Thank you for this interview and for pointing us to this book. I have a son who, like many kids, was conditioned throughout our educational system (from 1st grade through college) to see his ADHD as a handicap. The help he received was effectively giving him crutches and Band-Aids rather than learning ways to find and leverage benefits of ADHD. Range was helpful in pointing out the real advantages of ADHD in pursuing multiple interests and nurturing diverse talents. As he's making his way into the working world my hope is that he truly believes that the same parts of his brain and behavior that made sitting in a classroom pure torture can help him thrive in the "real" world. The Explorers Gene is definitely in his future!
Thanks so much for this comment, Edie! And I'm gratified to hear that about Range. My feeling is that anytime we're making curiosity, or having multiple interests into a bad thing, we should first examine whether it's the environment not the individual that needs to be tweaked. We should be working to harness those qualities rather than stifle them! You also reminded me of a study I read some years ago, and I don't remember all the details, but a takeaway was that some behaviors that lead to good grades are inversely correlated with success in the wider world.
Interesting thought about the difficulty of making a new concept work when the novel idea crosses disciplines. Some of the concepts that I thought were the most important in my work in orthopaedic sports medicine - including 3 of them that I deemed unique (due to unusual alignment of amazing people, services and ideas) and critical or very important - never panned out. Nonetheless, many of the things I've done in life, from early childhood, were firsts. Perhaps I was just "too stupid" to recognize that those approaches weren't typical, and they were novel in retrospect.
But I didn't learn. Now I embark on "Harp Moves", combining playing a wearable harp with dance. Few harpists seem to think it's worthwhile to combine their years-long mastery of a beautiful instrument with anything else. Few - if any - dancers have tried to design a musical instrument as a true extension of body line and music.
The kicker is that the sports medicine doctor part of me wants to combine the public health needs for physical activity with Harp Moves, so that the audience truly participates actively in the process!
A very long way of writing that sometimes explorations are linear, sometimes broad and developing, and sometimes novel. Any may fail or succeed. Are there keys to success in exploration? I look forward to The Explorer's Gene!
Ok...ok, this is an epic comment with twists and turns! I love the "too stupid" line, and I did not know of wearable harps. I don't know anything about it, but from your description it sounds like the type of activity that creates a fully immersive experience. And I love the idea that this could be used for public health — something artistic, athletic, and accessible. (That seems like a good hendiatris to me for physical and mental health: artistic, athletic, accessible. Artificiosa, athletica, accommodata!) Is there a video of Harp Moves that you can share?
I'm attaching the only Harp Moves video I currently have that doesn't include other people (whom I've not asked to sign releases). It has little harp playing as it was an early exploration of how a player could move, and my fingers were frozen. (BTW, I'm loving The Explorer's Gene! Thanks for letting us know it was out.)
I had never seen that before! Thanks so much for this. My first impression was that this is an activity that probably has a high propensity for inducing "flow" in the practitioner. ...and I have a special place in my heart for harp, because it was the first instrument my son heard. Within an hour of him being born, there was a harpist in the hospital who would play if one asked, and now it's a wonderful memory.
I wish this was longer, like an hour long podcast :) Re: this person's takes + Haidt's + many others... it's hard not to wonder if this generation of children, given how little they get to play/explore or even socially interact with each other in the real world, are going to just end up so creatively and socially stunted. This is going to have so many downstream effects on our world/future.
The hot streak research, based on retrospective analysis, may suffer from selection bias by focusing on already successful individuals. Are we potentially overlooking countless explorers who got lost and 'died' out there in the cold? Ie maybe they pursued ideas that made no sense or bore no fruit?
Ah, dang, this was like one-third of the conversation! Starting to think maybe I should record slightly better audio and upload the full thing? As far as the hot streak research, I think that's often the case, but in Dashun's work, I don't think it's a big concern. He just sucked up huge databases, like IMDB and things like that, and wasn't just picking the winners. So his initial work that lead to this was just looking at the time of peoples' best work, and that was the initial "hot streak" revelation. I don't think this totally absolves the work of potential selection bias, but I think it's about as rigorous as work in the area can get. Indeed, some people in the sample never had a hot streak at all. In any case, I do think your general concern is very well founded. My read of some of the "exploration" literature is that it really heightens the variance of output, which of course means there are more bad outcomes as well.
