Range

“How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules”—that is, by providing rewards for repetitive short-term success with a narrow range of solutions.

As one oncologist put it, “The difference between winning at Jeopardy! and curing all cancer is that we know the answer to Jeopardy! questions.” With cancer, we’re still working on posing the right questions in the first place.

the bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.

the centaur lesson remains: the more a task shifts to an open world of big-picture strategy, the more humans have to add.

It took Treffert decades to realize he had been wrong, and that
savants have more in common with prodigies like the Polgar sisters than he thought. They do not merely regurgitate. Their brilliance, just like the Polgar brilliance, relies on repetitive structures, which is precisely what made the Polgars’ skill so easy to automate.

We all rely on chunking every day in skills in which we are expert.

Studying an enormous number of repetitive patterns is so important in chess that early specialization in technical practice is critical.

The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman
reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens.

Chunking helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain-specific memory,

Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.