Quote: “Pegau was basically describing the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.” (Epstein 177).
Comment: I find this quote interesting because as kids we are kind of taught to think this way. For example, a lot of times in math class the teacher will take off points if you use a different method for getting the correct answer than what you were taught.
Question: Is there a benefit of being forced to use a certain method while trying to solve a problem? If not, then why have we been forced to only use specific methods in the past?
Quote: “That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.” (Epstein 189).
Comment: This quote caught my attention because I feel like we have a lot of knowledge about things we have learned but we have yet found a way to actually use the knowledge in the real world. Of course, we learn things in school to get a good grade, but I think for a lot of us that is where we stop using the things we learn. Not really sure where I was getting at, I guess I was thinking schools should do a better job of teaching us how to actually use the things we are learning in real life.
Question: Do you feel like schools should do a better job of teaching us how to use the things we have learned outside of school?
“Cragin and Davis were outside the box to begin with and saw straightforward solutions that ended insiders with seemingly every training and resource advantage. Solvers themselves were often bewildered when they overcame a challenge that stumped entire companies or industries.” (177)
Comment: Cragin and Davis were able to think of solutions that were not common, and they had the ability to create new useful solutions. Being able to create solutions is a very useful and important characteristic to have. They were able to use these abilities to make solutions that ended up stumping big industries.
Comment: Are there any other things they are able to use this useful skill in other than in that industry?
“It isn’t just the increase in new knowledge that generates opportunities for non-specialists, though. In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by simply looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.” (189)
Comment: Instead of sticking to one idea and throwing away useful knowledge that is able to go to use, learning from old ideas and information creates non-specialists that are more well-rounded in their field. Being able to look back on old concepts and work off of those can lead to new ideas to further knowledge. Once people set their mind to something once, they achieve that goal they are unsure on how to further their experiences. By looking at every part of the journey you are able to grow from experience.
Question: If everyone looked further in their knowledge would there be more competition to learn similar things?
QUOTE 1
“Our intuition might be that only hyperspecialized experts can drive modern innovation, but increasing specialization actually creates new opportunities for outsiders.” –Page 178.
COMMENT
I liked this quote because it had to stop and think about it for a minute. When we increase specialization within our own communities, that invites opportunities to people with a wider range of skills from outside our communities. Having a wide range of knowledge and skill sets is incredibly useful, because in the real world, people want to hire others with versatility. When problems arise that might have been foreseen, they want someone with the flexibility to be able to adapt and overcome new challenges. Someone who has only dealt with a certain field in their life might not be able to do this.
QUESTION
What might the world look like if school systems stopped rewarding this sort of specialization and started rewarding versatility?
QUOTE 2
“In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.” –Page 189.
COMMENT
This quote stood out to me because it makes sense to me that people would want to stand out by being innovative. In the modern world, it’s common for people to look for new ways to stand out, but sometimes a lot of good knowledge and information lingers in our past history. I don’t think there’s anything truly wrong or bad about looking for new ways to be different– the world wouldn’t be what it is now without this sort of innovation, but it never hurts to look back into our past and use what we already know to get a job or a project done.
QUESTION
I notice that some trends repeat themselves in our new generations– fashion, technology, slang, etc. What sparks people to look back into the past for these trends instead of trying to be new and different?
Quote: “’I visualized the problem as drinking slushy,’ he said. ‘You end up having to whip around the straw to stir it up. How could you make it, so you don’t have to work so hard to get that slushy out?’” pg 176
Comment: He turned the oil spill problem into this kind of analogy which brought Davis back to a summer he worked with construction. His team was challenged by concrete drying to fast by the sun on a hot summer day while trying to pour it down a hill to create stairs from a friend’s house to a lake. He used his outside knowledge to take a metal vibrating rod and stick it inside the mound of concrete, and that completely liquidized it solving their problem. Instead of adding different chemicals to create a different substance completely changing the concrete, Davis used his general knowledge to solve the problem.
Question: What made him think of a slushy analogy?
Quote: “’Sometimes you just slap your head and go, ‘Well why didn’t I think of that?’ If it was so easily solved by the people within the industry, it would have been solved by people in the industry,’ Pegau said. ‘I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall.’”
Comment: I believe this quote is talking about how some people usually specialists think so highly of themselves and their methods of solving, that when they hit a block in their understanding for a problem, they can forget that there are outside ideas for solving this problem. This term is known as Einstellung effect where problem solvers will only use familiar methods and forget that others exist even If they could be more useful. Usually, people in their own industry don’t feel comfortable seeking help for these kinds of problems because it can lower their self-esteem and specialists can be very uncomfortable with that.
