Through the Prism: Meander Widely

Research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated.

When I read a book I really like, I don't just push through to the end. I take time to savor it, noting bits I like, then revisit parts when I'm done, carefully compose my thoughts related to it, and keep a record of my favorite parts to revisit again later. I try to really digest it. I keep that record of what I've fully consumed on Goodreads and here. I've organically learned that learning deeply means learning slowly, and unconsciously created habits to help me with it.

I say this as an introduction to the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. Here's my review:

I could be included in the book as an example to support its thesis--in a number of ways--and reading it is definitely a case of confirmation bias for me, so of course I highly recommend it.

In a nutshell, the message is to spend as much time as possible developing a broad, diverse knowledge (and interest and skill) base before specializing in one domain. More important than simply knowing and being able to do many different things is that doing so develops good habits of thinking, problem solving, and creativity. While slower to pay off up front, this approach eventually results in more innovation, deeper learning, and longer lasting success.

Epstein is a good communicator and writer, clearly and engagingly making a convincing case. He explores the idea of ranging widely in sports, music, education, business, science, and more, highlighting evidence and examples of the approach's success in each area. It is fascinating reading.

(And now I don't feel so bad about spending 9 years in college before getting a "real" job--while pursuing another degree to support it on the side; I'm probably better off for it.)

A few excerpts to let Epstein speak for himself:
Research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated.

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The most momentous personality changes occur between age eighteen and one's late twenties, so specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a person who does not yet exist.

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Learning deeply means learning slowly.

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In wicked domains that lack automatic feedback, experience alone does not improve performance. Effective habits of mind are more important, and they can be developed.

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Work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.

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The further basic science moves from meandering exploration toward efficiency, the less chance it will have of solving humanity's greatest challenges.

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"First act and then think." Ibarra marshaled social psychology to argue persuasively that we are each made up of numerous possibilities. As she put it, "We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models." We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

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"Active open-mindedness." The best forecasters view their own ideas a hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is no to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions. In the sweep of humanity, that is not normal. . . .

The most science-curious folk always chose to look at new evidence, whether or not it agreed with their current beliefs. . . . Their foxy hunt for information was like a literal fox's hunt for prey: roam freely, listen carefully, and consume omnivorously. Just as Tetlock says of the best forecaster, it is not what they think, but how they think. The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness. They are also extremely curious, and don't merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them.
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Desirable difficulties like testing and spacing make knowledge stick. It becomes durable. Desirable difficulties like making connections and interleaving make knowledge flexible, useful for problems that never appeared in training. All slow down learning and make performance suffer, in the short term.

Testing - without hints or choices; having to generate your own answers (even if wrong).
Spacing - leaving time between practice sessions.
Making connections - focusing on underlying concepts and principles and how they can be broadly applied.
Interleaving - mixing up the ideas and topics studied/practiced (instead of blocks of repeating the same types of practice problems).
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Scientists and members of the general public are about equally likely to have artistic hobbies, but scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation. And those who have won the Nobel Prize are more likely still. Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. Nationally recognized scientists are much more likely than other scientists to be musicians, sculptors, painters, printmakers, woodworkers, mechanics, electronics tinkerers, glass-blowers, poets, or writers, of both fiction and nonfiction. And, again, Nobel laureates are far more likely still. The most successful experts also belong to the wider world. "To him who observes them from afar," said Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, "it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them." The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area. As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, "rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic," creative achievers tend to have broad interests. "This breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain-specific expertise alone."

I've argued at my place of work against making efficiency too high a priority and have repeatedly been told I'm too negative for instinctively helping people "falsify their own notions" as we look for workable solutions to problems. I fret about the ways specialization of job duties has become more and more prevalent through the years. Everything about this book makes so much sense to me.

I could be included in the book as an example to support its thesis--in a number of ways, I opened my review. This blog has chronicled many of those ways.

Let's start with my intentional choice, particularly the past few years, to have long, meandering, eclectic posts that lack focus, composed of many various, diverse elements such as: book reviews, personal stories, humor, news articles, academic articles, poetry, artwork, photography, long and meandering sentences, and more. I try to let my posts range widely.