Brilliant (as usual)! Thanks for the additions to my reading list ... and also for lending support to my refusal, often viewed askance, to use turn-by-turn navi. It's in having been unsure of location and route that I truly know where I am. :)
Absolutely, parts of it definitely fed into my view of the world (which I hope is reasonably well-founded). Even so, Alex avoided oversimplification, and doesn't shy away from the fact that there are obvious downsides to exploration as well. In any case: thanks for reading and commenting!
First, thanks for the pointer back to this article, David. I think I was locked in exploitation when you published it.
“the pattern he noticed goes back to this explore-exploit dilemma. It's not that you need to always explore more, and it's not that you just need to do 10,000 hours and exploit more. You need a mix of both, and you need them in the right order. In this vast data set of thousands of artists, film directors, and scientists, the chance of a hot streak was highest if you had a period of exploration first, followed by a period of exploitation.”
This reminds me of my days in product development/R&D. We, like most organizations, employed a phases and gates approach. Phase 1 being the exploration of a concept(s) phase. It seems we did better on producing something more innovative the longer we allowed ourselves to explore, but management, of course, wanted us to be more “productive” and would be impatient with our “wandering”. The irony was the sooner we’d lock in our product concept, the longer we’d spend in Phase 2 (design) overcoming the weaknesses of a concept with a premature preliminary design. That would then ripple into a longer verification and validation phase, and a late delivery date. (We’d then patch things up with software, which would become the scapegoat. But that’s another story.)
Be liberal with your exploration and you’ll be more likely to be more successful and more productive in your exploitation.
I got a little lost on my long run exploring an area near the Rio Grande here in Las Cruces, NM this morning. I knew where I was but not how to get to the trails I wanted. I was running beside a pecan orchard and was asked to leave, but no big deal! I could have pulled out my phone and used the Gaia app, but I just didn't feel like it.
Alex Hutchison and David Epstein's conversation on the dance between explore and exploit struck a chord, particularly when considering the subtle yet pervasive ways our modern environment seems to be tipping the scales. It’s as if the very fabric of our digital lives, woven with social proof and hyper-personalized recommendations, is subtly optimizing us for exploit.
Think about it: the endless scroll of social media feeding us echoes of our own preferences, the "you might also like" suggestions that box us into familiar categories. This curated reality, while offering convenience, risks becoming a default behavior, a comfortable inertia that subtly discourages venturing beyond the known.
This tendency towards exploit isn't confined to our online interactions. I found myself reflecting on a recent family dinner, a ritual often associated with comfort and familiarity. We realized we were consistently ordering the same dishes, drawn by the low risk of disappointment – a classic example of exploit in action. It prompted a conscious intervention: a rotation of order-placers, a deliberate nudge away from the familiar and towards the potential for delightful (or at least memorable) surprises.
Interestingly, it's the "failures" of exploration – the dishes that didn't quite hit the mark, the recommendations that fell flat – that linger in our memory and spark conversation. These deviations from expectation, while perhaps momentarily disappointing, become richer threads in the tapestry of our experience. They highlight a crucial point: the value of exploration isn't solely in the successes, but also in the unexpected detours.
The toggle between explore and exploit isn't simple. Especially when we've been immersed in an exploit-optimized environment for an extended period, consciously shifting towards exploration requires intention, perhaps even a touch of playful disruption, as our family dinner experiment revealed. It’s a reminder that in a world increasingly tailored for comfort and predictability, the deliberate embrace of the unknown might be the most insightful path of all.
Hey, David. This has me now wanting to buy the book, which I think this is a very well done Q&A, so good job there. I know you've mentioned this explore-exploit dichotomy in the past. From hearing you talk about this, I think my understanding is you deliberately tried to explore post-Range since you didn't feel like there was much left to exploit, right? With your new book, do you think you'll feel similarly post-publication that this terrain has been fully exploited? Also, I asked you the same question with Gladwell, and I'm wondering the same thing here: after reading the book, what is one thing you disagree with Alex on? I couldn't let the buttering up get in the way of productive disagreement.
