Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
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Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
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Re: Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
#2The title is incorrect as it is Anders Ericsson‘s research, Ericsson did not find that time necessarily led to mastery (that is a popular misunderstanding) the study quantified practice, not deliberate practice, and despite all that did find a correlation between unqualified practice time and mastery, among other factors.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
#3So I shouldn't bother with anything. Good to know. Thanks for that info. If practice doesn't mean anything what even is the point of anything?
Re: Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
#4So I shouldn't bother with anything. Good to know. Thanks for that info. If practice doesn't mean anything what even is the point of anything?
One of the debates I'm surprised to have with my friends is: some of them will parrot Gladwell-style advice (truisms that claim to come from science). I will say, "That didn't replicate." They'll say, "Well it's a good idea anyway."
And then I'll say some long thing about how when you're giving someone advice, you should hold yourself to a higher standard, not a lower one. Especially if you're an institution.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
#5I feel like there is a Dunning-Kruger homomorphism with the Gladwell 10k "rule". There are mastery inflection points at 20, 100, 500, 1000, etc. hour marks (ish). It really seems like the Gladwell conjecture is that people that do a thing for love|money, do a thing a lot.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
#6So I shouldn't bother with anything. Good to know. Thanks for that info. If practice doesn't mean anything what even is the point of anything?
One of the debates I'm surprised to have with my friends is: some of them will parrot Gladwell-style advice (truisms that claim to come from science). I will say, "That didn't replicate." They'll say, "Well it's a good idea anyway." And then I'll say some long thing about how when you're giving someone advice, you should hold yourself to a higher standard, not a lower one . Especially if you're an institution.
If you're competing in an area where other competitors spend 10k hours before they compete, you better practice. We didn't really need a study to tell us that, but people feel it adds something to say that science has "proved it". That's why if you point out the study was BS, it doesn't matter, because it was just a supporting detail for the point they wanted to make anyway. Practice.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
#7Couple of points here:
1) HN is supposed to link to the original report about the research, which is done by the Guardian (linked in the first sentence!) here [1]
2) "Anders Ericsson [original study author] said the new paper actually replicated most of their findings."
3) Gladwell pushed the 10k rule to the point of breaking, by that I mean he extrapolated way beyond the original research. Gladwell's point may not hold up (as the title reads) because he pushed it too far, he drew his own imaginary conclusions that make for a nice story.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/21/practice-doe...
Re: Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
#8Serious question: which of Gladwell's various truisms and rules have actually held up to research? I've seen a lot of criticism of his pop science books over the years without much talk about what he actually gets right.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
#9While they are talking about quantity of practice, they aren’t discussing the quality of it. I can certainly imagine that there are better and worse ways to practice and am curious if anyone has seen some studies on its effects?
Re: Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
#10One of the other key papers in the book in which the original finding was published ("The Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise") was the role of increasingly skillful teachers. If you don't have a series of progressively competent teachers who are all good at providing motivation you also won't see the kind of performance increases that lead to professional status.