Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research

> But according to a new study published in Royal Society: Open Science that attempted to replicate the findings of the original, practice alone doesn't account for mastery. In the study, deliberate practice only accounted for a quarter percentage of the skills difference, which doesn't account for what makes someone an expert.

> Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, and researcher Megha Maitra interviewed three groups of 13 violinists, each rated as less accomplished, good, and best. The violinists were told to keep a diary to log practice hours, and those hours were then tallied. While the less accomplished violinists had logged an estimated 6,000 hours by age 20, the good and best had both logged around 11,000 hours.

> That is to say: The good and best violinists saw no huge difference, as opposed to the not so good violinists, who didn't practice as much. The implication: practice didn't account for all the differences in performance.

And the abstract:

> We sought to replicate Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer's (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer 1993 Psychol. Rev.100, 363–406) seminal study on deliberate practice. Ericsson et al. found that differences in retrospective estimates of accumulated amounts of deliberate practice corresponded to each skill level of student violinists. They concluded, ‘individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice’ (p. 392). We reproduced the methodology with notable exceptions, namely (i) employing a double-blind procedure, (ii) conducting analyses better suited to the study design, and (iii) testing previously unanswered questions about teacher-designed practice—that is, we examined the way Ericsson et al. operationalized deliberate practice (practice alone), and their theoretical but previously unmeasured definition of deliberate practice (teacher-designed practice), and compared them. We did not replicate the core finding that accumulated amounts of deliberate practice corresponded to each skill level. Overall, the size of the effect was substantial, but considerably smaller than the original study's effect size. Teacher-designed practice was perceived as less relevant to improving performance on the violin than practice alone. Further, amount of teacher-designed practice did not account for more variance in performance than amount of practice alone. Implications for the deliberate practice theory are discussed.

The Pros identify the specific scales and short sections of pieces they hit problems with, and focus almost all their practice on those tricky parts. As a result they get as much as 10x or 20x or more utility from the time they spend on it.

Gladwell never defines Asian, instead shifting between definitions that rely on nationality (cherrypicked test scores from a number of well-off Northeast Asian countries), language (where he brings up the Chinese counting system used only in some but not all Asian Languages), and ethnicity (where he compares Asian-American children to other American children, many of whom share little to no commonalities with the former two groups). He uses the classic tactic of generalizing these three groups as one through the nefarious concept of "culture", which is poorly defined and can not objectively measured.

He then makes the claim that "Asians" are "better at math" without backing up the point with anything other than cherrypicked standardized test scores.

Aside from that, he only shows vague correlations without ever proving causation in any rigorous way. Even if the Chinese counting system leads to a faster understanding of arithmetic, Gladwell does not prove that this leads to significantly better math performance. Likewise, he simply claims without any solid proof that growing rice is more difficult than wheat (what units do you measure that in?), or that this increased difficulty would actually provide enough pressure to create a "culture of perseverance" (again, what objective units do you measure that in?).

Individual claims in Gladwell's writing may be true, but they never connect together in any rigorous way to prove the claims he tries to make.