Hey Matt! You're right, I think of my book projects as a shifting between explore and exploit. Between books, I'm very much in explore mode, open to more different projects, and, in the past different jobs. (Right after The Sports Gene came out I went to ProPublica, feeling like I'd exploited my sports science work deeply by then, and wanted to see what else might interest me. I didn't know that terminology at the time, though, but it was my thinking.) That's a good question about the new book. On the one hand, I'm still doing final edits and in a way it's already partly dead to me. On the other hand, I think I'll be thinking about the applications of topics in the book (in large part specific to my own life), for longer than I did with my previous books. Inevitably, though, I'll shift into a more exploratory mode. Already I've started having new discussions about things I might engage with. Actually, for the last two years I did very little public speaking while focusing on research. But now I'm in the very late stages of the book, I've given three talks this month. So I had done zero for about a year, and then three in a month, which is a shift to explore mode. (I often find conferences creatively generative, and I make unexpected connections with people.) Going forward, to some degree what exactly I'm doing will depend on the reception of the new book. If it goes really well, a lot of people will want to talk to me about it and I might exploit a bit longer. If not, I'll shift fully into explore earlier. ...Now the hard question: something I disagree with Alex on. That's tough, because he's so smart and so rigorous, and he knows his topic a lot better than I do. But here's a thing: he has a great section about the importance of basic research, where we have no idea what we're going to find, we just let people be curious, and that has led to some of the most world-changing breakthroughs. He talks about Abraham Flexner's famous "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge." And I agree with that. At the same time, I think I've come around to feeling that super-applied problem solving may be a bit undervalued in terms of world-changing science. Like, someone is trying to solve some very specific problem regarding trains, or water pumps or something, and their solution opens up an entirely new area that even they didn't foresee. So that's basically the polar opposite of basic research, and more like targeted tinkering. Reading Joel Mokyr's work on the roots of the industrial revolution influenced me in this view. So I don't know that I'd say I disagree with Alex, but it was one spot in the book where I just said to myself, "but what about..." I think he's totally right in his emphasis that de-prioritizing curiosity driven research has led to less scientific advancement. As Alex writes: "Paul Forman, a historian of science at the Smithsonian Institution, argues that by around 1980 a transition had occurred, corresponding to the shift from modernity to postmodernity: instead of technology being subordinate to science, the opposite was now true. Basic curiosity-driven exploratory research, from society’s point of view, is now less important than the pursuit of new gadgets." I just think there have been times when science-subordinate-to-tech also led to breakthroughs, particularly when an important problem was very well framed. Eric Gilliam has a great post on the inimitable Bell Labs; it's typically thought of as a place of complete freedom, but he writes that there were certain practical guiderails. He uses this beautiful phrase, "long leash, narrow fence." https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-know
Cool to hear you're in the midst of toggling between explore and exploit. Did you find these recent conferences to be generative creatively as well? And please let me know if you're doing a talk in Boston sometime!
Reading that freaktakes piece is an interesting frame. Their idea is like the 80/20 principle to the extreme, where less than 1% of problems are actually worth their time and they only focus on those. It's hard not to see that application in my own life, especially with teaching and thinking of what things actually drive learning/culture in my class. Anyway, regarding the basic research vs. targeted tinkering: it isn't an exact match, but it seems thematically similar to the foxes and hedgehogs. Even if foxes seem to perform better, you still need hedgehogs! Or maybe that's a stretch and that when I'm reading the Range Widely newsletter I can't help but see everything as a Range problem. Either way, thanks as always for the thoughtful reply
I think that's true. I loved Freeman Dyson's take, that we need "both birds and frogs" for a healthy ecosystem, his birds and frogs being roughly equivalent to foxes and hedgehogs. The problem, he said, was that we're telling everyone to be frogs. That's often how I think about this stuff, not that we don't need specialists, but that in many areas we've gone overboard, or gotten extreme silo-ization, or simply undervalued the power of generalists. ...I will definitely let you know about Boston! It'd be great to meet up someday. As far as conferences, I sit in on many of the other talks, and those are often far more industry specific than what I'm talking about, and it's fascinating to see the political and technological landscape through the concerns of a specific industry. So just from a standpoint of being curious I appreciate that. But as I've become more experienced as a speaker, I've become more apt during Q&A after a talk to just share from a stage things I'm curious about or interested in, and quite often it leads to someone coming up after and saying, "I know someone you should talk to..." Now that I don't have a normal, daily journalism job, I find this really useful!
