Luke Taylor

Hallelujah! Family man. Adventurer. Building Eden 2.0.

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

@historyinmemes Break the frame, and win for posterity.

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

Always unique, sometimes unork, New York.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

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.

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

King Sacrifice

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

Life feels earnest now. The purpose of life presses to be contended with. Which life to pursue? Family relies on me, but I must contend with them too.

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

@limeytime7 @RonDeSantis This is also delicious.

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

I started drinking coffee black because of a @RonDeSantis post. Thanks for the recommendation.

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

🚨New Guidance on Egg Consumption: Eat as many as you can.🚨

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

Did Dr. Laura Schlessingler pull a Martin Luther?

https://t.co/pQ6l5KEAtL

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

Ginger ale is for airplanes

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

Calamity Jane has been a true blessing. Thank you God, holy creator, for my friend.

[Megyn Kelly @megynkelly]

Hey, @grok

What was the most popular name given to newborn children in Britain last year?

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

It's all about guns-backed fiat.

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

Good Dog!

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨#BREAKING: A 13-year-old boy with special needs who got lost in the snow in North Carolina...

...has been RESCUED and FOUND by a police dog named Bo!

Bo was given a piece of the boys clothing and found him in the dark, in the snow.

INCREDIBLE!!!!

[Sean Feucht @seanfeucht]

“I know they're gonna try to kick me off here, so just let me try to get this out.”

“First of all, Jesus, I hear you and I'm listening, Lord. I am listening.”

“I want to tell y'all right now, Jesus is for everybody. Jesus is not owned by one political party. Jesus is not owned by no music label. Jesus is Jesus and anybody, everybody can have a relationship with him…”

[Candace Owens @RealCandaceO]

GOOD MORNING, GOYIM! 🙌

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

This is the way.

[Stacy Robinson @stacepochalypse]

A jury has awarded Fox Varian a total of $2 million after it found her psychologist and surgeon liable for medical malpractice related to a mastectomy at age 16.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Nobody has fought harder for full release of the Epstein files and prosecutions of those who abused children more than I did, knowing full well that the legacy media, far-left propagandists and those who are actually guilty would:

1. Admit nothing
2. Deny everything
3. Make counter-accusations against me

I knew that I would be smeared relentlessly, despite never having attended his parties or been on his “Lolita Express” plane or set foot on his creepy island or done anything wrong at all.

Nonetheless, the extreme pain of being accused of being the opposite of who I am was worth it.

The strong must protect those cannot protect themselves, especially vulnerable children. I will gladly accept any amount of future pain to do more to protect kids and give them a chance to grow up and have happy lives.

[Owen Benjamin 🐻 @OwenBenjamin]

In my opinion, after Shanghai surged again pushing 130 oz the western price manipulation went into high gear. They can do this because so many people are buying everything with leverage and debt.
Then they can have another weekend of hope that everything will keep going according to debt dominance.
China will take this opportunity to buy tons of silver that doesn’t exist at a massive discount. Same with the Saudis and India etc. When comex can’t deliver their credibility will be even more destroyed and we will see much more “price controls.”
This didn’t work in Soviet Russia and it won’t work here. It will only create more doubt and more black market trade.
It’s the equivalent of your girlfriend needing some space because you’re too intense so you chain her to the bed. It only makes it worse.
I can’t predict the future and I don’t know everyone’s personal situation but advice that’s universally true in all situations is: your wealth is in your health, trust, and morality. In permaculture this is zone 1. The fruit of that will come in a variety of ways that are unpredictable.
It feels like we are entering an age where manipulation doesn’t work and the truth is becoming more and more obvious. So just enjoy it. It’s a good thing.

[Luke Taylor @luketacula]

Beautiful

[𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 ✨🎵 @Hoang_HQ]

Describe her singing voice in one word.💫🎙️

[Owen Benjamin 🐻 @OwenBenjamin]

I’d buy them
https://t.co/WVkf5rp9Of