I also mention in the review all the years I spent in college. Three at junior college just taking classes for fun, where I first decided to go on to major in wildlife biology before changing to secondary education in English. Then three years at university getting that degree, followed immediately by three years getting a Master of Divinity degree in seminary, a degree that I never used. Then I accepted a library job and spent four years working part-time on my library degree. Finally, at age 31, I settled into the public library youth services position I've made a career of.

source

I discussed parts of that journey in Words, Words, Words, sharing how I would have been happy ranging even more widely as a student, spending more time and studying even more topics. I seriously debated pursuing a Ph.D. and making a career in academics, but I just couldn't stomach the thought of narrowly defining myself to the level of specialization that entails. The doctoral program that has most tempted me was an interdisciplinary one that focused on the connections between different fields of study. I'm pleased to say I feel like I've truly become a life-long learner, improving and getting wiser with age. My reading and writing have certainly gotten stronger.

Many of my posts have titles like Intellectual Humility and Connecting Seemingly Disparate Fields of Knowledge. I try to cultivate the flexible, wide-ranging habits of mind that Epstein advocates.

Then, of course, there's my 2009 post explicitly titled I Want to Be a Generalist, where I said one of my favorite things about my job is the variety.

Finally, in 2010 post Speaking of Supervillains, I said my superhero alter-ego is:

The Synthesist
(Bringing together disparate: 1) ideas, to solve problems and mysteries; 2) materials, to address physical issues (MacGyverish); and 3) people, to overcome conflict.)

Ah, but enough about me. It's enough to say that Epstein's book supports my life and my life supports Epstein's book.

Speaking of being interdisciplinary, I love this conversation between professor of physics and a professor of literature and philosophy exploring how uncertainty is both a fundamental of science and a key to human thought and creativity.

Uncertainty Isn’t a Human Flaw, It’s a Feature of the World

Quantum mechanics tells us that within materialism – the idea that nothing exists except matter and its movements – there are uncertainties that do not derive from our ignorance but are fundamental to matter and the laws that govern it. In this view, uncertainty is an uneradicable feature of our physical world. . . .

Things will never be extricated from uncertainty because we never perceive things in themselves. We perceive things through our perceptual systems. . . .

If matter acquires its massness through this Higgs boson, then matter is a dynamic entity, an interaction. A process; not a thing! Albert Einstein’s E=mc2 foretold that matter was a form of energy . . .

Psychologists like Arie Kruglanski suggest that uncertainty is at the root of a lot of bad behaviour: authoritarianism, the intolerance of ambiguity, and dogmatism. Today’s huge levels of uncertainty – climate change, inflation, the nigh-impossibility of shared societal goals, the rampant polarisation making political moderation very difficult – have truly brought out the very worst in us. Yet if uncertainty is a feature of the world, and not just a story about the limits of human knowing, then we’d better find better ways to come to grips with it. Understanding uncertainty as an ineradicable feature of the world, as many physicists do, makes uncertainty not our fault and not just a problem about human knowing. Why should we continue to be threatened by uncertainty when there is no way of getting around it? . . .

Why does uncertainty get such a bad rap anyway? Without uncertainty, one never makes a true decision, one is merely compelled in one direction or another. Existentialists since Søren Kierkegaard insist that uncertainty lies at the heart of freedom. Far from being something to shun, uncertainty makes real decisions and therefore real creativity possible. In short, uncertainty enables our very humanity.

Without uncertainty, possibility itself is not possible. The poet Emily Dickinson called possibility a ‘fairer house’ than the predictability of prose. If we experience uncertainty as the necessary architecture of the world, and not just as our own mental furniture in disarray, then we need not blame ourselves for the negative feelings that uncertainty engenders. Uncertainty, and the choices it necessitates, is precisely what prevents our humanity from being inevitable and therefore reproducible by machines. Instead of trying to produce certainty at any cost, we can celebrate the freedom and creativity that comes from uncertainty, and thus, with Dickinson, escape an otherwise prosaic and robotic life.