Question: What made them finally reach out for an outside point of view?
Quote: “Named InnoCentive, it facilitates entities in any field acting as “seekers”, paying to post “challenges” and rewards for outside “solvers”. A little more than one-third of challenges were completely solved, a remarkable portion given that InnoCentive selected for problems that had stumped the specialists who posed them” (Epstein 173).
Comment: It is interesting to think about how sometimes you just have to think outside of the box. We are so immersed in specifics of solving a problem that we forget about the bigger picture and how to solve it. This reminds me of a topic from an environmental presentation I attended called wicked problems. These are problems so vast and difficult that we don’t know how to solve them. The only way to combat them is to take a step back and question each layer of the problem before one even starts to think about solutions. This way of solving problems is the best way to combat close minded thinking. It forces people to open their minds and think about things in a way that they are not normally used to. Sometimes that random common knowledge that you know can be helpful.
Question: Why is it so difficult for us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture?
Quote: “Nineteen-year-old Jill put on her most imposing navy pantsuit, took her papers to a neurologist in Des Moines, and asked to be connected to the Italian study. ‘No, you don’t have that,’ she recalled the neurologist saying sternly. She refused even to look at the papers” (Epstein 184-185).
Comment: It is sad to see that sometimes our elders don’t respect the younger generation and just dismiss them because they believe we aren’t as smart as they think. Sometimes young people are very smart and can come to conclusions. The fact that this person did not even look at her evidence truly is hurtful. Even if she might not have believed the girl, she should have at least heard her out and looked at what she brought. Even in the end the girl was right, and she ended up saving her father’s life because she wouldn’t stop her pursuits. This shows great resilience on the girl’s part as she knew that she was right, so she kept pushing until someone believed her. She just needed one person to listen to her and then she was able to show her evidence and even save her dads life.
Question: Why do we ignore younger people sometimes just because of the association that they are young and don’t know anything?
Quote: “Specifically, NASA was unable to predict solar particle storms, radioactive material spewed by the sun that can gravely damage astronauts and the equipment they depend on. Solar physicists were understandably skeptical that outsiders could help, but after three decades of being stuck, there was nothing to lose; NASA posted through InnoCentive in 2009. Within six months, Bruce Cragin, an engineer retired from Spirit Nextel and living in rural New Hampshire, solved the challenge using radio waves picked up by telescopes. Pre-retirement, Cragin had collaborated with scientists, and found that those specialist teams often got mired in working out small details at the expense of practical solutions” (Epstein 175).
Comment: This quote is an example of someone who has an “outside perspective” being able to come into a situation and solve it using skills that aren’t necessarily directly related. The highly specialized workers at NASA are used to thinking and solving problems a certain way, but this retired engineer has a different set of skills and a different perspective, which can help look at things a different way and find ways to solve it.
Question: Do engineers share a lot of similar skills with NASA workers?
Quote: “The more information specialists create, the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information–undiscovered public knowledge, as Don Swanson called it. The larger and more easily accessible the library of human knowledge, the more chances for in inquisitive patrons to make connections at the cutting edge (Epstein 189).
Comment: In the age of the internet, people have a lot more information at their disposal. I think this makes it easier for people to be generalized and have a bunch of different skills that they might not have even wanted to have if the internet didn’t exist. Having so many different kinds of information makes it easier for people to research a bunch of different topics at the same time, and become experts or specialists in any number of topics, or you can just learn a little about a ton of different topics you’re interested in.
Question: Are people actually learning information from the internet or are we just using it as a tool to replace memory? (Do we actually retain the information we see online?)
Quote:
“Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.” (p. 179)
Comment:
I think this is my favorite quote of the whole chapter, as Pedro Domingos captures the reader’s attention with a powerful quote, but speaks the truth at the same time. How could knowledge possibly blind you to other things? I see it as so much knowledge in a single domain is going to make someone think they can not expand their thoughts outside of that domain. If this is the case, their approach for problem solving is going to be very slim and much tougher to do, when in reality, the knowledge from an outside domain could help them tremendously. In the words of Pedro Domingos, that is the “blinding” factor that knowledge can have. I may sound naive when I say that I don’t think this has happened to me, because I’m sure it’s happened to most people without them realizing it. I’m happy that reading this chapter provides me with the awareness of this problem.
