How many 10K hours do you have left? • Hacker News Board

Re: How many 10K hours do you have left?

#31

Post by TrevorJ » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 3:18 AM UTC

Couple flaws I see here: first, I'm not convinced that 10k hours is a reasonable estimate given how vastly different any given discipline is from another. Some disciplines allow for fast iteration and thus more practice in a shorter amount of time, for one thing.

Second and more important, we need to remember that none of us learn in a vacuum. How much faster did you pick up programming because you already understood the concept of grammar, and had taken a logic or debate class in high school? Even in wildly different fields of study, there are dots we connect, analogies that we construct, and skills that we posses and bring to the table. It is reasonable to assume that we gain some efficiency in learning new skills, by virtue of the masteries we already possess.

Re: How many 10K hours do you have left?

#32

Post by ternaryoperator » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 5:19 AM UTC

daok wrote: post #15

mrleinad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 hours a day is not something completely unachievable. Hell, I spent that time everyday watching some movie or just relaxing.

Yes but if you work full time and you have a family this 2 hours per day become rare. It's also important to notice that your body require to have some relaxing time which is also needed to be in consideration. Yes you may remove all "wasted time" of your day, but at the end, your brain will need rest. Spending your whole life optimizing this time will just get you more chance to get a burnout. 18 hours per week on f…

That's exactly right. As you get older, you begin to derive joy from things other than mastering new skills. I understand the OP's original post was more about time in the abstract, but the point you make is in fact the reality.

Re: How many 10K hours do you have left?

#33

Post by epo » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 10:52 AM UTC

anthonycerra wrote: post #11

This is a cool brain hack in that it uses math to convince you that you're not too old to become a master at something. One issue I have with the 10,000 hour rule in general is this: there are approximately 2,088 hours in a work-year not counting overtime. To achieve mastery in your profession would then take less than 5 years. Most professions don't consider someone an expert 5 years into their careers. So does that…

Hours spent doing something is not the same as hours spent in targetted time to achieve mastery of your chosen domain. Lots of kids spend hours and hours kicking footbals, few become the next Ronaldo, Messi, Beckham ...

Re: How many 10K hours do you have left?

#34

Post by Evbn » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 3:15 PM UTC

dgabriel wrote: post #24

I thought the "10k" rule had been discredited. http://allaboutwork.org/2012/11/21/malcolm-gladwells-10000-h...

Really, finding a few examples of 7000k hour violin players discredits the 10k hour rules? It's an estimate, not a mission to mars.

Are you also offended by astronomers getting the mass of a star, or geologists measuring the amount of oil in a well wrong? They would be delighted to get the order of magnitude right.

Re: How many 10K hours do you have left?

#35

Post by Evbn » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 3:17 PM UTC

psycr wrote: post #7

How could anyone actually sustain such a rate of learning? Two hours every weekday, plus an additional sixteen hours every weekend for 48 weeks every year? Life creeps up, and seeps into the cracks so tenuously occupied by free time. Mastering but a single skill is impressive.

That rate sounds like what many kids do who become successful adults. Kids are born learners, at a far more intense rate than that. But adults? Become a manager and wise advisor.

Re: How many 10K hours do you have left?

#36

Post by Evbn » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 3:18 PM UTC

kiba wrote: post #5

mrleinad wrote: post #4

5 more achievements to unlock before game over

Clearly, we need to hack the underlying codebase to allows more time for achievements. On a serious thought, if old people live longer, we have longer access to their knowledge and expertise. When old people die, we lost some their expertise forever. So if we cure cancer and other diseases, that would be money well spent.

Thanks we have books, videos, and Internet. A lot of what people know is redundantly distributed.

Re: How many 10K hours do you have left?

#37

Post by CubanSandwich » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 5:24 PM UTC

wuest wrote: post #13

sireat wrote: post #9

Sadly, the problem is that the older you does not get the same out of 10k hours of deliberate practice than the younger you. Let's take chess: 10k hours of deliberate practice in your teen years will make you a master level player (and possibly near GM caliber if you think Polgar experiment was not a fluke). There are no known instances of someone starting to play chess after age of 30 and getting near GM. Conversely…

Anecdotal data, admittedly not perfectly analogous. I got serious about playing the game of go relatively late in life for a go player--I was 23 years old at the time. In 2 years of hard study (1~2h/day, and a bit more on weekends) I rose from essentially a complete beginner to dan level play. Since then, life has pulled me away from playing go as actively, but the work I do at this point does let me maintain my leve…

Out of interest, where would advise a beginner to start playing go online?