Why I hate your favorite book that explains history or politics or how to live life or whatever

But like many others in the “hey here’s an obvious fact of life that I’ve dressed up to try to sell you as a Secret of the Universe” line of work it goes about its business in a way I find specifically frustrating — by making its argument in superficially convincing but logically fallacious ways.

And the thing that’s irritating is that the cardinal sins committed by Epstein’s op-ed are not limited to him. No sir, they’re the same kinds of lazy thinking and logical fallacies that run rampant through many best selling pop psych / history / politics / whatever flavor of the moment books purporting to explain Life, The Universe, and Everything.

But just because I understand the dynamics of why something happens doesn’t mean I have to condone it, dammit!

So, because I am a pedantic, angry little man, let’s take a look, shall we?

The first and most common sin is a basic failure of logic: looking at end results and projecting backward in time to support a story of causality instead of going the other way around.

The article mentions things like this:

or

The story he wants to sell is explicitly causal: generalization and exposure to diverse experiences leads to success.

But obviously, the data doesn’t really support that. In fact, all that the data actually tells us is that there’s a correlation between those who are successful and diversity of experience.

For example with the Nobel prize winners, the story that he wants to tell is that people with broad intellectual curiosity across many areas are more likely to be successful in scientific research.

And of course the implied consequence of this is that if you let your little budding genius play baseball and golf and football they’re more likely to grow up into a Nobel Prize-winning physicist than if you just made them play the golf.

But an equally viable explanation given the available information is that, in hyper-competitive fields like science research where scare funding is directed towards the top institutions, the most professionally successful scientists are the only ones with the spare time and financial resources to develop outside hobbies and interests.

That is, it’s much easier to nurture your budding interests as a virtuoso violinist in between runs of the particle accelerator if you’re a tenured professor at Caltech than if you’re a part-time adjunct lecturer at Cal State Fullerton.

Or consider another explanation that is almost as bleak, and one that I can imagine a budding Tiger Mom delivering in a lecture to a recalcitrant child:

Geniuses, whether athletic or intellectual, will tend to be good at anything in a broad range.

Having that diverse, meandering life path didn’t make them successful, they were going to be successful no matter what, so they can afford the delays and detours of such a life.

But you? You’re not a genius, so you better work your ass off pushing to succeed along your one chosen path!

Now, personally, I happen to believe that the basic thesis is true here: broad interests and curiosity are good and great things.

But that’s not the point. The point is that the data being cited here, as in many such “how to live your life” articles, doesn’t actually support the hypothesis being put forward.

To actually test the hypothesis you can’t look backward, because all that tells you is that there’s a correlation between broad interests and career success as a scientist. There’s no predictive power.

Instead, what you have to do is look forward in time. Given a set of, say, early-career scientists, or maybe even grad students, how well does the extent of their extracurricular hobbies predict their future success as professionals?

Or in the sports case, go look at a group of 10 year-olds and see how well diversity in sports predicts future success in sports. And see if that holds up if you control for pure athleticism (looking at traits like jumping height, running speed, etc), because again, a more likely explanation even if it holds true is simply that athletically gifted kids are just more likely to play more sports because they’re good at more sports.

Another favorite gambit of the Let Me Tell You How to Live Your Life story is to not make comparisons against real, meaningful alternatives.

Case in point, the subheading of the article is “What ‘Roger’ dads do better than Tiger moms ever will.”

In this case, it’s a blatant attempt to leech off the publicity around the Tiger Mom book, which is its own lovely package of contradictions and idiocy packaged as a how-to-guide for child raising.

That’s fine, but really, an explicit branch of the Tiger Mom philosophy is a carefully studied diversity of interest — it’s not enough to get into Harvard and study pre-med. Nope, you also have to perform at Carnegie Hall!

As any Tiger-parented kid can tell you, there’s no shortage of stuff to do here.

If anything, Epstein and Chua fall into the same narrow line of thinking: that there’s some narrowly defined metric of “success” in bring up your kid (usually equivalent to attaining wealth and status) and the point of parenting is to maximize obtaining that metric.

Society being what it is I’m not saying that they’re completely wrong to take that approach, but it would be more intellectually honest to admit that there’s not a huge difference between two variations on the them of single-mindedly pushing your kids toward success.

I’m not a parent (yet), so it’s hard for me to make very definitive pronouncements on the matter. But judging from what I’ve seen (and experienced) it’s probably no less exhausting to shuttle your kids to twenty different diverse, meandering experiences as it is to take them to twenty different sessions practicing the same thing.

And really, it’s probably pretty easy to encourage your kid in multiple diverse interests if they have them. You want to play basketball and soccer and enter the science fair? Sure!

The really hard thing is, what if they don’t care about anything? Or, worse, what if all they care about is sitting around browsing Instagram and playing video games… and they’re not even good at video games?

The final thing that he does here, that indeed everybody does, is to ignore an obvious, common sense overview or more complex synthesis which would obviate the one-dimensional story being told.

In his article, Epstein leads with another Tiger, this time a dad. He talks about Tiger Woods’ upbringing as an example of extreme specialization, and proceeds to contrast that with the more meandering career of Roger Federer.

But you know what? He then ends the article with a nod towards the obvious point: that in fact Tiger’s upbringing was the right thing for him:

In other words, he’s hinting at something that every grandma could tell you: every child is different, and they need different things growing up.

So let me give you a much simpler and straightforward guide to the future:

Kids with parents who pay attention to the specific needs of their child and have the time and resources to provide that to them, whether that is broad, diverse experiences or focused professional training at an early age, are more likely to succeed in life, whatever “succeed” means.

There. I would write that book, but it probably won’t sell many copies.

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