StarCraft video games, 28–29 stents (coronary), 266 Storm King Mountain fire, 246 strategic thinking, 22–23, 28–29 struggling, benefits of, 88, 89 sunk cost fallacy, 143 Super Bowl, 2018, 8 superforecasters, 258 Superforecasting (Tetlock and Gardner), 220 surgeons and surgical teams, 6, 32, 210–11 Suzuki Method, 76 Swanson, Don, 179–180, 189, 206 Swanson, Judy, 180–81 Syed, Matthew, 6 Talent Is Overrated (Colvin), 18 Taylor, Alva, 208–10 teachers, 91–92, 132 teams innovation in, 209–10 of specialists in “kind” learning environments, 210–11 tech companies, founders of, 11 technological inventors, 9 tennis, 31 ten-thousand-hours rule of expertise, 5, 32 test-and-learn model for exploring options, 163–64 testing/self-testing, 87–88, 89, 96 Tetlock, Philip, 218–223, 225, 228, 230, 231, 256 Thrale, Hester, 56 Tiger parents, 64–65, 275 Tillman Foundation, 10, 13 Togelius, Julian, 28–29 tools and Air Force pararescue jumpers, 250–55, 258 and cultural congruence/incongruence, 255, 256–57 in medical world, 266–67 and NASA’s quantitative culture, 241–45, 247–48, 249, 254, 257, 258 and overlearned behavior, 248, 250 and reliance on trusted methods/beliefs, 246–47, 265–67 in wilderness firefighting, 245–47, 248 Toynbee, Arnold, 51, 267 Treffert, Darold, 27 Tucker, Ross, 9 Tu Youyou, 272 Tversky, Amos, 108
University of Chicago, 49 University of Washington, 50 Unusual (or Alternative) Uses Task, 198 U.S. Air Force Academy, 90–92 U.S. Army, 132–35, 137–140, 140n “using procedures” question type, 82–85, 92–94 U.S. Military Academy, 132–35, 137–140, 145 U.S. National Library of Medicine, 180 Uzzi, Brian, 280–81 Van Gogh, Vincent, 121–27, 144, 162 Vaughan, Diane, 240–41, 245, 247–48 Venice, seventeenth-century, 55–64 video games, 28–29, 196–97, 199–200, 288 Viles, Jill, 181–89 Vivaldi, Antonio, 55–57, 60, 62 vocabulary learning, 85–86, 88 Von Braun, Wernher, 258–59, 262 Wallace, William, 164 Wallenda, Karl, 246 Warshaw, Howard Scott, 288 Watson (IBM), 29 Weick, Karl, 245, 246–47, 248, 265 Wellington, Chrissie, 166 Wertham, Fredric, 208 West Point, 132–35, 137–39, 145 Whiteread, Rachel, 288 Whole Candidate Score of U.S. Military Academy, 133, 134 “wicked” learning environments, 21, 30 Wii by Nintendo, 199–200 Williams, Anson, 23–24 Wing, Jeannette, 50 Winner, Ellen, 32 Winter Olympics, 2018, 8 Woods, Earl, 1–2, 5 Woods, Tiger, 1–2, 4–6, 18, 32 writers, 156, 165–66, 210, 288 Yates, Ian, 65 Yokoi, Gunpei, 192–97, 198–200, 272 youth, perceived intelligence of, 11 youth sports programs, 97n
Zuckerberg, Mark, 6, 11 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
About the Author David Epstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as an investigative reporter for ProPublica and a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Washington, DC.
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* A common solution was for several team members to hold the pole at an angle as others took turns crawling up it and jumping over the wall. The pole could eventually be passed over the wall, held at an angle, and the remaining team members could jump and grab on to it and shimmy along it until they could jump over the wall.
* About half of savants are autistic, and many others have a disability, but not all do.
* Twenty-five bulbs were mounted behind a translucent board, and the puzzle started with the upper left bulb lit and a scoreboard at zero. Subjects were told that accumulating points would earn them money, but they were not told how to score. By experimenting, they could figure out that pressing buttons in a sequence that resulted in the bottom right bulb being lit was the way to score points and earn money. Essentially, they had to move the light from upper left to bottom right.
* Psychologists still hotly debate the contributions to and implications of the Flynn effect. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker characterized the gains as more than just a shift of thinking: “No historian who takes in the sweep of human history on the scale of centuries could miss the fact that we are now living in a period of extraordinary brainpower.”
* Flynn also told me that he gave the test to pupils at a British secondary school that sends a lot of students to the London School of Economics, as well as to juniors and seniors at LSE. His conclusion: “They were no better at thinking critically when they came out of university than when they went in.”
* As psychologist Robin Hogarth noted of economists, “What strikes me about their discourse . . . is how the terminology and reasoning processes of economics work their way into almost all topics. Whether the topic is sports, economic phenomena, politics, or even academic curricula.”
