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Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

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61–70 of 145 posts

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#61

I have my own theory. The idea is that there are lots, lots and lots of tiny unspoken things which could make huge difference in long run. And those who successful doesn't necessary know their own tiny things they got right. Let's say there are two persons A and B who is training in chess. Person A trained for X hours and became chess master. Person B trained for 10X hours and didn't get even close to master level. T…

Yup. Best thing I ever did for my dancing was reading "The Inner Game of Tennis".

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I'm a guitarist, and have been for over 30 years. I'm good, but not REALLY good, and I hit a wall in terms of technical ability / speed a long time ago - after about 5 years of playing. Nothing I did improved my speed and I didn't have the accuracy of a Malmsteen or MacAlpine, despite practicing religiously for hours at a time. I thought I had a speed limit and that was that - everyone I consulted felt th…

Was it just luck, or are you actually not creative enough to figure out new and useful things in your own? (say, extended guitar playing techniques) An open question so far.

No, I've figured out LOADS of stuff on my own and then found others had done so, or had different names for it. I started doing hybrid picking when no-one I knew was doing it, and other techniques. Remember as well, this was in the 80s - there just wasn't the access to information that is available today; the kids I teach now say "how are you so good at working things out?", but it was the only way to play most of the music I liked when I was a kid; good transcriptions were like hen's teeth, and I remember having to negotiate with the guy who owned the paper shop (where I had a paper round - remember I was 14-15 at the time!) to speak to his distributor to order american guitar magazines so I could get the good stuff. I'd go to London once every couple of months and buy a VHS instructional tape. It wasn't like today when you can find an in-depth lesson from a world master within 5 minutes.

But the point is that it was one specific (and subtle) technique that I missed, and everyone else missed, or didn't instruct people to do - that completely stalled my playing. And I know I'm not the only one!

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#63

The modern world looks on with increasing horror: My God, you are dead, and the eugenicists were right.

Nature certainly seems to be clobbering nurture as of late, if the recent spate of behavioural genetics research is correct. Parenting, deliberate practice, 'grit' - all seem to be superseded or confounded by genetics. Although it's probably irrational of me, I find this somewhat disheartening - as more of human behaviour is rationalised, the Calvinist picture that emerges is ... less interesting. A very weak and nerdy analogy would be that of an RPG where the dice rolls on the character creation screen led almost directly to the final dungeon. The prospect of more elaborate dice-rolling with the advent of genetic engineering does not make the game that much more appealing.

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#64
post #10

Being a "professor at a music conservatory in Russia" does not necessarily say much about how good of a music teacher this person was. Especially in a competitive field like concert piano. There are probably thousands of people who studied piano from a teacher who was a professor at a music conservatory in Russia. They can't all become world-class. Ericsson's research stresses "deliberate" practice and previous criti…

> ...it's 10,000 hours of practice the right way and ideally with an effective teacher.

There are a few problems with this.

One is that it's unfalsifiable. For any given case of failure you simply say the practice was not deliberate enough.

Two is that we do not have that ideal environment for deliberate practice. There are only so many music conservatories. That's a resource problem.

Three is that we do not know what actually constitutes proper deliberate practice, and that the informational component of the practice is a lot more important than the hard work component. In the common regurgitation of this phrase and the principle, it's typically told the other way around - as if we have already figured out how to deliberately practice, and you can just go do the work. See my rather large post above.

Finally, practice even with the best information can't compensate for motor problems and other related issues, at least, I don't see how. There are most likely genes that code for various degrees of the quality of the physical apparatus, and then there are people whose body is more messed up than normal in general.

> There are probably thousands of people who studied piano from a teacher who was a professor at a music conservatory in Russia. They can't all become world-class.

This is an important point. If you have thousands of people trying to do something, they can't all become world class. Even if you have the absolute best methods, if they are more or less equally practiced, you'll get a homogenization effect and the best practitioners would be purely random. The more this happens, the more inappropriate it is to tell someone that they can become the best, because it requires some weird negative assumptions about all the other participants. It's not even work or genetics at that point, but just general randomness. This is not a problem that necessitates solving, it's an artificial one.