Questions:
Do you recall a time where you found knowledge “blinding”?
Quote:
“As Alph Bingham noticed, for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before.” (p. 178)
Comment:
This quote shows that Alph Bingham has a great understanding of what methods work for success. This local search that Bingham refers to is really the expanding of specialization. The local search offers opportunities for outsiders to prove their knowledge in a specific domain. This quote also offers the idea that Bingham limits specialists to “their” domain, where they don’t need outside information and where methods and patterns are easily recognizable. This quote shows us a prime example of generalists and specialists not necessarily working “together”, but the two polar opposite ideals are not clashing in this case.
Bingham found a way where he was able to utilize both to their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses in order for maximum success. The whole time we’ve been talking about generalists and specialists, they’ve always battled each other. Here they do not really pull each other back, they are both used for Bingham’s success.
Questions:
Do you think company’s find themselves solving more problems that require a local search or more problems where they rely on specialists?
Quote – The more information specialists create,the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information – undiscovered public knowledge, as Don Swanson called it.
Comment – I find this quote really interesting. It is cool to see how specialists and generalists work together and use each other to find out more about certain topics. The specialists find the information, and the generalists combine that information together and find different ways to do and handle situations. This is really interesting in the way the world works. Problem solving is not just relying on the generalists with the wide arrangement of skills to solve these problems. The specialists actually contribute a lot more than what I would have thought. We have been focusing so much on how generalists are so important to a working society, but it is easy to forget about how specialists contribute to society. I have been thinking this whole time while learning about generalists, that they were better or more important than specialists, but I definitely think they are just different from each other and both have their own benefits.
Question – How can these people benefit from each other and actually work together to solve problems?
Quote – It isn’t just the increase in new knowledge that generates opportunities for nonspecialists, though. In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create or invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge.
Comment – This is another interesting concept to me. I find all of this information about information to be really interesting and important. It really makes me wonder how much information is floating around that can be the key to solving one of the world’s biggest problems. Could the cure for cancer just be floating around waiting to be combined with other information. This is why generalists are so important. People who just want to take in as much information and use all that they can to solve problems. This opportunity is very appealing to me. Maybe one day I might want to be one of these people who creates and invents stuff but I don’t want to be researching and finding out all of the information. Maybe one day I can piece something together and solve one of the world’s biggest problems. That is why this concept is so important and really interesting to me.
Question – What problems are out there just one simple step away from being solved? Or is this just a theory with nothing really like that?
Quote
“Bingham calls it “outside-in” thinking: finding solutions in experiences far outside of focus training for the problem itself. History is littered with world-changing examples.” (Epstein 173)
Comment
Instances of outside-in thinking can be acts of bravery. In combat, troops are trained to distance themselves quickly and take cover when a grenade is thrown in their vicinity. Pfc. Robert Simanek is a Marine who used outside-in thinking to save his fellow Marine’s lives. When Robert was twenty-two years old in 1942, a grenade was thrown at Robert and his group. Robert dove on the grenade and took the blast to save his Marines. This is an example of outside-in thinking because he solved a problem by using a method against what he was trained. This act of bravery caused Robert to be awarded with the Congressional Medal Of Honor. Sometimes when you go against your training and open your mind you can find even better solutions to problems. If Robert followed his training and instead of diving on the grenade and jumped into cover, his friends could have died that day.
Question
Is outside-in thinking more dangerous than following training?
Quote
“Napoleon once fretted that his armies could only carry a few days’ worth of provisions. “Hunger is more savage than the sword,” A fourth-century Roman military chronicler wrote.” (Epstein 173)
Comment
After not eating for several days at a time you will grow extremely hungry, and your stomach will begin to eat itself from the inside out. The quote “Hunger is more savage than the sword” made a lot of sense because the pain caused by death from hunger and starvation will take weeks. This will slowly drag your body down, while a sword will take you down swiftly and you will die within minutes. Hunger can cause hallucinations and pain in many areas of your body. In my personal experience with hunger, there have been a couple of times when I was so hungry that I would develop a splitting headache when I did not eat for over a day. This painful experience only took one day to develop. The pain of not eating for weeks is unfathomable to me. In World War II the Nazis attempted to invade the Soviet Union but ultimately failed because they could not survive the winter with no food.
Question
What did Napoleon experience to come up with that quote?
