Kind and Wicked Environments

I was introduced to the idea of breaking up learning environments into 'kind' and 'wicked' by David Epstein's book Range. I think this is a powerful idea with broad implications.

Kind learning environments have quick feedback, repeating patterns, and well defined rules. Engineering feels to me like a kind learning environment – most of the time your feedback is quite rapid, solutions to engineering problems repeat, and rules are well defined. Investing, on the other hand is wicked – feedback can be delayed by years, almost all identifiable patterns are arbitraged away, and the rules of the game keep changing.

This article describes the two learning environments in more detail.