often see myself using many different skills that I helped develop playing other sports, like footwork from lacrosse or hand-eye coordination from baseball.
Questions:
If broad integration is our greatest strength as a human, what really draws them into narrow specialization? Is it the living proof of it, Tiger? Is it the thought of focusing all of your energy on that one thing?
Quote:
“When we know the rules and answers, and they don’t change over time– chess, golf, playing classical music– an argument can be made for savant-like hyper specialized practice from day one. But those are poor models of most things humans want to learn”
Comment:
This quote really resonated with me because I found myself actively comparing every bit of it to myself and the hockey world. Although the rules of hockey stay the same and patterns are good to recognize, it’s not nearly as important compared to the activities Epstein gave as an example. Rather than this, it’s much more instinctively thinking, much faster paced, and there are too many things that can happen at once to make a play solely off recognizing patterns. Uncoincidentally, I can confidently say that I know one person who had a legit narrow and hyper specialized approach to hockey out of the countless number of people I’ve met throughout my hockey journey. A big reason I agree with the fact that Epstein mentioned how poor of a model this is, is because you can’t predict bumps in the road with most things in the real world. I’ve always been told, what if you have a career ending injury, then what? In the case where one’s whole life was dedicated to one thing, this question would really leave them with nowhere to go.
Questions:
Do you think people with a specialized approach take into account any possible bumps in the road? If yes, why do you think they still stick with this approach?
Quote. “On a normal day, the girls were at the gym by 7a.m. playing table tennis with trainers, then back home at 10:00 for breakfast, before a long day of chess. When Laszlo reached the limit of his expertise, he hired three coaches for his three geniuses in training”(17).
Comment. This is like Tiger Woods and his dad dropping him off all day to practice golf and that’s why it got my attention.
Question. Did he ever have any doubt that his kids wouldn’t like chess or that they would quit when they got older?
Quote. “The powerful lesson is that anything in the would can be conquered in the same way. It relies on one very important, and very unspoken, assumption: that chess and golf are representative examples of all activities that matter to you”(18).
Comment. This got my attention because I’m not sure what it means but I also understand it all at the same time.
Question. What is this lesson trying to tell me and other readers of this book?
Quote- “Laszlo’s experiment had worked. It worked so well that in the early 1990’s he suggested that if his early specialization approach was applied to thousands of children, humanity could tackle problems like cancer and AIDS” (18).
Comment- This quote is interesting to me because of how confident he is in his experiment. I like the response to the quote that says chess and golf have simple problems and rules. While something like cancer or AIDS is not just a simple step by step solution with rules you have to follow. It is important because this quote shows the ignorance of Laszlo. Sure he thinks that it may help solve the cures but he really took a simple task and compared it to a task no human has ever completed. I think Laszlo overestimates how people can grow. A child wont be able to even understand cancer or what it is or what causes it. It is silly to think a child will even comprehend something as complex as cancer at a young age. With chess it is different because there are rules that you need to follow.
Question- What would actually happen if we tried this experiment? Would it work?
Quote-”Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly” (29)
Comment – This quote is interesting to me because it explains the difference between Laszlo’s experiment and the generalization of chess players. It contrasted that you had to train chess from a young age and work hard and study chess all day. But these people with little to no chess experience can beat robots just by designing and implementing their own ideas to a program they can beat computer chess players. This proves that just by knowing how to solve problems and implement them into action, you can have the same amount of talent or skill or chess ranking as someone who has been training their whole life. This proves the whole point of the novel. The generalist will always succeed if they have the right skills. This quote is probably one of the most important in proving the importance of generalists in society.
Question- How will we see generalists in the later chapters of the novel, will they be winning in specialized tasks? Or will they be winning in multiple tasks?
Quote 1: “He decided that traditional education was broken, and that he could make his own children into geniuses, if he just gave them the right head start.” pg 15
Comment: This quote caught my attention immediately because it reminded me of Tiger’s father’s mindset with golf. Laszlo had the same idea that he could make his children specialists in a category if he trained them their whole lives, the entire time. If I were either of their children, personally I would want to spend my childhood and my free time doing what I wanted to do, not what my parents forced me to do. It is understandable to want your children to be intelligent, but I do not get why these two fathers think this way, why their children need to be the greatest. Even though their plans worked, and their children are both incredibly talented, famous, and have brought money to the family, but at what cost for them?
Question: Although it would be cool to have your children be talented in one category, why not multiple? Why wouldn’t you want your kids to have free will with what they want to do?
Quote 2: “When I asked Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player in history, to explain his decision process for a move, he told me, ‘I see a move, a combination, almost instantly,’ based on patterns he has seen before.” pg 19
Comment: I thought this quote was intriguing because the greatest chess player of all time studied different men’s plays based on their careers. With firefighters, 80 percent of them decide their move within seconds as if they were responding to flames and collapsing buildings. He made his plays in his games based on certain plays and moves he had seen in men from the past. With nonwartime naval commanders, 95 percent of them “chose a common course of action that was the first to come to mind.” He studied these moves and decisions based off natural human instinct, based on different careers. This way of thinking has to do with psychology, meaning that even though he is the greatest in history, he knows more than just chess, meaning he is probably not a specialist and has an education elsewhere.
