Smartbean Café

Fun community focused EduTech company looking to facilitate learning on Earth and beyond. ❤️🍁🇨🇦

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

Worth thinking about this analysis.

[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.

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

Sun sky and trees

[jack @jack]

artist direct to fans

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

@ahmednadar We are exploring ideas that merge IoT sanitation/health risk - perhaps something city can pilot around garbage bins and if possible we integrate air quality detection for toxic air particles that could theoretically provide early detection for fires emerging outside of buildings

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

What are your thoughts for automation of fire / smoke detection sensors around schools and school yards? @ahmednadar #solveTO #CivTech

[AA @measure_plan]

i made fruit ninja but you've got a guitar instead of a sword

[Cronos Network @CronosNetwork]

Cronos zkEVM Alpha Network: Sunset Announcement

We have made the decision to deprecate the Cronos zkEVM Alpha and consolidate all development efforts on the Cronos EVM network.

The network will remain operational for 12 months, with withdrawals via the official bridge open until June 3, 2027.

This change affects zkEVM deployments only.

Withdrawals require zkCRO to cover gas fees. We encourage all users to retain sufficient zkCRO and complete withdrawals well ahead of the deadline.

Read more: https://t.co/2Uh8Bhrfhq

[Wealthsimple @Wealthsimple]

Banking is over.
What's on the end of those chains that banks attach to pens? We get to the shocking truth.

[kira 👾 @kirawontmiss]

I speak for everyone when i say we want more young directors in Hollywood.

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

@RealKidPoker @GGPoker Thank you for making this accessible to us!

[Daniel Negreanu @RealKidPoker]

Today I get the full featured-table treatment in the $25K Heads-Up Championship.

Lights. Cameras. Poker.

Day 7 of the WSOP Vlog premieres in 30 minutes.

Join the live chat:
https://t.co/wNamC0zhuX

@GGPoker

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

#ChirpWatching

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

Yes I think I did something like that but created a new bot named Herman which I was working on things with, recently it decided to have a job alert via my older OC Telegram bot when I asked it to review old folders for code - it’s really cool that it’s able to use channels created previously!

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

Adding to the positive chirping bird vibes on X…good day to everyone! ❤️🍁❤️🍁

[shift @joinshiftX]

Today, we're launching shift. We're starting by cleaning your apartment in New York City, for free.

Here's how it works. Book a shift cleaning. A vetted shift operator comes to your home wearing one of our devices. They clean. They leave. You pay nothing.

In exchange, we record the cleaning. Robotics is being built on data about how people do daily tasks, and the value of that recording is what funds the service. Anything personal in it is anonymized before the recording is processed.

By now, you have heard about the shift to AI more times than you can count. About the shift toward you, the part where you actually feel it, you have heard almost nothing. Shift is what starts to make it concrete, in specific cities, with specific services.

Today, cleaning in New York. Soon, handymen, repairs, and errands across the globe. And this is just one side of shift, with more on the way.

Comment “shift” and we’ll send you an early access link.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on.

The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software.

The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check.

Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance.

Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls.

Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else.

A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.

[Jesse Genet @jessegenet]

Today on product hunt, https://t.co/kIgVs0gqLq 🎉

This is how I unblock my agents so they don't constantly tell me they need new API keys or paid tools get shit done ;)

full disclosure: I'm sleeping with the founder... he's my husband 😆

https://t.co/MPTmUaGBNH

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

@marcellovtv Toronto here but cheering for the Habs!

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇪🇸 Barcelona is particularly interesting

The tourist center used to be just pickpockets targeting tourists, but now you have the highest crime rate in El Raval with drug dens/squats (narco piso), violent robberies and stabbings

The problem as a tourist in a new city you'd never know that because Google Maps doesn't tell you

But Hoodmaps does 😊

[Smartbean Café @smartbean]

@levelsio @TermiusHQ What is the advantage of using Tmux vs say Telegram?