8 ms·

It's really interesting to contrast this with this old article on software developers, "expert beginners" and skill plateaus ( https://daedtech.com/how-develope

It's really interesting to contrast this with this old article on software developers, "expert beginners" and skill plateaus ( https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/ https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th... ) Bowling technique is used as an example of something you can abuse in order to get quick wins and easy improvement on bowling ability, yet quickly hit a skill ceiling and you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) if you wish to reach an advanced level. From TFA there also seems to be a third path of "this isn't wrong, it's actually a better technique", and the article does outline the whole journey of self-coaching, being called a cheater and ultimately being validated via a string of victories and imitators.

abhaynayar 3y ago
> you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) Yeah that's what's happening with me in tennis. As a kid I never really took any formal coaching, just learnt from my brother and started rallying with people. Recently, I decided to start playing again, so I went to a coach and I am learning the correct technique from the beginning. Have to constantly correct and rewire my automatic reactions. It feels really good to learn something you're bad at, and then seeing your brain slowly automating the new stuff over time.
- yowzadave 3y ago
  Yes, this pattern is extremely obvious in tennis--you'll often encounter rec-level players who manage to win a lot of matches against players of lower ability by hitting nothing but slow floaters/moonballs/chip shots. Because they use those shots exclusively (because they're often effective at lower levels!), they plateau, and never develop the full range of tennis skills they need to compete against more well-rounded players.
- jdechko 3y ago
  See also swimming. A lot of people, myself included, know how to “swim” freestyle. But the difference in technique between trained and untrained is stark if you know what to look for. It takes a lot of effort to unlearn the improper technique and learn what to do. At the same time, it’s difficult doing longer distances because of muscle memory.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Hmm really? I feel like freestyle is just “lengthen your stroke (or go yolo windmills for sprints) and kick”
    - jdechko 3y ago
      Yep. “Lengthening the stroke” is the end result. But body rotation, head position, engaging your core/abs, how your arms enter and pull through the water all make it so much more fluid. Even the angle of your elbow and hands. I’m certainly no expert, but I see so many people that swim with their head completely out of the water. It drops the hips and legs, increases drag and expends so much more effort. The result is yolo thrashing through the water. Compare to Olympic swimmers who seem to effortlessly glide through the water.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        Eh. If your head is out of the water you’re doing more of a doggy paddle than a front crawl, caveats to water polo players. I would say that is an entirely different way to swim. “Freestyle” is whatever you want, although people generally will choose front crawl for almost every situation* Edit: to clarify, if you’re not rotating your shoulders and are doing a doggy paddle, you’re going to be moving so inefficiently that you’ll probably drown over a short distance if you cannot rest. That’s barely “swimming”. And is a far cry from amateur bowling and tennis imo.
        jdechko 3y ago
        That’s kinda my point though. At my gym, about half of the people I see in the pool are so inefficient that they barely can swim 25 yards without getting exhausted. But to them, they’re “swimming”. I know you mentioned amateurs, but I’m really considering the average person who can “do the thing” (swim, golf, bowl, play tennis) vs someone who has even spent a little time trying to figure out the proper technique. Hell, Tiger Woods dominated the tour and then spent time trying to work on his swing (before his life spiraled out of control). Also, re-reading the original comments I was replying to, I wanted to clarify that I fell into the “flail around and try to get across the pool” category. I improved my technique considerably even though it’s not proper. I’m at the point where if I really want to improve, I need to unlearn my “good enough” skills and re-learn it properly. Unfortunately, it’s hard to do 1000+ yds nonstop the “right” way right now, so my warm ups are a lot of 50s and 100s where I go slow and focus. Then I can do maybe 50% of a longer interval “properly”
