“for knowledge to be flexible, it should be learned under varied conditions, an approach called varied or mixed practice, or, to researchers, “interleaving.†Interleaving has been shown to improve inductive reasoning. When presented with different examples mixed together, students learn to create abstract generalizations that allow them to apply what they learned to material they have never encountered before. a museum and want to be able to identify the artist (Cézanne, Picasso, or Renoir) of paintings there that you have never seen. Before you go, instead of studying a stack of Cézanne flash cards, and then a stack of Picasso flash cards, and then a stack of Renoir, you should put the cards together and shuffle, so they will be interleaved. You will struggle more (and probably feel less confident) during practice, but be better equipped on museum day to discern each painter’s style, even for paintings that weren’t in the flash cards. In a study using college math problems, students who learned in blocks—all examples of a particular type of problem at once—performed a lot worse come test time than students who studied the exact same problems but all mixed up. The blocked-practice students learned procedures for each type of problem through repetition. The mixed-practice students learned how to differentiate types of problems. Focusing narrowly on many fine details specific to a problem at hand feels like the exact right thing to do, when it is often exactly wrong. Netflix came to a similar conclusion for improving its recommendation algorithm. Decoding movies’ traits to figure out what you like was very complex and less accurate than simply analogizing you to many other customers with similar viewing histories. Instead of predicting what you might like, they examine who you are like, and the complexity is captured therein. Interestingly, if the researchers used only the single film that the movie fans ranked as most analogous to the new release, predictive power collapsed. What seemed like the single best analogy did not do well on its own. Using a full “reference class†of analogies—the pillar of the outside view—was immensely more accurate. Like the venture capitalists, their intuition was to use too few analogies, and to rely on those that were the most superficially similar. “That’s usually exactly the wrong way to go about it regardless of what you’re using analogy for,†Lovallo told me. Boston Consulting Group, one of the most successful in the world, created an intranet site to provide consultants with collections of material to facilitate wide-ranging analogical thinking. The interactive “exhibits†were sorted by discipline (anthropology, psychology, history, and others), concept (change, logistics, productivity, and so on), and strategic theme (competition, cooperation, unions and alliances, and more). A consultant generating strategies for a post-merger integration might have perused the exhibit on how William the Conqueror “merged†England with the Norman Kingdom in the eleventh century. Epstein, David J. . Range (p. 113). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Epstein, David J. . Range (p. 113). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Epstein, David J. . Range (p. 112). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Epstein, David J. . Range (p. 112). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Epstein, David J. . Range (pp. 111-112). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Epstein, David J. . Range (p. 110). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. “The slowest growth,†the researchers wrote, occurs “for the most complex skills.†Epstein, David J. . Range (p. 97). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Epstein, David J. . Range (pp. 94-95). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Epstein, David J. . Range (p. 94). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
