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Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

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Re: Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

#11

Post by tunesmith »

GregBuchholz wrote: post #9
jonmc12 wrote: post #2

Related - "Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis" - http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Macn... Gives some context for the kinds of fields where deliberate practice improves performance.

Your mention of deliberate practice prompted me reinvestigate the guy who was doing the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a golf pro. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, he did get to 10,000 hours, but it doesn't seem like it panned out. Anyone have further sources of information? http://thedanplan.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_McLaughlin_(golfer)

There was a recent HN discussion on it, I believe - I think he got to around 6,000 hours, and was doing really well at golf actually, but then injuries started happening.

Re: Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

#12

Post by Bucephalus355 »

drivers99 wrote: post #7
HappyKasper wrote: post #3

"Talent is Overrated" is a great pop exploration of this and similar findings. If you find this interesting, I highly recommend that book as a jumping off point for exploring similar findings.

Another very good book is "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" by Anders Ericsson. I'm in the middle of reading it now. As I suspected (since he mentions studies on chess masters), he's part of this article, and in fact he's the author of 2 of the 5 "More to Explore" sources listed at the end of the article.

Just posted above on K. Anders Ericcson and the book Peak is great.

Main point is the 10,000 hour rule comes from Ericcson's study that the best violinists in the world practice about 7,000 hours by the time they are 18. They average between 3-4 hours a day. This last point is really interesting because the ceiling for what qualified as good practice consistently was no more than 4 hours. So if you do 4 hours of top notch practice / studying, it would seem like no matter your field you are done for the day.

Continuing on, the 10,000 hour rule was stupidly expanded by 3,000 hours just to make it easier to remember, and additionally that number is COMPLETELY ARBITRARY anyway.

The only reason violinists practice that much is because everyone else is competing that hard. Old, well defined fields like Violin or say Chess have pretty clearly defined ways on how you get better, meaning the "secrets" are somewhat known. Therefore the only way to get better is via practice, which of course everyone does, which drives up these insane numbers.

In other fields which are much newer and far less defined, expertise is up for grabs and there are no well-defined broadly agreed on ways to get better. If you do 800 hours of the "right" practice you can be far ahead of anyone else, since no one really knows what's right.

That being said, Ericcson's research still shows lots of correlation before time and skill, so alas no easy shortcuts.

EDIT: between time and skill

Re: Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

#13

Post by brianwawok »

tunesmith wrote: post #11
GregBuchholz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your mention of deliberate practice prompted me reinvestigate the guy who was doing the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a golf pro. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, he did get to 10,000 hours, but it doesn't seem like it panned out. Anyone have further sources of information? http://thedanplan.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_McLaughlin_(golfer)

There was a recent HN discussion on it, I believe - I think he got to around 6,000 hours, and was doing really well at golf actually, but then injuries started happening.

Maybe a slightly different topic.. but from what a lot in the running field think, its all about how fast your body recovers.

There are 10,000 amazing marathoners in the world. If you gave them all the same training, they would all be absurdly good, as they got better and better. But 9,990 or so of them would get injured and wash out.

So it seems at least in some sports, your limiter is not how genetically gifted you are the SPORT, but how genetically gifted you are at recovering from training so that you can train more.

So perhaps this guy has the genetics to be a pro golfer, but his body can't take the strain and recover between sessions.. so he would never quite make it.

Re: Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

#14

Post by jtuente »

brianwawok wrote: post #13
tunesmith wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent HN discussion on it, I believe - I think he got to around 6,000 hours, and was doing really well at golf actually, but then injuries started happening.

Maybe a slightly different topic.. but from what a lot in the running field think, its all about how fast your body recovers. There are 10,000 amazing marathoners in the world. If you gave them all the same training, they would all be absurdly good, as they got better and better. But 9,990 or so of them would get injured and wash out. So it seems at least in some sports, your limiter is not how genetically gifted you…

If his body cannot take the strain and recover between sessions then wouldn't that suggest that he does not have the genetics to be a pro golfer, but merely a good one?

Re: Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

#16

Post by jinfiesto »

brianwawok wrote: post #13
tunesmith wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent HN discussion on it, I believe - I think he got to around 6,000 hours, and was doing really well at golf actually, but then injuries started happening.

Maybe a slightly different topic.. but from what a lot in the running field think, its all about how fast your body recovers. There are 10,000 amazing marathoners in the world. If you gave them all the same training, they would all be absurdly good, as they got better and better. But 9,990 or so of them would get injured and wash out. So it seems at least in some sports, your limiter is not how genetically gifted you…

I'm not convinced that the recovery is genetic (well it is, but that's not the point.) People give themselves repetitive motion injuries in music all the time. It causes tons of otherwise amazing musicians to wash out.

It's become such a problem, that it's basically become the biggest issue the pedagogy community as a whole is actively trying to address. This is interesting, because there has been a lot of progress made in injury-preventive technique.

Even in running, a quick Google search revealed that injury preventive techniques exist.

So I guess, I'm not convinced that injury isn't technique related and that not being injured doesn't have more to do with luck (in terms of natural technique) than genetics.

Re: Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

#17

Post by hellbanner »

If you want to improve this chess, I recommend this playlist by International Master John Bartholomew:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao9iOeK_jvU&index=5&list=PLl...

I recommend https://lichess.org over chess.com for a far superior UI.

Re: Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

#18

Post by afro88 »

hellbanner wrote: post #17

If you want to improve this chess, I recommend this playlist by International Master John Bartholomew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao9iOeK_jvU&index=5&list=PLl... I recommend https://lichess.org over chess.com for a far superior UI.

Lichess is excellent. I run my in person games through it's analysis. They have a great feature where you practice the correct move where you had made a mistake or "blunder".

And it's open source: https://github.com/ornicar/lila

Re: Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

#19

Post by lainon »

hellbanner wrote: post #17

If you want to improve this chess, I recommend this playlist by International Master John Bartholomew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao9iOeK_jvU&index=5&list=PLl... I recommend https://lichess.org over chess.com for a far superior UI.

There's also this paper which gives a general overview on which aspects of the game you should focus improving on once you mastered the basics of chess.

"Training in chess: a scientific approach"

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2dd/31c7db68667f1485f80d0e...

Re: Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

#20

Post by bfung »

So...(start internal monologue)

- The 10x engineer is so because of 10x practice (numbers not precise nor accurate). Companies - need to keep challenging people to get experts. Bootcampers - keep practicing.

- As with the soccer study in the article, boys ended up as the "bigger kids" in computer science and due to motivational factors, there's more boys in the tech industry today [1]

- Refutes a large portion of [2]; did the google engineer read these studies before?

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

[2] http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-div...

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