He spent his extra time cutting two hundred thousand records of game sequences from chess journals—many offering a preview of potential opponents—and filing them in a custom card catalog, the "cartotech."

The bestseller Talent Is Overrated used the Polgar sisters and Tiger Woods as proof that a head start in deliberate practice is the key to success in "virtually any activity that matters to you."

When I asked Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player in history, to explain his decision process for a move, he told me, "I see a move, a combination, almost instantly," based on patterns he has seen before.

When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found that experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.

In those domains, which involved human behavior and where patterns did not clearly repeat, repetition did not cause learning. Chess, golf, and firefighting are exceptions, not the rule.

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.

The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.

In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

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

Chunking helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain-specific memory, from musicians playing long pieces by heart to quarterbacks recognizing patterns of players in a split second and making a decision to throw.

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. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear.

We humans sort of suck at all of them individually, but we have some kind of very approximate idea about each of them and can combine them and be somewhat adaptive. That seems to be what the trick is.

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.

"AI systems are like savants." They need stable structures and narrow worlds.

Tiger's story and the Polgar story give the false impression that human skill is always developed in an extremely kind learning environment.

it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.

The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment.

They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work.

No amount of cajoling, explanation, or examples could get remote villagers to use reasoning based on any concept that was not a concrete part of their daily lives.

So long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.

And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.