- LanceH 3y ago
  I see this play out every year with the kids in wrestling. A strong kid comes in and hits a particular move to beat all the other new wrestlers. It's the most obvious move in the world and is easily countered by anyone with experience. Some never get past it and never get better. It's maddening when it's the kid on your team, because they are often the best athlete as well, and they're now losing to much weaker kids who have paid attention in practice for a year.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    My BJJ coach says "Success is a terrible teacher"
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      Sadly, this applies to business as well.
ralphc 3y ago
We need people like this that self-teach "in the wild" to break down expectations and learn what's possible. This is how revolutionary leaps are made in a field; Eddie Van Halen with guitar is a classic example.
- wolfram74 3y ago
  Having people do these long commitments to independently reinvent techniques, with the prevailing odds being worse alternatives to what already exist, is financial insanity under the current regime of only rewarding people for value they can capture. One example of a reward model that could facilitate this kind of activity would be a universal basic income. We admit we have no idea /where/ value comes from in the first place, we acknowledge that it is not always entirely capturable in the second place. Ergo, a fraction of the stream is rerouted uniformly through all the other actors.
memcg 3y ago
Yet another reason I love HN. I have not bowled in 40 years, but I read the entire article and will look for more written by the author. I read your comment, and the linked article, and will enjoy thinking about it all day.
jerf 3y ago
There's other such things, such as the Fosbury flop. However, it's a high risk, high reward endeavor, because you don't necessarily know in advance that it's a better approach. There's a survivorship bias here, there's any number of people with eclectic techniques that ended up not being any better than the "standard" technique even after tons of practice. You also shouldn't use "but maybe it's a better technique" when using a known dead end, which will be a very tempting play for a lot of people. No, you're not going to take the known-broken bowling technique and be the one to rehabilitate it after millions of other people.
- ssivark 3y ago
  What even is a “known broken” technique — how do you establish that some technique “can’t work” rather than “just haven’t found a good execution” so far? Of course, there’s risk involved in straying off the beaten path and trying new things — not denying that.
  - jerf 3y ago
    "What even is a “known broken” technique — how do you establish that some technique “can’t work” rather than “just haven’t found a good execution” so far?" If you insist on 100% certainty, nothing. If you are satisfied with "millions upon millions of people have used this and it has been broadly revealed to be a dead end", then bowling certainly has a known-bad technique that is very appealing to people just picking up the ball for the first time. But if you really, really want that 100% certainty, then by all means go forth and base your decisions about what to focus on on that. If you set the bar at anything even remotely less than 100% certainty, though, you'll find there are known-bad techniques. Heck, there are techniques that aren't just known to not work, they are known to lead to injuries with high reliability; see the lifting world, for instance. There's a difference between being an iconoclast and refusing to learn from the experiences of others. From the outside they may look similar but they are not the same.
- LanceH 3y ago
  There is a guy who has done some great videos on youtube. Search for "banned techniques in track and field", that should get you there. Among them are the forward flip in the long jump (possibly better), the shotput cartwheel (better at some levels), and others.
myself248 3y ago