9 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 14”
Quote: “Pegau was basically describing the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.” (Epstein 177).
Comment: I find this quote interesting because as kids we are kind of taught to think this way. For example, a lot of times in math class the teacher will take off points if you use a different method for getting the correct answer than what you were taught.
Question: Is there a benefit of being forced to use a certain method while trying to solve a problem? If not, then why have we been forced to only use specific methods in the past?
Quote: “That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.” (Epstein 189).
Comment: This quote caught my attention because I feel like we have a lot of knowledge about things we have learned but we have yet found a way to actually use the knowledge in the real world. Of course, we learn things in school to get a good grade, but I think for a lot of us that is where we stop using the things we learn. Not really sure where I was getting at, I guess I was thinking schools should do a better job of teaching us how to actually use the things we are learning in real life.
Question: Do you feel like schools should do a better job of teaching us how to use the things we have learned outside of school?
“Cragin and Davis were outside the box to begin with and saw straightforward solutions that ended insiders with seemingly every training and resource advantage. Solvers themselves were often bewildered when they overcame a challenge that stumped entire companies or industries.” (177)
Comment: Cragin and Davis were able to think of solutions that were not common, and they had the ability to create new useful solutions. Being able to create solutions is a very useful and important characteristic to have. They were able to use these abilities to make solutions that ended up stumping big industries.
Comment: Are there any other things they are able to use this useful skill in other than in that industry?
“It isn’t just the increase in new knowledge that generates opportunities for non-specialists, though. In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by simply looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.” (189)
Comment: Instead of sticking to one idea and throwing away useful knowledge that is able to go to use, learning from old ideas and information creates non-specialists that are more well-rounded in their field. Being able to look back on old concepts and work off of those can lead to new ideas to further knowledge. Once people set their mind to something once, they achieve that goal they are unsure on how to further their experiences. By looking at every part of the journey you are able to grow from experience.
Question: If everyone looked further in their knowledge would there be more competition to learn similar things?
QUOTE 1
“Our intuition might be that only hyperspecialized experts can drive modern innovation, but increasing specialization actually creates new opportunities for outsiders.” –Page 178.
COMMENT
I liked this quote because it had to stop and think about it for a minute. When we increase specialization within our own communities, that invites opportunities to people with a wider range of skills from outside our communities. Having a wide range of knowledge and skill sets is incredibly useful, because in the real world, people want to hire others with versatility. When problems arise that might have been foreseen, they want someone with the flexibility to be able to adapt and overcome new challenges. Someone who has only dealt with a certain field in their life might not be able to do this.
QUESTION
What might the world look like if school systems stopped rewarding this sort of specialization and started rewarding versatility?
QUOTE 2
“In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.” –Page 189.
COMMENT
This quote stood out to me because it makes sense to me that people would want to stand out by being innovative. In the modern world, it’s common for people to look for new ways to stand out, but sometimes a lot of good knowledge and information lingers in our past history. I don’t think there’s anything truly wrong or bad about looking for new ways to be different– the world wouldn’t be what it is now without this sort of innovation, but it never hurts to look back into our past and use what we already know to get a job or a project done.
QUESTION
I notice that some trends repeat themselves in our new generations– fashion, technology, slang, etc. What sparks people to look back into the past for these trends instead of trying to be new and different?
Quote: “’I visualized the problem as drinking slushy,’ he said. ‘You end up having to whip around the straw to stir it up. How could you make it, so you don’t have to work so hard to get that slushy out?’” pg 176
Comment: He turned the oil spill problem into this kind of analogy which brought Davis back to a summer he worked with construction. His team was challenged by concrete drying to fast by the sun on a hot summer day while trying to pour it down a hill to create stairs from a friend’s house to a lake. He used his outside knowledge to take a metal vibrating rod and stick it inside the mound of concrete, and that completely liquidized it solving their problem. Instead of adding different chemicals to create a different substance completely changing the concrete, Davis used his general knowledge to solve the problem.
Question: What made him think of a slushy analogy?
Quote: “’Sometimes you just slap your head and go, ‘Well why didn’t I think of that?’ If it was so easily solved by the people within the industry, it would have been solved by people in the industry,’ Pegau said. ‘I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall.’”
