The case for Range

Book Review: Range by David Epstein

Is it better to learn more deeply than more broadly? Can ‘mental meandering’ be turned into a productive pursuit? Is there such a thing as being fooled by expertise? What is ‘T’ shaped knowledge?

For those with a wide-ranging set of interests, the premise of the book is engaging: that of breadth of knowledge built on a bedrock of clear thinking, rather than laser-focused domain expertise bereft of the benefit of eclectic interests.

This book stands out in a world where specialisation is seen as the ultimate form of expertise. He starts off by making clear the differences between 'kind' and 'wicked' (his words) learning environments, and demonstrates that relentless practice may work for the former and may fail miserably in the latter. A 'kind' learning environment is one where rules are well-defined and where practice makes perfect. A 'wicked' one, which is the category most real world endeavours fall into, calls for a fresh way of thinking, of solving problems by synthesising across various domains, and in general, for people to have breadth of knowledge, rather than depth in a particular specialisation.

The author has flung his net far and wide across history and comes up with examples ranging from 17th century Venetian musicians to modern day Nobel laureates to demonstrate his point. Apart from this, he talks about the gaps in our education system (even in the First World) which is oriented towards nudging students to arrive quickly at the right answers rather than spending time understanding problems and thinking through them deeply to arrive at a solution.

Range has its share of overturned truisms, even as it creates new ones. For those who start to acquire a skill later in life, the 'Don't feel behind' advice is certainly heartening. So also with 'mental meandering' being a source of power, and head-starts being overrated. But some of this advice is to be taken with caution, with appreciation of the context. Some of his conclusions may seem tough to practise in the world as it is today. Being a 'deliberate amateur' in a world that demands very specific skills to count one's contribution as worthy of value can be problematic. It may be that van Gogh meandered through various dead ends before becoming a sensation. But such examples make for fascinating anecdotes rather than evidence of a trend.

Some of the examples illustrate how essential it is for experts to break free from their silos and trenches and collaborate across disciplines. Specifically, the need for experts with "T" shaped knowledge, which means depth in any field with breadth across multiple other fields, makes tremendous sense. Even in the examples in the book, a vast number are of specialists who bridged several streams of knowledge, while a smaller number is dedicated to plain vanilla generalists who struck gold.

As someone who believes in the power of the polymath, maybe I expected more from this book grounded in the current world. I would posit that specialisation is inescapable to showcase the 'grit' that he talks so much about. Having said that, specialists should take their lessons from this book, and avoid falling into the trap of being fooled by expertise, and be open to solutions that arise from outside of their proficiency.

Where I agree with the author completely is on the need to flip the education system over to one that values showing your approach to problem solving rather than rewarding the shortest path to success.

A closing caveat from my point of view: while it is good to know something about everything, there is no merit to it unless you know (almost) everything about something. In short, this book is not to be read as a validation of the ‘jack-of-all-trades but master-of-none’ school. Rather, the case made is for ‘master-of-not-just-one' but ‘jack-of-some-other-trades-too’.

Epstein manages to shatter the belief that super-specialisation is the only way to expertise, and this book will certainly spawn a whole genre around cross-disciplinary thinking. 

Flight to Safety

If you had told me a few years ago that the most striking parallels for the irrational behaviour of markets would come to me not from my perch in the trading floor, but from a bawling child, well…you could’ve knocked me down with a teether. Or pacifier.

Again, had you told me then that there existed a tube-like contraption to extract snot from a creature suffering from a blocked nose, one that didn’t know how to blow its nose, I would most likely have recoiled in distaste. So, it is quite telling that when I was recently introduced to that very contraption, I fell upon it like a pile of bricks, dubbing it the most useful thing invented since MTR Ready-to-Eat.

Markets flit about amongst a set of behaviours that at best times, confound even the most seasoned of practitioners. Risk aversion is that strange thing that causes traders to withdraw into their shells, like a beachful of turtles facing a predator onslaught. It makes them take refuge in old, predictable things like gold, the US dollar and the Japanese yen. And abandon the tantalizing yet risk-fraught plays with more complex financial instruments. This behaviour can play out in counterintuitive and fascinating ways, such as US Treasury bills finding favour when the US was downgraded or the surge in the Japanese yen when a tsunami wreaked havoc in Japan.

So what has all of this got to do with de-blocking a baby’s nose? Well, more than you would think. Like any right-thinking being, my child absolutely abhorred the idea of this thingamajig that (to toddler-eyes) I had clearly thought up as a punishment, a brand new ‘time out’ idea. So, there was much protestation, and I as the perpetrator, would surely bear the brunt of baby-wrath? As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Just like the markets, the baby also has a strange concept of flight-to-safety. When subjected to a snot-clearing attack by the mother, rush to the safest thing you know, ergo, the self-same mother who mounted said attack. For the rest of that day, she resisted all attempts by the father and others at soothing, and clung to me.

Now you know why markets are irrational. They are just the macrocosm of grown up babies.