Ha! That's such a smart way to do it. I'll have to start finding socially acceptable ways to just voice my curiosity and see what happens. Now that I think about it, a lot of these comments in your newsletter seem to be similar in that it's people saying, "You mentioned you like X, so you should totally read Y." It's so cool!
Exactly. People sometimes say to me something like: "I know I shouldn't ask what you're working on..." and I'm like: "Here's what it is. Know anybody?" The only reason I'm ever cagey about it is out of self-consciousness, not secrecy. Even when I was doing investigative stuff, I'd share eagerly. It's not as if I was sharing the names of confidential sources, but sharing the topic occasionally led to someone making a useful connection.
"I think there are some serial innovators who are such serial innovators that they're really only interested in the discovery."
Anthropologists and some economists make a distinct between invention and innovation, this is conflated inthe quote (no doubt due to recent hoopla about start-up culture (I am 60) I can personally attest to inventing things that rarely and barely get innovation going out elsewhere. This conflation allows grifters to grift by getting naming rights for other peoples work (alienated or just plain stolen), especially narcissistic hacks.
If anyone is actually interested in what it is like to get lost by someone who never gets lost... here is my post from earlier in the month, from an essay I wrote about 25 years ago.
PROTIP: everyone should self-host, at least in parallel. Platforms (and LLMs) are the perfect example of grifting, in aggregate, other peoples' invention and innovation (all your activity belong to us).
Thank you for this interview and for pointing us to this book. I have a son who, like many kids, was conditioned throughout our educational system (from 1st grade through college) to see his ADHD as a handicap. The help he received was effectively giving him crutches and Band-Aids rather than learning ways to find and leverage benefits of ADHD. Range was helpful in pointing out the real advantages of ADHD in pursuing multiple interests and nurturing diverse talents. As he's making his way into the working world my hope is that he truly believes that the same parts of his brain and behavior that made sitting in a classroom pure torture can help him thrive in the "real" world. The Explorers Gene is definitely in his future!
Thanks so much for this comment, Edie! And I'm gratified to hear that about Range. My feeling is that anytime we're making curiosity, or having multiple interests into a bad thing, we should first examine whether it's the environment not the individual that needs to be tweaked. We should be working to harness those qualities rather than stifle them! You also reminded me of a study I read some years ago, and I don't remember all the details, but a takeaway was that some behaviors that lead to good grades are inversely correlated with success in the wider world.
Interesting thought about the difficulty of making a new concept work when the novel idea crosses disciplines. Some of the concepts that I thought were the most important in my work in orthopaedic sports medicine - including 3 of them that I deemed unique (due to unusual alignment of amazing people, services and ideas) and critical or very important - never panned out. Nonetheless, many of the things I've done in life, from early childhood, were firsts. Perhaps I was just "too stupid" to recognize that those approaches weren't typical, and they were novel in retrospect.
But I didn't learn. Now I embark on "Harp Moves", combining playing a wearable harp with dance. Few harpists seem to think it's worthwhile to combine their years-long mastery of a beautiful instrument with anything else. Few - if any - dancers have tried to design a musical instrument as a true extension of body line and music.
The kicker is that the sports medicine doctor part of me wants to combine the public health needs for physical activity with Harp Moves, so that the audience truly participates actively in the process!
A very long way of writing that sometimes explorations are linear, sometimes broad and developing, and sometimes novel. Any may fail or succeed. Are there keys to success in exploration? I look forward to The Explorer's Gene!
Ok...ok, this is an epic comment with twists and turns! I love the "too stupid" line, and I did not know of wearable harps. I don't know anything about it, but from your description it sounds like the type of activity that creates a fully immersive experience. And I love the idea that this could be used for public health — something artistic, athletic, and accessible. (That seems like a good hendiatris to me for physical and mental health: artistic, athletic, accessible. Artificiosa, athletica, accommodata!) Is there a video of Harp Moves that you can share?
