Range

In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons.

Kahneman was focused on the flip side of
kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.”

In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better.

The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat
over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question.

Do specialists get better with experience, or not?

Psychologist Gary Klein is a pioneer of the “naturalistic decision making” (NDM) model of expertise

experts in an array of fields are remarkably similar to chess masters in that they instinctively recognize familiar patterns.

Just how much of the world, and how many of the things humans want to learn and do, are really like chess and golf?

While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.