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#65

I haven't click through to the article yet, so I'll just respond to the headline now with something I've been saying for a long time: Practice doesn't necessarily make perfect, it could very well just make you habitually wrong.

"Practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent", my music teachers say.

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#66
post #35

I read The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, co-edited by K. Anders Ericsson, the psychology professor mentioned in this article. His work inspired Malcolm Gladwell's popular work on deliberate practice. I found Ericsson and co's ideas to be completely counter to their data. A lot of the articles were based on case studies. They studied wrestlers and wrestling coaches, for instance. The wrestlin…

When you say "these guys were in a position to win local and regional powerlifting competitions with basically no training at all", do you have any similar examples for things like chess tournaments? Because if not, you're kind of disproving yourself. Of course genetics can assist you in becoming a good chess player but I have a hard time seeing how a genius who never played chess before just sits down, learns the ga…

There were some studies on chess that seemed to imply that some people reach a certain level after 3k hours and some don't reach it after 30k.

I don't have the link on hand right now but I could find it tomorrow...

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#67

The modern world looks on with increasing horror: My God, you are dead, and the eugenicists were right.

Not necessarily. Selective breeding and genetic manipulation might not be the best of things. It may be better to have a bunch of people who love to sweep floors rather than 100% super intelligent. Plus we need different perspectives. To an extent, their should be variance in many things. Sometimes a janitor solved the problem, by turning the genius thinking around.

There's nothing better about designating a class of people to sweep floors. The loss of power and agency is the problem.

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#68
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "these guys were in a position to win local and regional powerlifting competitions with basically no training at all", do you have any similar examples for things like chess tournaments? Because if not, you're kind of disproving yourself. Of course genetics can assist you in becoming a good chess player but I have a hard time seeing how a genius who never played chess before just sits down, learns the ga…

There were some studies on chess that seemed to imply that some people reach a certain level after 3k hours and some don't reach it after 30k. I don't have the link on hand right now but I could find it tomorrow...

Is this it?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616...

Highlights • Gf, Gc, Gsm, and Gs all correlated positively and significantly with chess skill. • The relationship between Gf and chess skill was moderated by age and skill level. • Chess skill correlated positively with numerical, visuospatial, and verbal ability. Abstract Why are some people more skilled in complex domains than other people? Here, we conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate the relationship between cognitive ability and skill in chess. Chess skill correlated positively and significantly with fluid reasoning (Gf) ( = 0.24), comprehension-knowledge (Gc) ( = 0.22), short-term memory (Gsm) ( = 0.25), and processing speed (Gs) ( = 0.24); the meta-analytic average of the correlations was ( = 0.24). Moreover, the correlation between Gf and chess skill was moderated by age ( = 0.32 for youth samples vs. = 0.11 for adult samples), and skill level ( = 0.32 for unranked samples vs. = 0.14 for ranked samples). Interestingly, chess skill correlated more strongly with numerical ability ( = 0.35) than with verbal ability ( = 0.19) or visuospatial ability ( = 0.13). The results suggest that cognitive ability contributes meaningfully to individual differences in chess skill, particularly in young chess players and/or at lower levels of skill.

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#69

I have my own theory. The idea is that there are lots, lots and lots of tiny unspoken things which could make huge difference in long run. And those who successful doesn't necessary know their own tiny things they got right. Let's say there are two persons A and B who is training in chess. Person A trained for X hours and became chess master. Person B trained for 10X hours and didn't get even close to master level. T…

This is basically how I feel about dating.

Re: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were some studies on chess that seemed to imply that some people reach a certain level after 3k hours and some don't reach it after 30k. I don't have the link on hand right now but I could find it tomorrow...

Is this it? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616... Highlights • Gf, Gc, Gsm, and Gs all correlated positively and significantly with chess skill. • The relationship between Gf and chess skill was moderated by age and skill level. • Chess skill correlated positively with numerical, visuospatial, and verbal ability. Abstract Why are some people more skilled in complex domains than other people?…

The names look familiar. Too bad the .pdf is not accessible.
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