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

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

#51

Post by posterboy »

swsieber wrote: post #49
Godel_unicode wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked Gladwell's response, that 10,000 hours was never intended as the goal it turned into. Rather, it was intended as an order of magnitude. More than that however, it was intended to call attention to the support structure being expert requires. I.E. nobody can get 10,000 hours in on their own.

This. I'm listening to Outliers right now (where he builds up that concept). I can understand how people think Gladwell is a load of crap... if you focus on his points out of context. It was never "get 10,000 hrs and you'll be an expert", but instead "once you get to a certain level of talent/innate ability, it's deliberate practice that makes the difference."

like the constant factors usually omitted in complexity analysis

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

#52

Post by 6stringmerc »

danharaj wrote: post #10
jonmc12 wrote: 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…

As basically a lifetime musician (and second generation) I'd like to give some counter-points to your hypothesis regarding the "diminishing returns" notion and deliberate musical practice.

I'll try to keep this light hearted - so as a guitarist, one learns the rules, and practices them, then grows and grows and grows. Eventually, one learns how to break a rule, but over time, bend it into something that resembles an existing rule or otherwise still interests an audience, and create rules whereby none existed before. Sometimes minor mistakes or oddities become wholesale innovations in the right hands (ex: Jimi Hendrix, Tom Morello) but are very much a byproduct of deliberate, routine, intense attention and practice.

My experience is that music performance has an incredible power to both be-shaped-by-and-reciprocally-shape the human brain. The inherent elasticity and plasticity cross cultures. Generations. One of the most consistent observational effects though is that practice makes better in most cases.

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

#53

Post by lj3 »

danharaj wrote: post #10
jonmc12 wrote: 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…

> 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 very little of the variation in their ability.

I think you're talking about two different things here. There are lots of musicians and artists and writers who have mastered their craft but have no amount of creativity. The opposite is also true. There are quite a few writers and musicians and artists who are rather poor from a technical perspective, but they manage to use what they have to create enduring pieces of art. Peanuts would be a great example for art. Snow Crash for writing.

Technical skill is one thing, but the ability to create an emotionally engaging piece of art is something else. Deliberate practice can only help with the former. As for the latter, John Cleese has an interesting perspective seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

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

#54

Post by ktRolster »

kristianp wrote: post #30

So what kind of deliberate practice is required to become a highly skilled developer? Not just to know a language and library. Code kata used be a thing years ago.

It helps to read other people's code bases.

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

#55

Post by coldtea »

rednum wrote: post #28
GregBuchholz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

6000 seem like just totally close to 10K for all practical purposes...

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

#56

Post by d0mine »

kristianp wrote: post #30

So what kind of deliberate practice is required to become a highly skilled developer? Not just to know a language and library. Code kata used be a thing years ago.

The meta-analysis linked above [1] claims that deliberate practice explains only 1% of variance in performance for professions (programmers are in this category in the article)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15101548

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

#57

Post by Can_Not »

6stringmerc wrote: post #52
danharaj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As basically a lifetime musician (and second generation) I'd like to give some counter-points to your hypothesis regarding the "diminishing returns" notion and deliberate musical practice. I'll try to keep this light hearted - so as a guitarist, one learns the rules, and practices them, then grows and grows and grows. Eventually, one learns how to break a rule, but over time, bend it into something that resembles an…

There's one or more quotes about this, one of them supposedly by Picasso: "Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."

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

#58

Post by Principe »

>Experiments indicate that the memory of chess masters is tuned to typical game positions. In 13 studies conducted between 1973 and 1996 (the results were compiled in a review article published in 1996), players at various skill levels were shown positions from actual games (a) and positions obtained by randomly shuffling the pieces (b). After observing the positions for 10 seconds or less, the players were asked to reconstruct them from memory. The results (graph at bottom) showed that chess masters (with ratings of 2200 or higher) and grandmasters (generally 2500 or higher) were significantly better than weaker players at recalling the game positions but only marginally better at remembering the random positions. This finely tuned longterm memory appears to be crucial to chess expertise.

That's kinda neat

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

#59

Post by antaviana »

wslh wrote: post #4

In the introduction I would begin telling the story of Najdorf playing blind chess: http://www.blindfoldchess.net/blog/2011/12/after_64_years_ne...

Apparently he did that one also as a means to inform family in Poland that he was still alive (http://www.poloniachess.pl/najdorf2017/index.php?page=najdor...).

I post-war times, doing something highly newsworthy was pretty much like today making it to HN front page.

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

#60

Post by dEnigma »

coldtea wrote: post #55
rednum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

6000 seem like just totally close to 10K for all practical purposes...

What do you mean? It's barely more than half of the goal.
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