P.S. Thanks for being an important supporter!
And I love the alliteration -- and a new word!!
I'm attaching the only Harp Moves video I currently have that doesn't include other people (whom I've not asked to sign releases). It has little harp playing as it was an early exploration of how a player could move, and my fingers were frozen. (BTW, I'm loving The Explorer's Gene! Thanks for letting us know it was out.)
https://youtu.be/XwM7WCr0CUQ
I had never seen that before! Thanks so much for this. My first impression was that this is an activity that probably has a high propensity for inducing "flow" in the practitioner. ...and I have a special place in my heart for harp, because it was the first instrument my son heard. Within an hour of him being born, there was a harpist in the hospital who would play if one asked, and now it's a wonderful memory.
I wish this was longer, like an hour long podcast :) Re: this person's takes + Haidt's + many others... it's hard not to wonder if this generation of children, given how little they get to play/explore or even socially interact with each other in the real world, are going to just end up so creatively and socially stunted. This is going to have so many downstream effects on our world/future.
The hot streak research, based on retrospective analysis, may suffer from selection bias by focusing on already successful individuals. Are we potentially overlooking countless explorers who got lost and 'died' out there in the cold? Ie maybe they pursued ideas that made no sense or bore no fruit?
Ah, dang, this was like one-third of the conversation! Starting to think maybe I should record slightly better audio and upload the full thing? As far as the hot streak research, I think that's often the case, but in Dashun's work, I don't think it's a big concern. He just sucked up huge databases, like IMDB and things like that, and wasn't just picking the winners. So his initial work that lead to this was just looking at the time of peoples' best work, and that was the initial "hot streak" revelation. I don't think this totally absolves the work of potential selection bias, but I think it's about as rigorous as work in the area can get. Indeed, some people in the sample never had a hot streak at all. In any case, I do think your general concern is very well founded. My read of some of the "exploration" literature is that it really heightens the variance of output, which of course means there are more bad outcomes as well.
Upload full thing: yes. Even if the audio is bad.
Brilliant (as usual)! Thanks for the additions to my reading list ... and also for lending support to my refusal, often viewed askance, to use turn-by-turn navi. It's in having been unsure of location and route that I truly know where I am. :)
Beautiful phrase: " It's in having been unsure of location and route that I truly know where I am." Thanks so much for leaving it here!
Fascinating stuff—thanks for sharing this interview. The new book’s topic does remind me of Range, and I’ll look forward to reading!
Absolutely, parts of it definitely fed into my view of the world (which I hope is reasonably well-founded). Even so, Alex avoided oversimplification, and doesn't shy away from the fact that there are obvious downsides to exploration as well. In any case: thanks for reading and commenting!
Really informative. Thanks.
So glad you found it interesting, Darrell. Thanks for reading!
First, thanks for the pointer back to this article, David. I think I was locked in exploitation when you published it.
“the pattern he noticed goes back to this explore-exploit dilemma. It's not that you need to always explore more, and it's not that you just need to do 10,000 hours and exploit more. You need a mix of both, and you need them in the right order. In this vast data set of thousands of artists, film directors, and scientists, the chance of a hot streak was highest if you had a period of exploration first, followed by a period of exploitation.”
This reminds me of my days in product development/R&D. We, like most organizations, employed a phases and gates approach. Phase 1 being the exploration of a concept(s) phase. It seems we did better on producing something more innovative the longer we allowed ourselves to explore, but management, of course, wanted us to be more “productive” and would be impatient with our “wandering”. The irony was the sooner we’d lock in our product concept, the longer we’d spend in Phase 2 (design) overcoming the weaknesses of a concept with a premature preliminary design. That would then ripple into a longer verification and validation phase, and a late delivery date. (We’d then patch things up with software, which would become the scapegoat. But that’s another story.)
Be liberal with your exploration and you’ll be more likely to be more successful and more productive in your exploitation.
Oh wow! This is fantastic. Explorer Gene is such a wonderful book!!!
I got a little lost on my long run exploring an area near the Rio Grande here in Las Cruces, NM this morning. I knew where I was but not how to get to the trails I wanted. I was running beside a pecan orchard and was asked to leave, but no big deal! I could have pulled out my phone and used the Gaia app, but I just didn't feel like it.
