Random Configuration Expertise

I have expanded my readings in psychology to K. Anders Ericsson. He writes about how elite performers in a variety of domains reached their achievement levels. The foundation of his framework in the idea of deliberate practice. Experts become experts because they spend a tremendous amount of time and effort on training excercises designed to improve their performance. In his model, the source of very high achievement is not a function of innate ability but a consequence of an accumulation of skills and mediators that have been developed during hours and hours of concentrated effort.

He has applied his model to scientists. As world-class scientist publish papers at a higher rate than less heralded researchers, he recommends that scientist focus on writing research papers to maximize their impact. Simonton (he wrote Scientific Genius and Creativity in Science, both of which are in my read book list) would likely agree with this suggestion as his model for successful scientists is based on publishing as many papers as possible to increase the liklihood that one of the papers will contain a significant idea.

There is another aspect of Ericsson's model that also corresponds well with Simonton's random configuration model. Simonton notes that a number of prominent scientists read widely in displines outside of their own. He notes that this provides mental elements that may combine with an element from the researchers specialty to produce a novel insight into a difficult problem. This outside reading could also serve to keep a researcher's thinking fresh. Rather than using the same ideas to solve every problem, the ideas presented in other types of scientific research forces the scientist to incoporate these new ideas into the mental models that they have established around their own research. In Ericsson's words "Expert performers counteract the arrested development associated with generalized automaticity of skill by deliberately acquiring and refining cognitive mechanisms to support continued learning and improvement."

I have never been much of a reader of the literature when I wasn't looking for ideas about my own research, but I am going to start reading non-chemistry papers every now and then. Everytime I thought about trying to read more papers, I envisioned reading chemistry papers. The ideas in Simonton and Ericsson make expanding my selections to other areas of science sound more productive. I don't want to get cognitive freeze, where my thinking around particular problems gets locked in one particular model. Breaking up my chemistry knowledge to incorporate ideas from biology, geology, or physics would definitely prevent that from happening.

You could say that I am already doing this by reading Simonton's and Ericsson's work. I have gotten a number of ideas on how to improve my performance and the performance of my colleagues by reading both psychologists. In writing this post, I have seen other ways that their models support one another. This strengthens their validity in my thinking, which makes me even more likely to incorporate their ideas into my approach to work. And to think that I always though psychology was a big waste of time...