Max McKinnon’s Reviews > Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World > Status Update

I can definitely relate to the cultural stigma around “a jack of all trades is a master of none”. I have many times not included things on my resume or in conversations with hiring managers because more than once I’ve gotten stopped early due to being interested in too many things.

I learned the full phrase was originally a complement “… but oftentimes better than a master of one”

He describes a scenario involving a choice to race and a failing engine. Worse case was described as losing the sponsorship. Then when you make the decision to race, it turns into an “aha! You were given NASA data and just killed 7 people on the Challenger!”, an entirely different set of risks vs reward. Terrible analogy.

Overall he was trying to say challenge the data but did so poorly.

The comic book section was interesting. But one super glaring issue, he kept describing “so many benefited from breadth of working on multiple genres” without giving any data. How significant was it? Probably not much if be failed to mention it in numbers. I hate it when authors are more interested in the narrative than the actual data

The notes around Michael Crichton, Patrick Rothfuss, and other “late to arrive” authors were insightful. I could add one more to that list: Andy Weir.

I like his commentary on Duckworth’s Grit, which had both rebuttals and praise.

I found myself overpraising that book. A lot of the things he’s saying about pivot vs persevere I can relate to, especially since I just switched teams at work. The first team wasn’t traumatically bad, and I could have easily gritted it out, but I’m so glad I made a transfer.

The music and math examples are pretty good however. Both music and math have a fairly easy way to understand both the memorization approach and the understanding approach and the superiority of the understanding approach. I would disagree that that generalizes to all fields though. Many fields are more about memorization, and even math and music can benefit from some amount of memorization.

3/5 so far. You’d have to be living under a rock to not understand some of these problem solving principles, and I completely disagree with the narrative of building breadth before depth. Almost all my breadth and analogy knowledge I can trace back to going super deep in one thing, then relating lessons there back to other things. “Fundamentals first” is completely wrong and totally neglects the role of passion

The author discerned that chess is 99% tactics and 1% strategy. Doesn’t matter how good your strategy is if you’re more than a few pieces down (rare short term exceptions come up, like the beautiful stockfish queen in the corner game).

The conclusion of humans adding to a computer’s ability was a bit forced and only true during the deep blue era. Humans aren’t infinitely better at generalizing everything.