Alex Hutchison and David Epstein's conversation on the dance between explore and exploit struck a chord, particularly when considering the subtle yet pervasive ways our modern environment seems to be tipping the scales. It’s as if the very fabric of our digital lives, woven with social proof and hyper-personalized recommendations, is subtly optimizing us for exploit.
Think about it: the endless scroll of social media feeding us echoes of our own preferences, the "you might also like" suggestions that box us into familiar categories. This curated reality, while offering convenience, risks becoming a default behavior, a comfortable inertia that subtly discourages venturing beyond the known.
This tendency towards exploit isn't confined to our online interactions. I found myself reflecting on a recent family dinner, a ritual often associated with comfort and familiarity. We realized we were consistently ordering the same dishes, drawn by the low risk of disappointment – a classic example of exploit in action. It prompted a conscious intervention: a rotation of order-placers, a deliberate nudge away from the familiar and towards the potential for delightful (or at least memorable) surprises.
Interestingly, it's the "failures" of exploration – the dishes that didn't quite hit the mark, the recommendations that fell flat – that linger in our memory and spark conversation. These deviations from expectation, while perhaps momentarily disappointing, become richer threads in the tapestry of our experience. They highlight a crucial point: the value of exploration isn't solely in the successes, but also in the unexpected detours.
The toggle between explore and exploit isn't simple. Especially when we've been immersed in an exploit-optimized environment for an extended period, consciously shifting towards exploration requires intention, perhaps even a touch of playful disruption, as our family dinner experiment revealed. It’s a reminder that in a world increasingly tailored for comfort and predictability, the deliberate embrace of the unknown might be the most insightful path of all.
Hey, David. This has me now wanting to buy the book, which I think this is a very well done Q&A, so good job there. I know you've mentioned this explore-exploit dichotomy in the past. From hearing you talk about this, I think my understanding is you deliberately tried to explore post-Range since you didn't feel like there was much left to exploit, right? With your new book, do you think you'll feel similarly post-publication that this terrain has been fully exploited? Also, I asked you the same question with Gladwell, and I'm wondering the same thing here: after reading the book, what is one thing you disagree with Alex on? I couldn't let the buttering up get in the way of productive disagreement.
Hey Matt! You're right, I think of my book projects as a shifting between explore and exploit. Between books, I'm very much in explore mode, open to more different projects, and, in the past different jobs. (Right after The Sports Gene came out I went to ProPublica, feeling like I'd exploited my sports science work deeply by then, and wanted to see what else might interest me. I didn't know that terminology at the time, though, but it was my thinking.) That's a good question about the new book. On the one hand, I'm still doing final edits and in a way it's already partly dead to me. On the other hand, I think I'll be thinking about the applications of topics in the book (in large part specific to my own life), for longer than I did with my previous books. Inevitably, though, I'll shift into a more exploratory mode. Already I've started having new discussions about things I might engage with. Actually, for the last two years I did very little public speaking while focusing on research. But now I'm in the very late stages of the book, I've given three talks this month. So I had done zero for about a year, and then three in a month, which is a shift to explore mode. (I often find conferences creatively generative, and I make unexpected connections with people.) Going forward, to some degree what exactly I'm doing will depend on the reception of the new book. If it goes really well, a lot of people will want to talk to me about it and I might exploit a bit longer. If not, I'll shift fully into explore earlier. ...Now the hard question: something I disagree with Alex on. That's tough, because he's so smart and so rigorous, and he knows his topic a lot better than I do. But here's a thing: he has a great section about the importance of basic research, where we have no idea what we're going to find, we just let people be curious, and that has led to some of the most world-changing breakthroughs. He talks about Abraham Flexner's famous "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge." And I agree with that. At the same time, I think I've come around to feeling that super-applied problem solving may be a bit undervalued in terms of world-changing science. Like, someone is trying to solve some very specific problem regarding trains, or water pumps or something, and their solution opens up an entirely new area that even they didn't foresee. So that's basically the polar opposite of basic research, and more like targeted tinkering. Reading Joel Mokyr's work on the roots of the industrial revolution influenced me in this view. So I don't know that I'd say I disagree with Alex, but it was one spot in the book where I just said to myself, "but what about..." I think he's totally right in his emphasis that de-prioritizing curiosity driven research has led to less scientific advancement. As Alex writes: "Paul Forman, a historian of science at the Smithsonian Institution, argues that by around 1980 a transition had occurred, corresponding to the shift from modernity to postmodernity: instead of technology being subordinate to science, the opposite was now true. Basic curiosity-driven exploratory research, from society’s point of view, is now less important than the pursuit of new gadgets." I just think there have been times when science-subordinate-to-tech also led to breakthroughs, particularly when an important problem was very well framed. Eric Gilliam has a great post on the inimitable Bell Labs; it's typically thought of as a place of complete freedom, but he writes that there were certain practical guiderails. He uses this beautiful phrase, "long leash, narrow fence." https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-know
Cool to hear you're in the midst of toggling between explore and exploit. Did you find these recent conferences to be generative creatively as well? And please let me know if you're doing a talk in Boston sometime!
