From June 2022...
It is becoming a reality! 😉
Here, in today's news: The European Union has proposed to relax its landmark carbon-pricing system, and allow automakers to sell gasoline-burning cars for longer.
A Machiavellian vibe I totally share. Most betrayal comes from people who “love” you.
"I prefer to be hated than loved. I’ll be honest with you, because when they say they love you, you don’t really know. When they say they hate you, trust me, THEY HATE YOU." Zlatan Ibrahimović
Forgive me for writing about my own country. But what I have to say is more than a Danish story. It reflects a broader pattern that can be observed across Europe - and probably far beyond.
Today, Denmark is getting a middle-class government. That is to say, a government based on the entire left wing, plus a single party that presents itself as centrist.
“But surely it is a working-class government?” many will object.
No, it is not.
A left-wing government in our time is largely a guarantee that policies will be pursued that benefit the well-educated middle class.
It will pour more resources into the public sector - where many of its own voters work.
Politically speaking, that is perfectly legitimate. Any government is entitled to favour its core voters to a reasonable extent.
But it will also promote as many luxury beliefs - to use Rob Henderson’s term - as it possibly can.
Criticism of Israel. Lax immigration policies. The promotion of identity politics. Passivity in the face of left-wing indoctrination in the education system. Climate activism everywhere - for example, by forcing everyone dependent on the public sector to eat vegetarian or near-vegetarian food. And, let’s be honest, ambitions to phase out a large part of agriculture.
The real working class is going to hate this red government.
Because the working class benefits from a strict immigration policy. It wants a steak on the grill. It wants to drive a car. And it wants to own a home that is not unreasonably expensive to live in.
The working class does not care much about Israel. And it remains firmly convinced that there are only two sexes and that only women can become pregnant.
The middle class’s takeover of the old working-class parties is a phenomenon found throughout the Western world.
It is this takeover that explains why the working class has been shifting to the right in recent years.
Not because the working class has become right-wing, but because left-wing parties have abandoned the working class.
A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived.
Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear.
His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range."
The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.
Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it.
Chess works that way. Most things do not.
Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read.
There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on.
A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked.
The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different.
Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore.
He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport.
The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers.
The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them.
The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career.
Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding.
Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science.
The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway.
Match quality matters more than head start.
A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose.
The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath.
The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was.
If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in.
You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.
Dawkins came upon a computer model, played with it, tried with all his might to move the weight, failed, and concluded because he, Dawkins, of very great brain, could not think of a reason why they model was not alive. announced the model must be alive.
President Trump says the US Navy is acting “like pirates” as he described a military operation seizing a ship during the tit-for-tat blockade of Iranian ports.
Evil websites like Libgen, Z-library, and Sci-Hub had pirated millions of academic books and papers.
They've been shut down, and rightly so.
We shouldn't use them anyway. We should make billion-dollar academic publishers richer.
Anyway, here's how to access these libraries:
🚨DO NOT DO THIS!