Uncertainty is not our fault and not just a problem about human knowing. It is not a flaw that needs correcting, it is an inherent part of the way the world works. Celebrate the freedom and creativity that comes from uncertainty.

Pie Comic

Life is essentially mysterious. It is enough not to know.

See also:

One area of mild interest I have is watching from afar the development of Artificial Intelligence, particularly the forecasts of how it's going to impact our world. The release of ChatGPT has been all over the news lately, as it will provide information requested in spontaneous, original, natural language in a very conversational style. I finally decided to try it out a little the other night. There was nothing too surprising and I don't have any immediate uses for it, but it was interesting.

My favorite part of our dialogue: For the record, ChatGPT, while terribly considerate, prefers the use of the Oxford comma.

I was finally convinced to give ChatGPT a look after coming across this article:

AI Is Taking the Jobs of Kenyans Who Write Essays for U.S. College Students

- Kenya is a major hub for the contract cheating industry, where freelancers help American students write essays and handle classwork.

- The proliferation of AI tools like ChatGPT is reducing the earnings of Kenyans involved in contract cheating.

I find both industries for cheating, human and AI, fascinating. Of course, I think both are wrong and dumb--why pay to learn if you're not going to try to learn?--but the industries are interesting.

Speaking of AI, I get so frustrated by the self-reinforcing feedback loops the logarithms create for our feeds (looking at you, Facebook). I like an eclectic feed with lots of variety, many topics and perspectives, sometimes something random. But they are so determined to box me into a few narrow specializations. If I click on something out of curiosity and a desire to explore something different, my feed gets overwhelmed by more of the exact same thing for a while. Even if I don't click, just pause my scrolling to watch a bit of a video or listen to a bit of music or just gaze at something for a while to digest it, everything I scroll past for the following while replicates it. I don't want it to all be the same; I want my feeds to meander widely.

Like this. A picture from this group randomly showed up in my feed, and I was delighted.

I have no current plans to join, but it nevertheless makes me happy to know this group exists and showed up in my feed.

Now some random things that have interested me lately, not about meandering widely, but demonstrating it a bit.

Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Other—and the Birds Loved It

Once the birds had learned how to initiate video interactions, the second phase of the experiment could begin. In this “open call” period, the 15 participating birds could make calls freely; they also got to choose which bird to dial up. Over the next two months, pet parrots made 147 deliberate video calls to other birds. Their owners took detailed notes about the calls and recorded more than 1,000 hours of video footage that the researchers analyzed.

For starters, they found that the parrots took advantage of the opportunity to call one another, and they typically stayed on the call for the maximum time allowed during the experiment. They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird, researchers say. Some of the parrots learned new skills from their virtual companions, including flying, foraging and how to make new sounds.

We are, all of us, social and connected.

This is fascinating.

What You Eat Can Reprogram Your Genes

Worker bees labor nonstop, are sterile and live only a few weeks. The queen bee, sitting deep inside the hive, has a life span that lasts for years and a fecundity so potent she gives birth to an entire colony.

And yet, worker and queen bees are genetically identical organisms. They become two different life forms because of the food they eat. The queen bee feasts on royal jelly; worker bees feed on nectar and pollen. Both foods provide energy, but royal jelly has an extra feature: its nutrients can unlock the genetic instructions to create the anatomy and physiology of a queen bee. . . .

Food contains micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals. These compounds and their breakdown products can trigger genetic switches that reside in the genome.

Like the switches that control the intensity of the light in your house, genetic switches determine how much of a certain gene product is produced. . . .

Interestingly, the ability of nutrients to alter the flow of genetic information can span across generations. Studies show that in humans and animals, the diet of grandparents influences the activity of genetic switches and the disease risk and mortality of grandchildren. . . .

For example, compared to milk from grass-fed cows, the milk from grain-fed cattle has different amounts and types of fatty acids and vitamins C and A . So when humans drink these different types of milk, their cells also receive different nutritional messages. . . .