> you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) I was told I'd need to do that with typing. I started out two-finger hunt-and-peck at age 7 on a TI 99/4A, and gradually added more fingers. Using my pinky for Shift, in particular, was a gateway to using my middle fingers for letters too. I didn't take any speed tests at the time, but retrospectively I'd guess I was around 8-10wpm. By the time I got to middle school and took a typing class with Mavis Beacon emphasizing home-row and stuff, I was already faster than the kids leaving the class from the previous semester, on the order of 20wpm. I did the exercises but I didn't really change my style much, and left the class typing roughly the way I started, but with more awareness of how I was "supposed" to do it. Feh. Then in high school, I learned about BBS's and modems, got my own modem, and found a local multi-line BBS with multi-user chat. And that created a heck of an incentive -- the faster I could type, the more I could participate in the present conversation rather than what happened 2 minutes ago. Social connection was thus linked to typing speed, and for a 9th-grader it's hard to find a more powerful motivator than that. I found myself adding fingers and breaking the 60wpm mark before the summer was out. No more hunting, still basically pecking, but pecking with 3 or 4 fingers on each hand. These days my typing style superficially resembles a home-row style; my wrists rarely move, but I perch over QWEF/QERG and JIO' rather than ASDF and JKL; like Mavis would've liked. I find the slightly higher perch gives me easier access to the symbols on the number keys and functions in the F-key row. I sit comfortably around 80wpm on plain text, and handily outrace home-row typists on code or anything with a lot of symbols. Moreover, the division between hands simply isn't. When typing with two hands, the letters in the middle, YGHVBN, are fair game for either hand. But if I have to reach for something, or if my right hand is on the mouse, I'll reposition my left to WRTH or thereabouts, and it feels perfectly natural to roam around the whole keyboard as needed. Thus my keybindings in games and CAD are probably horrifying to a home-row typist, but since I'm not wasting half my left hand's reach with tab/caps/shift, I have a lot more useful keys available to me in keyboard+mouse mode. I have CAD bindings from QAZ all the way to IKM, with only OPL off-limits. (And frankly, my left hand is on a SpacePilot half the time anyway. When I bounce it back to the keyboard, it's not required to settle into any particular home position, because the whole board "feels like home" for either hand.) I've never felt a desire to unlearn my evolved style and start over with home-row; I believe it to be demonstrably inferior for the sort of things I actually do.
kibwen 3y ago
I had the same thought regarding that article, and I think it's worth emphasizing that even the bowler in the GQ article risked being an "expert beginner" but managed to escape the trap: "As such, Advanced Beginners can break one of two ways: they can move to Competent and start to grasp the big picture and their place in it, or they can ‘graduate’ to Expert Beginner by assuming that they’ve graduated to Expert." ...and then from the OP: > When Belmonte first joined the PBA, he reveled in his power game: Let’s break some pins, he remembers thinking. But as he watched some of the game’s finest up close, he realized something: “These guys had the ability to make the ball dance. They could make the ball dance to any tune the lane was asking for. And I couldn’t do that.” > He worked to decrease his rev rate, his velocity, the number of moving parts to his game. And he slowed his approach, eliminating a “kangaroo hop” designed to generate power, and delivering the ball from a position of greater stability and balance. “I noticed my ball was still striking with 20 percent less revolutions, and my ball was still sending messengers. But I was more consistently in the pocket. And I realized, I don’t need to break a pin every round.” So despite the "expert beginner" article using the author's own bowling experience as an anecdote of what not to do, it's not trying to say you should always follow the crowd and blindly trust the prevailing wisdom; rather, it's saying that you should seek to understand your faults and grasp the bigger picture, and not automatically assume that minor expertise necessarily implies major expertise.
starky 3y ago
>Bowling technique is used as an example of something you can abuse in order to get quick wins and easy improvement on bowling ability, yet quickly hit a skill ceiling and you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) if you wish to reach an advanced level. I had to bite the bullet on this a few years ago for my league. I grew up doing 5-pin and when switching to 10-pin the timing of everything was messed up due to how I threw and I didn't want to make the change. Finally someone convinced me to do it a few summers ago and had some bad slumps due to it. The improvements finally really showed this past season with significantly better consistency though.

