Building Connections Through Knowledge
that approach Not only would they
not get better they would often get more confident but not better which was a
bad combination and sometimes it would get
even worse with really narrow focus
and I could not figure out how to reconcile these things why are they
finding such different results again
I'm looking through for all these signs of you know bad data not not finding it
and fortunately um I I gave a talk
uh where I was doing some of the critiquing
of the science underlying the 10,000
hours Rule and the Nobel La Daniel Conan who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow was
there and someone asked he asked someone
for my email address and like months
later he followed up and invited me to lunch and we go and have lunch and I'm
like I'm and he was he was
interested in my critique of some of the research and I was saying I'm really
confused you
know what are you working on now I'm
working through my confusion about this why do people sometimes get better with
narrowly focused practice and why
sometimes don't they he said oh I've done I've got the paper for you and
basically he referred me to this
body of research about kind versus wicked learning environments these are terms
coined by a psychologist named Robin
Hogarth kind is like next steps and goals are clear rules repeat uh it's
based on patterns repetitive
patterns rules never change give me an example chess golf uh in chess the
grandmaster's
advantage is largely based on
knowledge of recurring patterns so you better have started studying those by
age 12 or your chance of reaching Grandmaster drops
from about one in4 to about 1 and
155 also why it's relatively so easy to automate uh feedback is quick and
accurate uh not a lot of human
behavior involved work next year will look like work last year on the other end
of the
spectrum are wicked learning environments
where patterns don't just repeat they might fool you rules may
change if there are any feedback
could be delayed or inaccurate um work next
year may not look like work last
year and so whether or not people get better with this very Nar in a predictable
way
with this very narrow practice
depends a lot on where on that kind to Wicked Spectrum the the task happens to
be
what's an example of a wicked lining
environment so let's say one one of the examples uh that I loved that he turned
me to was uh in medicine because
there's a lot of areas in medicine where something is done and the person
making
the decision actually never learns
of the consequence of the decision um or I'd say I would say like judges some
cases in like the criminal justice
system are set up to have maybe the
worst judgment they could have in
some ways because they almost never get feedback they have like very little
they can do whatever they want and they
almost never get any any feedback
but so in in medicine there was this one example in one of the studies that I
thought was just interesting and
illustrative where um this this physician became famous for being able
to diagnose typhoid it's a New York
physician by feeling around palpating people's tongues feeling around their
tongues with his hand and he could tell
you know we or two before they would
even get it this person's going to get typhoid and as one of his colleagues
later observed he was a more
prolific spreader of typhoid than even Typhoid Mary he was spreading it with
his hands
by touching their tongue making the
prediction they would get typhoid which would turn out to be correct so would
reinforce the lesson that he was really
good at prediction that's a really
wicked learning environment where the feedback he's getting is reinforcing the
exact wrong lesson right but I would say
most of the things that most of us
are doing have feedback that tends to be delayed
sometimes it's accurate and
sometimes it's not it's never as accurate as like I hit that golf shot and I
see if it
hooks or slices and then I changed
the the club face and and try it again and so most of what most of us are
involved
in increasingly right like work
doesn't next year doesn't look like work last
year for most of us anymore and in
fact Andre Ericson again the guy who did the research underlying the 10,000
hour rule
when he eventually wrote a book he
he he made this caveat the book that said the
10,000 hours framework uh it applies
to things where we know exactly how to be good and a coach can watch you do it
and
correct everything that you do wrong
so it doesn't apply to most these other things that most of us do like computer
programming and managing and
Entrepreneurship and all these other
pretty big loophole right in those areas you want this much broader
toolbox I am I was really compelled
by something I saw you talking about which was the story of Nintendo and why
they
were so successful in the early days
because they have a a very Broad they take wrote down the quote um a lateral
thinking with withered technology
yeah that started with a guy named gune yokoi
who was scored poorly on electronics
exams in University and so he had to settle
for a low tier job as a machine
maintenance worker uh at a at a company in Kyoto that made playing cards with
flowers on them whereas like his
more prestigious peers went to big companies in Tokyo and the company was in
huge
trouble uh it had to diversify if it
was going to survive survive and he knew
that he wasn't equipped to work on
The Cutting Edge but that there was all this information available that maybe
he
could just look for technology
that's already well understood and combine it in ways that his more specialized
peers
couldn't see and so he went and he
took some well-known technology from the calculator industry some well-known
technology from the credit card
industry and combined them and made handheld games and those were those were a
hit
right that's what made Nintendo
which was a found in a wooden storefront in 19th century that's what turned it
into
a to a toy and game Operation so he
moved from machine maintenance to developing toys and games and his
magnopus was the Game Boy right
where um
it was a technological joke in every
way it's like the processor was a decade old the screen looks like you know
rotting
alala or something it's like and it
came out at the same time as color competitors and it blew them out of the
water because he knew what customers
cared about wasn't color as much as
it was durability affordability portability
battery life game selection by using
well-known technology people could make games quickly and so he kind of set
this
philosophy this lateral thinking
with withered technology that was his phrase which means taking things that are
already well understood and moving them
somewhere where they're seen as
invention and that actually turns out to be more the norm than the exception in
terms of technological innovation
particularly sort of later in the 20th century forward before that it wasn't
necessarily the case much of the
20th century actually the most impactful patents if you look at patent research
were authored by teams and
individuals that Dove deeper and deeper into one area of Technology as
classified by the
US patent office but starting in
this sort of Information Age period um you
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