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The Expert in a Year Challenge

experttabletennis.com

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Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#51

Post by guelo »

ericdykstra wrote: post #39
taybin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting to see how well Gladwell's claim stands up to empirical testing.

The "Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 Hour rule" Rule: In any discussion about mastery, people who have never read Outliers will attribute Gladwell with the idea of the 10,000 Hour Rule, take it out of context, and argue with it as if it were the main point of the book, or as if it was presented as a hard and fast rule.

The truth is that the book was not very good and didn't really have much of a point.

Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#52

Post by baddox »

Sprezzaturianna wrote: post #38

Always sad to see this myth live on. It is simultaneously as self-evident as it is nonsensical. 1) Yes you get better with practice 2) Some faster than others 3) Some with a higher peak than others 4) It is neither necessary, nor sufficient with 10 000 hours effective practice (some win the world championship in high jump after less than a year [Donald Thomas 2007], others will never become chess champions, or even r…

Where in this project do you see any myths being propagated? I followed the project all last year, and it is extremely reasonable and not in any way based on any myth I'm aware of.

Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#53

Post by soperj »

frogpelt wrote: post #22
aidos wrote: post #7

Related is The Dan Plan in which a chap is trying to become a pro golfer by dedicating 10,000 hours to it (from zero experience) [1]. I seem to recall it was after Malcolm Gladwell claimed that it takes that long to achieve mastery in a discipline. Dan's almost at the 5 year mark now. I check back a couple of times a year to see how he's getting on. [1] http://www.thedanplan.com

Gladwell's 10,000-hour-rule is, at its core, anecdotal. The 10,000-hour-rule seems like more of an observation that people who are really good at things are likely to have spent a lot of time doing them. My anecdotal observation: The people I know who are masters of things, were very good at those things early on and that encouraged them to practice more and more.

Everything Gladwell is anecdotal.

Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#54

Post by soperj »

loumf wrote: post #26
lazyant wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't his claim originally; he took a paper and summarized it in the 10,000 hour rule, even the original paper author has denied the claim stated as such.

There is a better summary of the studies in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" From what I remember, the claim is that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice work best when: 1. You get immediate feedback on success and failure 2. The thing you are trying to master has a skill set that can be improved, and that improving that skill is sufficient. That #2 is tricky -- a counter example is stock picking. We have no evidence that th…

There is a skill that makes stock picking work, Warren Buffett & Benjamin Graham have written all about it.

Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#55

Post by mattm »

mfringel wrote: post #42
tonystubblebine wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10,000 hours has got to be the least interesting concept in the body of work around deliberate practice. But it is somehow the concept that is most widely known. I would love to know the psychology behind why that concept was so sticky given that it seems self-evidently worthless to know where the theoretical cap on self-improvement lies. I mean, how many things do we put 10k hours of practice in to? The much better…

The 10k hour concept is sticky/durable because it holds out hope. The hope that you could be one of the best in the world if you just worked hard enough. The hope that it's not too late.

It's also politically correct and fits in with the current generation's thinking of "you can be anything you want." This comes up now and again on HN as well about whether everyone should/can learn to program.

Will practice make someone better than the average person? Definitely. But to be the best in the world, you have to have some genetic advantage - be it your body composition or the way your mind works.

I always like to point out the ice hockey player Ed Jovanovski. He didn't start playing hockey until he was 11 (which is pretty late) but was drafted 1st overall into the NHL just 7 years later. However, his dad was a semi-professional soccer player so his genes probably gave him an advantage over others who started playing much earlier but didn't make it.

Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#56

Post by tokenadult »

As is typical in most threads about this perennial topic here on HN, the people who are most relaxed about putting in their hours of practice are the people who are most relaxed about their definition of expertise. To be indisputably an expert (to have, in K. Anders Ericsson's formulation, statistically reliable superior performance) is not the work of a moment, no matter how much "innate" ability one starts out with.

Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#57

Post by tjradcliffe »

Sprezzaturianna wrote: post #38

Always sad to see this myth live on. It is simultaneously as self-evident as it is nonsensical. 1) Yes you get better with practice 2) Some faster than others 3) Some with a higher peak than others 4) It is neither necessary, nor sufficient with 10 000 hours effective practice (some win the world championship in high jump after less than a year [Donald Thomas 2007], others will never become chess champions, or even r…

There is also the interesting case of people with multiple areas of expertise. This is an understudied phenomenon, but I think it can shed light on the issue.

There are some skills that just come more easily to a person, and this is demonstrated by the case where you have the same person doing very similar things for similar lengths of time but in one case they become legitimately expert and in another they get better, but fall well short of true expertise. I'm a brilliant poet (if I do say so myself) but while I've invested at least as much time in prose I know I'll never be as good.

This doesn't mean practice isn't important, but it does mean that talent matters, both for how fast you improve and the ultimate capability you reach.

Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#58

Post by FlailFast »

guelo wrote: post #51
ericdykstra wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 Hour rule" Rule: In any discussion about mastery, people who have never read Outliers will attribute Gladwell with the idea of the 10,000 Hour Rule, take it out of context, and argue with it as if it were the main point of the book, or as if it was presented as a hard and fast rule.

The truth is that the book was not very good and didn't really have much of a point.

Which, rather ironically, didn't make it an outlier of the pop psych book genre.

Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#59

Post by prawn »

dpark wrote: post #13
[deleted] wrote: post #12

[deleted]

What's your issue with the word "expert"? The guy was trying to land in the top 250 in a year. That would comfortably place him in the "expert" player category (had he succeeded).

I agree with your sentiment.

Do we judge an "expert" on their ranking or on their knowledge and ability? If 50,000 people excelled to the level of the current #250, would only that best player be an expert, or could all 50,000 be considered to have excellent domain knowledge and ability? I'd call all of them experts.

Expert and "highly ranked" or "best" don't necessarily need to be the same thing.

Many of us get termed software experts or design experts or IT experts without any ranking systems.

Re: The Expert in a Year Challenge

#60

Post by brosky117 »

I love the idea of becoming an expert at something in an unusually short period of time. I felt like this article was entertaining and enjoyable.

That being said, in regards to the 10,000 hours discussion being had here, I feel like the issue can be summed up as being a classic confusion of correlation and causation. It is obvious that a master will have practiced more than the apprentice but the practice itself is not the sole source of mastery.

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