Reading that freaktakes piece is an interesting frame. Their idea is like the 80/20 principle to the extreme, where less than 1% of problems are actually worth their time and they only focus on those. It's hard not to see that application in my own life, especially with teaching and thinking of what things actually drive learning/culture in my class. Anyway, regarding the basic research vs. targeted tinkering: it isn't an exact match, but it seems thematically similar to the foxes and hedgehogs. Even if foxes seem to perform better, you still need hedgehogs! Or maybe that's a stretch and that when I'm reading the Range Widely newsletter I can't help but see everything as a Range problem. Either way, thanks as always for the thoughtful reply
I think that's true. I loved Freeman Dyson's take, that we need "both birds and frogs" for a healthy ecosystem, his birds and frogs being roughly equivalent to foxes and hedgehogs. The problem, he said, was that we're telling everyone to be frogs. That's often how I think about this stuff, not that we don't need specialists, but that in many areas we've gone overboard, or gotten extreme silo-ization, or simply undervalued the power of generalists. ...I will definitely let you know about Boston! It'd be great to meet up someday. As far as conferences, I sit in on many of the other talks, and those are often far more industry specific than what I'm talking about, and it's fascinating to see the political and technological landscape through the concerns of a specific industry. So just from a standpoint of being curious I appreciate that. But as I've become more experienced as a speaker, I've become more apt during Q&A after a talk to just share from a stage things I'm curious about or interested in, and quite often it leads to someone coming up after and saying, "I know someone you should talk to..." Now that I don't have a normal, daily journalism job, I find this really useful!
Ha! That's such a smart way to do it. I'll have to start finding socially acceptable ways to just voice my curiosity and see what happens. Now that I think about it, a lot of these comments in your newsletter seem to be similar in that it's people saying, "You mentioned you like X, so you should totally read Y." It's so cool!
Exactly. People sometimes say to me something like: "I know I shouldn't ask what you're working on..." and I'm like: "Here's what it is. Know anybody?" The only reason I'm ever cagey about it is out of self-consciousness, not secrecy. Even when I was doing investigative stuff, I'd share eagerly. It's not as if I was sharing the names of confidential sources, but sharing the topic occasionally led to someone making a useful connection.
Love it. Sahil Bloom calls this idea "Luck Surface Area": https://x.com/sahilbloom/status/1543229666030501894
"I think there are some serial innovators who are such serial innovators that they're really only interested in the discovery."
Anthropologists and some economists make a distinct between invention and innovation, this is conflated inthe quote (no doubt due to recent hoopla about start-up culture (I am 60) I can personally attest to inventing things that rarely and barely get innovation going out elsewhere. This conflation allows grifters to grift by getting naming rights for other peoples work (alienated or just plain stolen), especially narcissistic hacks.
If anyone is actually interested in what it is like to get lost by someone who never gets lost... here is my post from earlier in the month, from an essay I wrote about 25 years ago.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/lost-learning
some of my inventions are showcased at https://meika.loofs-samorzewski.com/
PROTIP: everyone should self-host, at least in parallel. Platforms (and LLMs) are the perfect example of grifting, in aggregate, other peoples' invention and innovation (all your activity belong to us).