Question: If Kasparov is the greatest play of all time, why does he use other men’s plays to perfect his own?
“After eight months of study, Laszlo took her to a smoky chess club in Budapest and challenged grown Men to play his for-year-old daughter, whose legs dangled from the chair” (pg 16)
This quote captured my attention because his four year old daughter was beating grown men in chess. Chess is a very objective game to try and master, and how easy it was for his daughter to master the game is very impressive. My question for this quote is how can someone so young be able to master a game that takes so much thought?
“ The students were not given any rules, and so had to proceed by trial and error. If a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked. Later on, new students were added, and all were now asked to discover the general rule of all solutions, while only one of the students who had been getting rewarded for a single solution did.” (pg 31)
This quote stood out to me because it said “ They repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked”. That part of the quote stood out to me because the students were not focused on how they figured out the solutions, they were more focused on just getting more money. The one student that did they figured out the general goal for the solutions and they were the one that was getting rewarded. My question for this quote is, if the students didn’t know about the reward or were not getting rewarded after the questions, would they have focused on the general rule of the solutions and paid more attention to that rather than the reward?
QUOTE
“They were both teachers and agreed that the school system was frustratingly one-size-fits-all, made for producing “the gray average mass.” as Laszlo put it.” -Page 16.
COMMENT
This quote caught my attention specifically because I believe the structure of the school system is inherently broken and is designed to take away kids’ individuality and sculpt them into citizens who cannot think outside of the box. I believe that what’s ‘outside the box’ might threaten the way our society is structured, and that teaching people to think for themselves and test the foundation on which our society is built is not what higher officials want. Therefore, we spend hours sitting in neat rows, are taught that there is only one right answer and one way of thinking, that it is wrong to make mistakes and it’s not okay if you have a different way of learning than your peers. This produces the ‘gray average mass’ Laszlo describes in his quote– Where freethinkers do not exist and people beat themselves up for making mistakes as opposed to learning from them. Individuals who are accustomed to rigid rules have the potential to strive in this environment, but a vast majority of kids, (increasingly more so in recent generations) are struggling with anxiety and mental health disorders which make it hard for them to thrive under these circumstances.
QUESTION
If all schools were designed to embrace kids’ individuality and their unique ways of perceiving information, how might the modern world function? Would certain issues like environmental health and war be affected by this change?
QUOTE NO. 2
“The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is ‘Martian Tennis.’ You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.” Page 31.
COMMENT NO. 2
This quote caught my attention because I believe that the author is correct when they state that there are no obvious rules in life. Life is truly what you make of it, and the ‘rules’ by which you play can have a strong impact on the outcome of your life. Being fluid, well-rounded, resilient and in-tune with your surroundings may help you to succeed in this ever-changing world. Life hardly ever goes according to plan, the expectations that we have for certain situations and outcomes are rarely what genuinely happens. This ties in to the first quote I chose because I believe that kids can learn how to adapt to change and enhance their problem-solving skills if the school systems encouraged them to embrace their differences instead of producing uniform mindsets.
QUESTION NO. 2
Is someone who is not afraid to make mistakes in order to meet their goal necessarily more equipped to take on challenges than someone who strives for perfection?
Quote: “But when the rules are altered just slightly, it makes experts appear to have traded flexibility for narrow skill. In research in the game of bridge where the order of play was altered, experts had a more difficult time adapting to new rules than did nonexperts (Epstein 32)”.
Comment (150-200 words): This quote stood out to me merely because it shows experts rely on patterns and strategy especially if it comes to something they are good at. This can be relatable in some aspects, especially in sports, I remember being in dance for 12 years and deciding to switch to cheerleading. The switch for me was harder because dance movements are meant to be fluid and pretty, and cheer movements are sharp and fast as good as differences. The counts for cheer and dance are not the same where dance is 1,2,3,4 and cheer is 1,3,5,7. Looking deeper into this the book puts in this example to show us how these strategies and practices are so important to professionals and nonexperts or people who are more well-rounded in things and not just one thing are able to pick up on different things and rules and are not stuck in one mindset.
Question: Is being more well-rounded better than being specifically good at one thing ?
Quote: “Those are the same twenty pieces of information, but over the course of your life, you’ve learned patterns of words that allow you to instantly make sense of the second arrangement, and to remember it much more easily. Your restaurant server doesn’t just happen to have a miraculous memory; like musicians and quarterbacks, they’ve learned to group recurring information into chunks (Epstein 26)”.
Comment (150-200 words): Almost like the quote I used before it shows we as people rely heavily on practice and patterns in our daily life. It takes time to learn a skill and be good at that certain skill. This quote made me think about daily occurrences in people’s lives and how we are used to growing accustomed to our practices, whether it’s work or school we fall into these patterns and routines without even realizing it. We are able to shape ourselves and choose these patterns according to what we do, yet sometimes we cannot choose these for ourselves. We are shaped by people around us, whether our parents put us in a certain sport at a young age or we get a job as a waitress based on our life situations. Life throws us these opportunities and whether we like it or not we fall into them into the patterns and routines we are given though life experiences.
Question: How can we be more willing to choose our own paths and fall into certain patterns?