All of these examples point to the possibility that the genetic information in food could arise not just from its molecular composition – the amino acids, vitamins and the like – but also from the agricultural, environmental and economic policies of a country, or the lack of them.

Scientists have only recently begun decoding these genetic food messages and their role in health and disease.

And ominous, considering some of the things we've been in the habit of eating lately.

I find this hopeful.

This Fun Guy Is Turning Fungi Into Meat

A network of thread-like strands, mycelium can digest organic matter and some chemicals and be formed into different shapes and textures. That makes it ideal to create things like compostable plastics, “living” building materials that can repair themselves and techniques to clean soils of chemicals—but “it cannot replace everything,” she said.

And if Schneider is right, it could be the newest trend in alternative meats.

“It’s a fibrous, high-protein ingredient that will be used in meat analogs,” he explained, showing off a handful of the popcorn-like flakes his company, Maia Farms, made by drying the whitish paste. Once compressed, flavored and colored, the flakes can “become anything you want,” from imitation burgers to plant-based steak. . . .

Once the company scales up its production enough to start selling, Schneider estimates Maia Farms will be pumping out enough each week to equal the weight of roughly 700 cattle. With growing demand for protein and strong evidence we need to reduce meat production to address climate change, he believes “mycoprotein…will be a staple food source in 20 years.” . . .

Mycelium “is much cheaper to make. You don’t have to conduct so much processing. It’s more natural” than existing plant-based commercial meat alternatives.

I hope it turns out to be something great.

I've always had trouble being in touch with my feelings.

Dark Feelings Will Haunt Us Until They Are Expressed in Words

Alexithymia is an extreme form of a deficit that is present in all of us to varying degrees. Whereas some of us struggle to put our feelings into words in nearly all domains, others can speak with sophistication and complexity about their emotional lives in relation to their artistic pursuits, for example, but not their personal relationships. Developing this capacity – the psychic elaboration of emotion – is a life-long task with which we must all engage. It is a cornerstone of psychological self-knowledge. Moreover, the failure to foster this capacity in psychotherapy is one of the most common factors that undermines its success. . . .

Finally, the verbal register entails the manifestation of affect in language, in words and stories, explanations and insights. It is the pinnacle of our emotional architecture, allowing us to link past and present, to hold up an experience and to examine it from different angles, to put our emotions ‘on pause’ and to bridge, even if only partially, the gaps that separate us as individuals. . . .

As I hope this abbreviated example has demonstrated, the problem that Jane struggles with – alexithymia – points to a task with which we must all engage: elaborating our affects into images and words, and subjecting them to ongoing reflection. Although most of us are not alexithymic in the clinical sense, we all have ‘pockets’, some larger and others smaller, of our inner lives that remain unelaborated. And in psychotherapy as in life, while a single, brilliant insight can be deeply important, that alone rarely leads to sustained personal development and relief from emotional suffering. It is, on the contrary, the development of this capacity – the psychic elaboration of emotion – that leads, quite literally, to continued mental growth.

Even after working on being better at understanding my feelings for years, I still find the thought of psychotherapy unappealing and alien. Nevertheless, I'll keep working on it in my own way.

While I'm no good at articulating and sharing my own feelings, I love connecting with the feelings of others in their stories and art. Here's a poem to wrap things up.

Kristene Kaye Brown

SELAH

Waves wash over the beached shells. Searching in a way

that will not fail.

Strange how soft water shapes hard rock

with its ancient lunar language.

I wish I understood the pyramids. I wish I understood

what holds together all the unlit spaces of a night sky.

I came to the shore to see what it might teach me.

The ocean lays down her rhythm and I float

above the noise of my mind. Today the moon

is as close to earth as it will be all year,

but this is beside the point. A wise saint once said:

There is no truth without first becoming truth. It’s true,

we become what we love. I love this silence

above all else. This is where I learn

to be alone. This is where I learn

all desire is the desire of God in disguise.

Just listen to the hush of a slow moving wave. It is

the sound of a body emptying itself. It is the world

dreaming itself awake.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
March 2023, Editor’s Choice