Comment: I believe this quote is talking about how some people usually specialists think so highly of themselves and their methods of solving, that when they hit a block in their understanding for a problem, they can forget that there are outside ideas for solving this problem. This term is known as Einstellung effect where problem solvers will only use familiar methods and forget that others exist even If they could be more useful. Usually, people in their own industry don’t feel comfortable seeking help for these kinds of problems because it can lower their self-esteem and specialists can be very uncomfortable with that.
Question: What made them finally reach out for an outside point of view?
Quote: “Named InnoCentive, it facilitates entities in any field acting as “seekers”, paying to post “challenges” and rewards for outside “solvers”. A little more than one-third of challenges were completely solved, a remarkable portion given that InnoCentive selected for problems that had stumped the specialists who posed them” (Epstein 173).
Comment: It is interesting to think about how sometimes you just have to think outside of the box. We are so immersed in specifics of solving a problem that we forget about the bigger picture and how to solve it. This reminds me of a topic from an environmental presentation I attended called wicked problems. These are problems so vast and difficult that we don’t know how to solve them. The only way to combat them is to take a step back and question each layer of the problem before one even starts to think about solutions. This way of solving problems is the best way to combat close minded thinking. It forces people to open their minds and think about things in a way that they are not normally used to. Sometimes that random common knowledge that you know can be helpful.
Question: Why is it so difficult for us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture?
Quote: “Nineteen-year-old Jill put on her most imposing navy pantsuit, took her papers to a neurologist in Des Moines, and asked to be connected to the Italian study. ‘No, you don’t have that,’ she recalled the neurologist saying sternly. She refused even to look at the papers” (Epstein 184-185).
Comment: It is sad to see that sometimes our elders don’t respect the younger generation and just dismiss them because they believe we aren’t as smart as they think. Sometimes young people are very smart and can come to conclusions. The fact that this person did not even look at her evidence truly is hurtful. Even if she might not have believed the girl, she should have at least heard her out and looked at what she brought. Even in the end the girl was right, and she ended up saving her father’s life because she wouldn’t stop her pursuits. This shows great resilience on the girl’s part as she knew that she was right, so she kept pushing until someone believed her. She just needed one person to listen to her and then she was able to show her evidence and even save her dads life.
Question: Why do we ignore younger people sometimes just because of the association that they are young and don’t know anything?
Quote: “Specifically, NASA was unable to predict solar particle storms, radioactive material spewed by the sun that can gravely damage astronauts and the equipment they depend on. Solar physicists were understandably skeptical that outsiders could help, but after three decades of being stuck, there was nothing to lose; NASA posted through InnoCentive in 2009. Within six months, Bruce Cragin, an engineer retired from Spirit Nextel and living in rural New Hampshire, solved the challenge using radio waves picked up by telescopes. Pre-retirement, Cragin had collaborated with scientists, and found that those specialist teams often got mired in working out small details at the expense of practical solutions” (Epstein 175).
Comment: This quote is an example of someone who has an “outside perspective” being able to come into a situation and solve it using skills that aren’t necessarily directly related. The highly specialized workers at NASA are used to thinking and solving problems a certain way, but this retired engineer has a different set of skills and a different perspective, which can help look at things a different way and find ways to solve it.
Question: Do engineers share a lot of similar skills with NASA workers?
Quote: “The more information specialists create, the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information–undiscovered public knowledge, as Don Swanson called it. The larger and more easily accessible the library of human knowledge, the more chances for in inquisitive patrons to make connections at the cutting edge (Epstein 189).
Comment: In the age of the internet, people have a lot more information at their disposal. I think this makes it easier for people to be generalized and have a bunch of different skills that they might not have even wanted to have if the internet didn’t exist. Having so many different kinds of information makes it easier for people to research a bunch of different topics at the same time, and become experts or specialists in any number of topics, or you can just learn a little about a ton of different topics you’re interested in.
Question: Are people actually learning information from the internet or are we just using it as a tool to replace memory? (Do we actually retain the information we see online?)
Quote:
“Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.” (p. 179)
Comment:
I think this is my favorite quote of the whole chapter, as Pedro Domingos captures the reader’s attention with a powerful quote, but speaks the truth at the same time. How could knowledge possibly blind you to other things? I see it as so much knowledge in a single domain is going to make someone think they can not expand their thoughts outside of that domain. If this is the case, their approach for problem solving is going to be very slim and much tougher to do, when in reality, the knowledge from an outside domain could help them tremendously. In the words of Pedro Domingos, that is the “blinding” factor that knowledge can have. I may sound naive when I say that I don’t think this has happened to me, because I’m sure it’s happened to most people without them realizing it. I’m happy that reading this chapter provides me with the awareness of this problem.
