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

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21–30 of 64 posts

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

#21

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…

Kind of related is that one of the biggest advantages of using performance enhancing drugs/steroids is the greatly reduced recovery time. Even if someone tests clean before an event because they genuinely are clean rather than being on something undetectable, they still benefit from all of the extra training they managed to get in in-between events when they were juicing.

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

#22
post #18

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

Open source, awesome!

I'm so impressed with their UI. You can watch games in real time and there's a dashboard showing you your Ping + Server Processing Time per Move (usually 2ms).

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

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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.

Could you please give me some references for this? Guitar has loads of famous people who encourage people to do things that will cause injuries. Having some actual research to fight against this would be really useful.

An egregiously bad example: Paul Gilbert (who is like 6'5" and has enormously long arms and fingers) actually SELLS an especially long guitar strap that is practically guaranteed to give you RSI. I wish I were joking: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paul+gilbert+gu...

Side note: this made me hugely disappointed in Paul Gilbert. Prior to this, I thought of him as an amazing guitar player with a very wry/dry sense of humor who was simply making fun of the guitar stereotype crowd. Actually encouraging something which is damaging in order to profit from it crosses the line whether he is serious or joking--too many people will listen and believe him.

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

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

>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.

Certainly luck is a factor, but genetics is an important factor as well. Many studies have linked genetics to a predisposition for inflammation, wound-healing, and other injury-related phenomena.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160302135149.h...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16472051

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

#25
post #5

Fyi... this a 2006 publication. (Not sure why HN submission says (2016).) Being 11 years old isn't an issue because the chess memory observation is interesting data. The age is significant because virtually every pop psychology & brain book in the last 10 years mentions this chess study as one of the anecdotes. (Similar to how all the pop psych books mention the Invisible Gorilla, Marshmallow Experiment, Stanford Pri…

Hey want to provide some quick clarification on your point. First, you are dramatically, 110% right that pop psychology books plunder really valuable research such as this for ultimately banal insights that they manage to hide in a 300 page book that could be 10 pages. K. Anders Ericsson, the absolute giant in the field of expertise research, is quite dismissive of Malcolm Gladwell and upset at his mis-interpretation…

Got any links for when K. Anders Ericsson slams Gladwell? Was it in a blog post or a podcast or something?

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

#26

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 wouldn't discount the not insignificant amount of luck involved either. Anecdotally, I know of one baseball player who got called up to the majors only to have his career ended by taking a bad hop to the face just before his rookie season.

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

#27
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.

I'm having a bit of trouble interpreting these numbers. If I look at deliberate practice in musical proficiency amongst the general populace, it'll look like deliberate practice is responsible for almost all of the proficiency. However, if I look at the top 100 musicians in the world, they would have all practiced thousands of hours and I expect practice to have diminishing returns, so it should be responsible for ve…

The top 100 didn't all practice the same way, have the same experiences

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

#28
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)

He did not get to the 10,000 hours, he had to quit after 6,000 due to back injury.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/the-dan-p...

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

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey want to provide some quick clarification on your point. First, you are dramatically, 110% right that pop psychology books plunder really valuable research such as this for ultimately banal insights that they manage to hide in a 300 page book that could be 10 pages. K. Anders Ericsson, the absolute giant in the field of expertise research, is quite dismissive of Malcolm Gladwell and upset at his mis-interpretation…

Got any links for when K. Anders Ericsson slams Gladwell? Was it in a blog post or a podcast or something?

Just looked at the physical book. I work in DevOps but just in general want to say physical books are great and highly underrated for how quickly you can access info / other things.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqmmlf1jpdexmav/Gladwell-Peak.jpeg...

Lol you'll see in the comments I even wrote "hates Gladwell!".

In fairness to Ericsson, he is very civil and it's a very respectable "takedown".

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