abhaynayar 3y ago

> you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) Yeah that's what's happening with me in tennis. As a kid I never really took any formal coaching, just learnt from my brother and started rallying with people. Recently, I decided to start playing again, so I went to a coach and I am learning the correct technique from the beginning. Have to constantly correct and rewire my automatic reactions. It feels really good to learn something you're bad at, and then seeing your brain slowly automating the new stuff over time.

yowzadave 3y ago
Yes, this pattern is extremely obvious in tennis--you'll often encounter rec-level players who manage to win a lot of matches against players of lower ability by hitting nothing but slow floaters/moonballs/chip shots. Because they use those shots exclusively (because they're often effective at lower levels!), they plateau, and never develop the full range of tennis skills they need to compete against more well-rounded players.
jdechko 3y ago
See also swimming. A lot of people, myself included, know how to “swim” freestyle. But the difference in technique between trained and untrained is stark if you know what to look for. It takes a lot of effort to unlearn the improper technique and learn what to do. At the same time, it’s difficult doing longer distances because of muscle memory.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Hmm really? I feel like freestyle is just “lengthen your stroke (or go yolo windmills for sprints) and kick”
  - jdechko 3y ago
    Yep. “Lengthening the stroke” is the end result. But body rotation, head position, engaging your core/abs, how your arms enter and pull through the water all make it so much more fluid. Even the angle of your elbow and hands. I’m certainly no expert, but I see so many people that swim with their head completely out of the water. It drops the hips and legs, increases drag and expends so much more effort. The result is yolo thrashing through the water. Compare to Olympic swimmers who seem to effortlessly glide through the water.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Eh. If your head is out of the water you’re doing more of a doggy paddle than a front crawl, caveats to water polo players. I would say that is an entirely different way to swim. “Freestyle” is whatever you want, although people generally will choose front crawl for almost every situation* Edit: to clarify, if you’re not rotating your shoulders and are doing a doggy paddle, you’re going to be moving so inefficiently that you’ll probably drown over a short distance if you cannot rest. That’s barely “swimming”. And is a far cry from amateur bowling and tennis imo.
      - jdechko 3y ago
        That’s kinda my point though. At my gym, about half of the people I see in the pool are so inefficient that they barely can swim 25 yards without getting exhausted. But to them, they’re “swimming”. I know you mentioned amateurs, but I’m really considering the average person who can “do the thing” (swim, golf, bowl, play tennis) vs someone who has even spent a little time trying to figure out the proper technique. Hell, Tiger Woods dominated the tour and then spent time trying to work on his swing (before his life spiraled out of control). Also, re-reading the original comments I was replying to, I wanted to clarify that I fell into the “flail around and try to get across the pool” category. I improved my technique considerably even though it’s not proper. I’m at the point where if I really want to improve, I need to unlearn my “good enough” skills and re-learn it properly. Unfortunately, it’s hard to do 1000+ yds nonstop the “right” way right now, so my warm ups are a lot of 50s and 100s where I go slow and focus. Then I can do maybe 50% of a longer interval “properly”
LanceH 3y ago
I see this play out every year with the kids in wrestling. A strong kid comes in and hits a particular move to beat all the other new wrestlers. It's the most obvious move in the world and is easily countered by anyone with experience. Some never get past it and never get better. It's maddening when it's the kid on your team, because they are often the best athlete as well, and they're now losing to much weaker kids who have paid attention in practice for a year.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  My BJJ coach says "Success is a terrible teacher"
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    Sadly, this applies to business as well.

ralphc 3y ago

We need people like this that self-teach "in the wild" to break down expectations and learn what's possible. This is how revolutionary leaps are made in a field; Eddie Van Halen with guitar is a classic example.

wolfram74 3y ago
Having people do these long commitments to independently reinvent techniques, with the prevailing odds being worse alternatives to what already exist, is financial insanity under the current regime of only rewarding people for value they can capture. One example of a reward model that could facilitate this kind of activity would be a universal basic income. We admit we have no idea /where/ value comes from in the first place, we acknowledge that it is not always entirely capturable in the second place. Ergo, a fraction of the stream is rerouted uniformly through all the other actors.

memcg 3y ago

Yet another reason I love HN. I have not bowled in 40 years, but I read the entire article and will look for more written by the author. I read your comment, and the linked article, and will enjoy thinking about it all day.

jerf 3y ago

There's other such things, such as the Fosbury flop. However, it's a high risk, high reward endeavor, because you don't necessarily know in advance that it's a better approach. There's a survivorship bias here, there's any number of people with eclectic techniques that ended up not being any better than the "standard" technique even after tons of practice. You also shouldn't use "but maybe it's a better technique" when using a known dead end, which will be a very tempting play for a lot of people. No, you're not going to take the known-broken bowling technique and be the one to rehabilitate it after millions of other people.

ssivark 3y ago
What even is a “known broken” technique — how do you establish that some technique “can’t work” rather than “just haven’t found a good execution” so far? Of course, there’s risk involved in straying off the beaten path and trying new things — not denying that.
- jerf 3y ago
  "What even is a “known broken” technique — how do you establish that some technique “can’t work” rather than “just haven’t found a good execution” so far?" If you insist on 100% certainty, nothing. If you are satisfied with "millions upon millions of people have used this and it has been broadly revealed to be a dead end", then bowling certainly has a known-bad technique that is very appealing to people just picking up the ball for the first time. But if you really, really want that 100% certainty, then by all means go forth and base your decisions about what to focus on on that. If you set the bar at anything even remotely less than 100% certainty, though, you'll find there are known-bad techniques. Heck, there are techniques that aren't just known to not work, they are known to lead to injuries with high reliability; see the lifting world, for instance. There's a difference between being an iconoclast and refusing to learn from the experiences of others. From the outside they may look similar but they are not the same.
LanceH 3y ago
There is a guy who has done some great videos on youtube. Search for "banned techniques in track and field", that should get you there. Among them are the forward flip in the long jump (possibly better), the shotput cartwheel (better at some levels), and others.

