6 ms·

There was a HN discussion some time ago about choosing a textbook that is optimal for oneself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41016650 https://news.ycombi

There was a HN discussion some time ago about choosing a textbook that is optimal for oneself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41016650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41016650), and this passage from the answer about deliberate practice stuck out to me: In the field of talent development, there is absolutely no debate about the most superior form of training. It's deliberate practice: mindful repetition on performance tasks just beyond the edge of one's capabilities. Deliberate practice is about making performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition. Any individual adjustment is small and yields a small improvement in performance – but when you compound these small changes over a massive number of action-feedback-adjustment cycles, you end up with massive changes and massive gains in performance. Deliberate practice is superior to all other forms of training. That is a "solved problem" in the academic field of talent development. It might as well be a law of physics. There is a mountain of research supporting the conclusion that the volume of accumulated deliberate practice is the single biggest factor responsible for individual differences in performance among elite performers across a wide variety of talent domains. (The next biggest factor is genetics, and the relative contributions of deliberate practice vs genetics can vary significantly across talent domains.)

Xcelerate 2y ago
> The next biggest factor is genetics I think it depends where you’re at in the progression curve. I’ve always thought that most people can reach the top 1% of just about anything with hard work. Beyond that, it comes down to other factors: genetics, environment, luck, etc. I ran track in college and reached roughly the top percentile of my age and gender (i.e., the level of a typical D1 athlete), but there is absolutely no way I would ever have come remotely close to a 12:37 5k. You could have started the training from birth under a team of experts, and it simply just would not have happened.
- FuckButtons 2y ago
  In basically any other field of endeavor, this is fine though, most things people do aren’t judged as though there can only be one best person in the world at it.
  - jgeada 2y ago
    Yes but no. The problem is that many very important things in life are winner takes all. If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate, you get no job. If your bid is 99.99% as good as the other one, you likely don't get the deal. If you're 99.99% as good as the other guy, you don't get the medal, the fame or the recognition. Little differences can have hugely significant consequences. And sometimes the difference is just luck, but still the same huge consequences.
    - InitialBP 2y ago
      Your example isn't a very good one. If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate you get no job? How about you get a different job because you're still a top performer. Most (all?) jobs don't have only a single role to be filled across the entire world. Sure you might not get THE singular highest paid/best position to do what you do really well, but you can certainly still get the 2nd or 3rd or be among the top 100/1000 well paid people who do X. I stand by the previous commenter, in the vast majority of cases you're still going to have some significant benefit from being near the top even if you aren't "the best".
      - jgeada 2y ago
        fair enough
    - __alexs 2y ago
      It is delusional to think that even the top 0.01% of interviewers can detect the difference in candidates that accurately.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      >Little differences can have hugely significant consequences. And sometimes the difference is just luck, but still the same huge consequences. Those differences compound too with one success leading to further success.
    - kspacewalk2 2y ago
      >If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate, you get no job. For the vast, vast majority of jobs, this is simply false. You will get an equivalent job elsewhere. But yes, if you're applying to be Prime Minister, this is definitely the case. >If your bid is 99.99% as good as the other one, you likely don't get the deal. This is very often false as well, when you look at the metric of whether you'll get work/income, rather than this specific unit of work. There are some industries where you're competing for a few massive winner-takes-all bids, but there are many where this isn't the case. And oftentimes in the former industries, bids are made by consortia and there will be plenty of sub-contracting. >If you're 99.99% as good as the other guy, you don't get the medal, the fame or the recognition. This is definitely true in sports, music and some other fields. I would say, unless you're a founder and are seeking to have massive disruptive impact in some field, this does not apply to anyone who visits HN. Good and great programmers, engineers, researchers and managers will always be well off and have a reasonable amount of recognition/impact, and the exceptional ones will not take such a disproportionately large chunk of the pie to leave the rest in the dust.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
nonameiguess 2y ago
That has to be misphrased. If we take "beyond the edge of one's capabilities" literally, that means you can't do it. You can't practice what you can't do. But even just hitting the edge of your capabilities is something athletes almost never do. Practice is certainly still deliberate. It's planned. Every workout has a purpose. But lifters don't hit a one-rep max every single day. Runners don't run a race every single day. The overwhelming majority of practice is intentionally submaximal because the stress of trying to max out every time you do something is too much to recover from and limits your ability to accumulate large volumes of practice over time. "Performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition" is almost incomprehensible in some realms of performance. I'm not some high level athlete or anything, but I ran 9 miles this morning with 5 of them slightly below lactate threshold and that took a bit fewer than 13,000 steps. Do we really expect each of those steps to involve feedback and improvement? Fatigue is a thing. Nobody gets better with every step. You get better very, very slowly, often after very long cycles of functional overreach and recovery in which you first get worse before you get better.
