Range - David Epstein Page 0,124
Scientific Biography (New York: Springer, 2001).
“eduction”: Flynn’s Does Your Family Make You Smarter? and chap. 22 of R. J. Sternberg and S. B. Kaufman, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
forest for the trees: An in-depth description of the “seeing the trees” phenomenon in a different context can be found in sections about “weak central coherence” in U. Frith, Autism: Explaining the Enigma (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003).
The Kpelle people: S. Scribner, “Developmental Aspects of Categorized Recall in a West African Society,” Cognitive Psychology 6 (1974): 475–94. For more on work that extended Luria’s findings, see: M. Cole and S. Scribner, Culture and Thought (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974).
The word “percent”: Google Books Ngram Viewer search for “percent.” See also: J. B. Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331 (2011): 176–82.
They do very well on Raven’s: Flynn, Does Your Family Make You Smarter?
provides peace of mind: S. Arbesman, Overcomplicated (New York: Portfolio, 2017), 158–60.
“cognitively flexible”: C. Schooler, “Environmental Complexity and the Flynn Effect,” in The Rising Curve, ed. U. Neisser (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998). And see: A. Inkeles and D. H. Smith, Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
“No historian who takes in the sweep of human history”: S. Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature (New York: Penguin, 2011).
more slowly for women: Flynn, Are We Getting Smarter?.
“the traits that earn good grades”: Flynn, How to Improve Your Mind (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Flynn kindly provided me with the test and answer key.
econ professors have been shown: R. P. Larrick et al., “Teaching the Use of Cost-Benefit Reasoning in Everyday Life,” Psychological Science 1, no. 6 (1990): 362–70; R. P. Larrick et al., “Who Uses the Cost-Benefit Rules of Choice?,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 56 (1993): 331–47. (Hogarth’s “what strikes me” quote in the footnote is from his Educating Intuition, p. 222).
Chemists, on the other hand: J. F. Voss et al., “Individual Differences in the Solving of Social Science Problems,” in Individual Differences in Cognition, vol. 1, ed. R. F. Dillon and R. R. Schmeck (New York: Academic Press, 1983); D. R. Lehman et al., “The Effects of Graduate Training on Reasoning,” American Psychologist 43, no. 6 (1988): 431–43.
“is intended as an introduction”: “The College Core Curriculum,” University of Chicago, college.uchicago.edu/academics/college-core-curriculum.
registration filled up in the first minute: M. Nijhuis, “How to Call B.S. on Big Data: A Practical Guide,” The New Yorker, June 3, 2017, online ed.
“Computational thinking is using abstraction”: J. M. Wing, “Computational Thinking,” Communications of the ACM 49, no. 3 (2006): 33–35.
narrow vocational training: B. Caplan, The Case Against Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 233–35.
a career unrelated to their major: J. R. Abel and R. Deitz, “Agglomeration and Job Matching among College Graduates.” Regional Science and Urban Economics 51 (2015): 14–24.
“No tool is omnicompetent”: A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 12, Reconsiderations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 42.
“Everyone is so busy doing research”: Center for Evidence-Based Medicine video, “Doug Altman—Scandal of Poor Medical Research,” youtube/watch?v=ZwDNPldQO1Q.
like Fermi-izing, can go a long way: In addition to the Larrick and Lehman studies above, see: D. F. Halpern, “Teaching Critical Thinking for Transfer Across Domains,” American Psychologist 53, no. 4 (1998): 449–55; W. Chang et al., “Developing Expert Political Judgment,” Judgment and Decision Making 11, no. 5 (2016): 509–26.
“how Fermi estimation can cut”: “Case Studies: Bullshit in the Wild,” Calling Bullshit, callingbullshit/case_studies.html.
CHAPTER 3: WHEN LESS OF THE SAME IS MORE
The citations for this chapter will be extensive but necessarily abbreviated. Explanation: The most extensive research on life and music at the ospedali was conducted by Jane L. Baldauf-Berdes. Some of her work can be found in books, like Women Musicians of Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), which she barely completed before she died of cancer. She was still very much in the thick of her work. In the course of reporting, I learned that she left her research files to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. Thanks to the library and its staff, I had access to forty-eight boxes full of Baldauf-Berdes’s research material, from translations of original documents and photographs of antique instruments, to rosters of musicians and correspondence with other historians. Her passion for the topic bursts from those boxes. A few details in this chapter that come from her research are, I believe, published here for the first time. I only hope she would