* Fermi was present at the first atomic bomb test and dropped pieces of paper “before, during, and after the passage of the blast wave,” he wrote in documents that were classified at the time. He used the distance the paper traveled to estimate the explosion strength.
* This is another instance where extrapolating from sports to the rest of the world can mislead. With motor-skill learning, some bad habits once formed can be laborious to undo. Elite coaches expend a lot of energy undoing motor habits that athletes who were overcoached as children formed years earlier. In the nonsports world, repeated wrong answers can set up learning, so long as the right answer is provided eventually.
* Five years must be active duty.
* Two of the most famously intensive early childhood education programs showed the fadeout pattern on several cognitive measures they targeted for improvement, but also demonstrated some important long-term social benefits, like decreased rates of incarceration. Even when the intended academic effects disappear, it seems that an extended program of positive interactions between adults and children can leave a lasting mark. In my opinion, youth sports programs should take note: coach/athlete interactions may have a longer life than the fleeting advantage of a head start in closed skills.
* He put the phrase in French in a letter to his brother: “ce qui ne passe pas dans ce qui passe”—that which endures in that which fades.
* This made job changing the single most popular question.
* In a detailed analysis, Levitt showed that the result of the coin flip actually influenced the decisions people made. Someone pondering a job change who flipped heads was more likely to change jobs than someone in the same situation who flipped tails, even though, of course, everyone could do whatever they wanted with their life no matter the result of the flip. Among people who chose to follow the coin’s advice, flipping heads (and changing jobs) was causally related to their subsequent increased happiness.
* In some years, a scientist who studied basketball would find an inverse relationship between player height and scoring if the scientist looked only at players in the NBA. If the scientist did not acknowledge that the rest of humanity outside the NBA had been filtered out, he or she might give parents the advice to have short kids for them to score more points in the NBA.
* The Army also started a process called “talent-based branching” in which it works with cadets and young officers to help them assess their own talents and interests as they progress in training. The idea is to improve their occupational match quality. As Colonel Joanne Moore noted in a presentation in 2017, the jobs that cadets enter the military dreaming of often prove not to be a great fit. They only realize that after trying, so the ability to switch is critical for optimizing match quality.
* Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that the trope of the professionally itinerant Millennial is really just the natural continuation of a knowledge-economy trend. Fifty percent of Late Baby Boomers (born between 1957 and 1964) held at least eleven different jobs between ages eighteen and fifty, and that was pretty similar for women and men of different education levels.
* For the statistically inclined, the correlation for a particular personality trait between an individual’s teen years and that individual’s older age is typically around 0.2–0.3, which is on the moderate side. (Assuming no random measurement error, a correlation of 1.0 would mean the personality trait did not change at all relative to one’s age-matched peers.) “We are clearly not the same people at seventy-five as fifteen,” Roberts told me, but “there are traces that should be recognizable.”
* A replication of the marshmallow test, published in 2018, found that the predictive power for later behaviors was less than in the original study.
* Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes flirted in the extreme via what she called her “Year of Yes.” Rhimes is introverted and was inclined to turn down every unexpected invitation that came her way. She decided to about-face and say yes to everything for an entire year. She finished the year with a deep understanding of what she wanted to focus on.
* Yokoi’s ideas and quotes are from his own writings and interviews, including his coauthored book 横井軍平ゲーム館 (Yokoi Gunpei Gēmu-kan), which translates to Gunpei Yokoi Game House. Yokoi’s works do not appear in English, so portions were translated for use here.
* Twister was a failure in Japan in the late 1960s due to a mismatch with prevailing social norms. It earned the nickname “the eroticism box.”
* “Performance” included measures of sales growth, profit from innovation, shareholder return, and market capitalization.
* Names of students have been changed except for those who gave explicit permission to use a real name.
* Scientists publish more now than in the past so the comparison isn’t entirely fair, but still puts Casadevall in very rare company.
* When bacteria enter a cut, the B cell releases antibodies that attach to bacteria and usher them to a macrophage, which destroys them.
* In fact, interdisciplinary research is sometimes looked down upon precisely because it does not signal hyperspecialization. Scientists Diana Rhoten and Stephanie Pfirman wrote in Inside Higher Ed that women appear to be more likely to engage in interdisciplinary research, but that they were told to refrain from encouraging junior women to conduct interdisciplinary research “or they’ll never be taken seriously.”
* When creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton studied the history of innovation in Japan, which vacillated between being very closed and very open to the rest of the world, he saw that creative explosions in domains from fiction writing and poetry to ceramics and medicine followed bursts of immigration.
* E.T. the game was such a legendary flop that it birthed the “Great Video Game Burial of 1983” legend, that Atari buried millions of copies in a landfill in New Mexico. In 2014, the site was excavated as part of a documentary. It actually did contain buried copies of E.T., but definitely not millions.