myself248 3y ago

> you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) I was told I'd need to do that with typing. I started out two-finger hunt-and-peck at age 7 on a TI 99/4A, and gradually added more fingers. Using my pinky for Shift, in particular, was a gateway to using my middle fingers for letters too. I didn't take any speed tests at the time, but retrospectively I'd guess I was around 8-10wpm. By the time I got to middle school and took a typing class with Mavis Beacon emphasizing home-row and stuff, I was already faster than the kids leaving the class from the previous semester, on the order of 20wpm. I did the exercises but I didn't really change my style much, and left the class typing roughly the way I started, but with more awareness of how I was "supposed" to do it. Feh. Then in high school, I learned about BBS's and modems, got my own modem, and found a local multi-line BBS with multi-user chat. And that created a heck of an incentive -- the faster I could type, the more I could participate in the present conversation rather than what happened 2 minutes ago. Social connection was thus linked to typing speed, and for a 9th-grader it's hard to find a more powerful motivator than that. I found myself adding fingers and breaking the 60wpm mark before the summer was out. No more hunting, still basically pecking, but pecking with 3 or 4 fingers on each hand. These days my typing style superficially resembles a home-row style; my wrists rarely move, but I perch over QWEF/QERG and JIO' rather than ASDF and JKL; like Mavis would've liked. I find the slightly higher perch gives me easier access to the symbols on the number keys and functions in the F-key row. I sit comfortably around 80wpm on plain text, and handily outrace home-row typists on code or anything with a lot of symbols. Moreover, the division between hands simply isn't. When typing with two hands, the letters in the middle, YGHVBN, are fair game for either hand. But if I have to reach for something, or if my right hand is on the mouse, I'll reposition my left to WRTH or thereabouts, and it feels perfectly natural to roam around the whole keyboard as needed. Thus my keybindings in games and CAD are probably horrifying to a home-row typist, but since I'm not wasting half my left hand's reach with tab/caps/shift, I have a lot more useful keys available to me in keyboard+mouse mode. I have CAD bindings from QAZ all the way to IKM, with only OPL off-limits. (And frankly, my left hand is on a SpacePilot half the time anyway. When I bounce it back to the keyboard, it's not required to settle into any particular home position, because the whole board "feels like home" for either hand.) I've never felt a desire to unlearn my evolved style and start over with home-row; I believe it to be demonstrably inferior for the sort of things I actually do.

kibwen 3y ago

I had the same thought regarding that article, and I think it's worth emphasizing that even the bowler in the GQ article risked being an "expert beginner" but managed to escape the trap: "As such, Advanced Beginners can break one of two ways: they can move to Competent and start to grasp the big picture and their place in it, or they can ‘graduate’ to Expert Beginner by assuming that they’ve graduated to Expert." ...and then from the OP: > When Belmonte first joined the PBA, he reveled in his power game: Let’s break some pins, he remembers thinking. But as he watched some of the game’s finest up close, he realized something: “These guys had the ability to make the ball dance. They could make the ball dance to any tune the lane was asking for. And I couldn’t do that.” > He worked to decrease his rev rate, his velocity, the number of moving parts to his game. And he slowed his approach, eliminating a “kangaroo hop” designed to generate power, and delivering the ball from a position of greater stability and balance. “I noticed my ball was still striking with 20 percent less revolutions, and my ball was still sending messengers. But I was more consistently in the pocket. And I realized, I don’t need to break a pin every round.” So despite the "expert beginner" article using the author's own bowling experience as an anecdote of what not to do, it's not trying to say you should always follow the crowd and blindly trust the prevailing wisdom; rather, it's saying that you should seek to understand your faults and grasp the bigger picture, and not automatically assume that minor expertise necessarily implies major expertise.

starky 3y ago

>Bowling technique is used as an example of something you can abuse in order to get quick wins and easy improvement on bowling ability, yet quickly hit a skill ceiling and you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) if you wish to reach an advanced level. I had to bite the bullet on this a few years ago for my league. I grew up doing 5-pin and when switching to 10-pin the timing of everything was messed up due to how I threw and I didn't want to make the change. Finally someone convinced me to do it a few summers ago and had some bad slumps due to it. The improvements finally really showed this past season with significantly better consistency though.