David Epstein Quotes

Interventional cardiologists have gotten so used to treating chest pain with stents — metal tubes that pry open blood vessels — that they do so reflexively even in cases where voluminous research has proven that they are inappropriate or dangerous. A recent study found that cardiac patients were actually less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology meeting, when thousands of cardiologists were away; the researchers suggested it could be because common treatments of dubious effect were less likely to be performed.

This is a widespread phenomenon. If you’re asked to predict whether a particular horse will win a race or a particular politician will win an election, the more internal details you learn about any particular scenario — physical qualities of the specific horse, the background and strategy of the particular politician — the more likely you are to say that the scenario you are investigating will occur. Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes.

And he refused to specialize in anything, preferring to keep an eye on the overall estate rather than any of its parts. . . . And Nikolay’s management produced the most brilliant results. — Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.

Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task,” she wrote. “It is choosing an appropriate representation for a problem.

it’s often the case in group meetings where the person who made the PowerPoint slides puts data in front of you, and we often just use the data people put in front of us.

I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident — a dangerous combination. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress.

In that way, the students had something in common with Luria’s remote villagers — even the science majors were typically unable to generalize research methods from their own field to other fields. Flynn’s conclusion: “There is no sign that any department attempts to develop [anything] other than narrow critical competence.

T-people like myself can happily go to the I-people with questions to create the trunk for the T,

Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn’t be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions. I just had a feeling all along that there was something wrong with the culture. We didn’t have a healthy tension in the system.

The fadeout was not a disappearance of skill so much as the rest of the world catching up. The motor-skill equivalent would be teaching a kid to walk a little early. Everyone is going to learn it anyway, and while it might be temporarily impressive, there is no evidence that rushing it matters.

a system that leads people to downplay previous experiences, as if they were entirely wasted, is a counterproductive one. We shouldn’t be ashamed of broad experience, or of needing time to find match quality. Take it from Angela Duckworth, the researcher whose work popularized the psychological construct of “grit.

Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface. It is a powerful tool for solving wicked problems, and Kepler was an analogy addict, so Gentner is naturally very fond of him.

The very tool that had helped make NASA so consistently successful, what Diane Vaughan called “the original technical culture” in the agency’s DNA, suddenly worked perversely in a situation where the familiar brand of data did not exist. Reason without numbers was not accepted. In the face of an unfamiliar challenge, NASA managers failed to drop their familiar tools.

The broad truth is that nature and nurture are so interlaced in any realm of athletic performance that the answer is always: it’s both.