Questions:
Do you recall a time where you found knowledge “blinding”?
Quote:
“As Alph Bingham noticed, for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before.” (p. 178)
Comment:
This quote shows that Alph Bingham has a great understanding of what methods work for success. This local search that Bingham refers to is really the expanding of specialization. The local search offers opportunities for outsiders to prove their knowledge in a specific domain. This quote also offers the idea that Bingham limits specialists to “their” domain, where they don’t need outside information and where methods and patterns are easily recognizable. This quote shows us a prime example of generalists and specialists not necessarily working “together”, but the two polar opposite ideals are not clashing in this case.
Bingham found a way where he was able to utilize both to their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses in order for maximum success. The whole time we’ve been talking about generalists and specialists, they’ve always battled each other. Here they do not really pull each other back, they are both used for Bingham’s success.
Questions:
Do you think company’s find themselves solving more problems that require a local search or more problems where they rely on specialists?
Quote – The more information specialists create,the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information – undiscovered public knowledge, as Don Swanson called it.
Comment – I find this quote really interesting. It is cool to see how specialists and generalists work together and use each other to find out more about certain topics. The specialists find the information, and the generalists combine that information together and find different ways to do and handle situations. This is really interesting in the way the world works. Problem solving is not just relying on the generalists with the wide arrangement of skills to solve these problems. The specialists actually contribute a lot more than what I would have thought. We have been focusing so much on how generalists are so important to a working society, but it is easy to forget about how specialists contribute to society. I have been thinking this whole time while learning about generalists, that they were better or more important than specialists, but I definitely think they are just different from each other and both have their own benefits.
Question – How can these people benefit from each other and actually work together to solve problems?
Quote – It isn’t just the increase in new knowledge that generates opportunities for nonspecialists, though. In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create or invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge.
Comment – This is another interesting concept to me. I find all of this information about information to be really interesting and important. It really makes me wonder how much information is floating around that can be the key to solving one of the world’s biggest problems. Could the cure for cancer just be floating around waiting to be combined with other information. This is why generalists are so important. People who just want to take in as much information and use all that they can to solve problems. This opportunity is very appealing to me. Maybe one day I might want to be one of these people who creates and invents stuff but I don’t want to be researching and finding out all of the information. Maybe one day I can piece something together and solve one of the world’s biggest problems. That is why this concept is so important and really interesting to me.
Question – What problems are out there just one simple step away from being solved? Or is this just a theory with nothing really like that?
Quote
“Bingham calls it “outside-in” thinking: finding solutions in experiences far outside of focus training for the problem itself. History is littered with world-changing examples.” (Epstein 173)
Comment
Instances of outside-in thinking can be acts of bravery. In combat, troops are trained to distance themselves quickly and take cover when a grenade is thrown in their vicinity. Pfc. Robert Simanek is a Marine who used outside-in thinking to save his fellow Marine’s lives. When Robert was twenty-two years old in 1942, a grenade was thrown at Robert and his group. Robert dove on the grenade and took the blast to save his Marines. This is an example of outside-in thinking because he solved a problem by using a method against what he was trained. This act of bravery caused Robert to be awarded with the Congressional Medal Of Honor. Sometimes when you go against your training and open your mind you can find even better solutions to problems. If Robert followed his training and instead of diving on the grenade and jumped into cover, his friends could have died that day.
Question
Is outside-in thinking more dangerous than following training?
Quote
“Napoleon once fretted that his armies could only carry a few days’ worth of provisions. “Hunger is more savage than the sword,” A fourth-century Roman military chronicler wrote.” (Epstein 173)
Comment
After not eating for several days at a time you will grow extremely hungry, and your stomach will begin to eat itself from the inside out. The quote “Hunger is more savage than the sword” made a lot of sense because the pain caused by death from hunger and starvation will take weeks. This will slowly drag your body down, while a sword will take you down swiftly and you will die within minutes. Hunger can cause hallucinations and pain in many areas of your body. In my personal experience with hunger, there have been a couple of times when I was so hungry that I would develop a splitting headache when I did not eat for over a day. This painful experience only took one day to develop. The pain of not eating for weeks is unfathomable to me. In World War II the Nazis attempted to invade the Soviet Union but ultimately failed because they could not survive the winter with no food.
Question
What did Napoleon experience to come up with that quote?