- shanusmagnus 2y ago
  These are good points. The devil is in the details for how to implement stuff like this, and there are a host of other tradeoffs, e.g., seemingly optimal regimens that people despise and that are de-motivating are, in practice, far worse than theoretically less-good training that people will actually do. If it was as straightforward as some of the "expertise" research suggests, the world would be teeming with super-beings. That it isn't should give one pause about the relative leverage of constructing the problem this way.
- JustinSkycak 2y ago
  "Beyond the edge of one's capabilities" means that you're working on things outside of your current repertoire. This could mean any of a number of things, e.g.: 1) Maybe you can do it with scaffolding, but you are unable to do it without scaffolding. For instance, a musician might not be capable of playing a difficult section of a musical piece at full speed. So they might practice it while playing slowly (a type of scaffolding), and then gradually ramp up the speed while maintaining accuracy. 2) Maybe you can do it sometimes, but not consistently/accurately. For instance, a gymnast might not be capable of landing a particular flip consistently with proper form. But maybe they can land it 50% of the time with shaky form. So they might practice improving their consistency and form on this skill. --- Working on things outside of one's repertoire, is a core aspect of deliberate practice. Non-experts are often misled to practice within their level of comfort. This tends to be more effortful and less enjoyable, which can mislead non-experts to practice within their level of comfort. For instance, Coughlan et al. (2014) observed this as a factor differentiating intermediate and expert Gaeilic football players: "Expert and intermediate level Gaelic football players executed two types of kicks during an acquisition phase and pre-, post-, and retention tests. During acquisition, participants self-selected how they practiced and rated the characteristics of deliberate practice for effort and enjoyment. The expert group predominantly practiced the skill they were weaker at and improved its performance across pre-, post- and retention tests. Participants in the expert group also rated their practice as more effortful and less enjoyable compared to those in the intermediate group. In contrast, participants in the intermediate group predominantly practiced the skill they were stronger at and improved their performance from pretest to posttest but not on the retention test." --- The idea of practicing outside of one's repertoire can be generalized to the idea of engaging in a cycle of strain and adaptation. This is done in, e.g., Ericsson (2006). Here's a snippet: "When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dormant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated. Over time the cells of the body, including the brain (see Hill & Schneider, Chapter 37) will reorganize in response to the induced metabolic demands of the activity by, for example, increases in the number of capillaries supplying blood to muscles and changes in metabolism of the muscle fibers themselves. These adaptations will eventually allow the individual to execute the given level of activity without greatly straining the physiological systems. To gain further beneficial increases in adaptation, the athletes need to increase or change their weekly training activities to induce new and perhaps different types of strain on the key physiological systems." --- In general, in the phrase "deliberate practice," the word "deliberate" is not just an adjective. "Deliberate practice" has a very specific meaning in the research literature. The way you describe it -- "Practice is certainly still deliberate. It's planned. Every workout has a purpose." -- is not as strict as the meaning in the research literature. For something closer to a proper definition, I'll quote (Ericsson, 2006): "The core assumption of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 1996, 2002, 2004; Ericsson et al., 1993) is that expert performance is acquired gradually and that effective improvement of performance requires the opportunity to find suitable training tasks that the performer can master sequentially -- typically the design of training tasks and monitoring of the attained performance is done by a teacher or a coach. Deliberate practice presents performers with tasks that are initially outside their current realm of reliable performance, yet can be mastered within hours of practice by concentrating on critical aspects and by gradually refining performance through repetitions after feedback. Hence, the requirement for concentration sets deliberate practice apart from both mindless, routine performance and playful engagement, as the latter two types of activities would, if anything, merely strengthen the current mediating cognitive mechanisms rather than modify them to allow increases in the level of performance." --- I don't know much about serious running, but based on how things work in other domains: if "performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition" is incomprehensible at the level you're looking, then it's an indication you need to zoom out a bit. The same confusion can happen in, e.g., deliberate practice in math, if you zoom in too much. When a student solves a math problem, do we really expect every single pen stroke to involve feedback and improvement? No. You have to zoom out to the level of the problem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would expect that in running, the appropriate level to view these deliberate practice cycles is not the level of a single step, but rather, a cohesive group of a taxing "deliberate practice" runs and easier "recovery" runs. At this level, it looks more like that cycle of strain/adaptation that is characteristic of deliberate practice. (And that level seems to align with what's discussed in the literature -- for instance, I was just skimming Casado et al, 2020, Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners, which mentioned that "systematic training ... included high-intensity training sessions considered deliberate practice (DP) and easy runs.") --- References Casado, A., Hanley, B., and Ruiz-Pérez, L.M. (2020). Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners. European Journal of Sport Science, 20 (7). pp. 887-895. Coughlan, E. K., Williams, A. M., McRobert, A. P., & Ford, P. R. (2014). How experts practice: A novel test of deliberate practice theory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(2), 449. Ericsson, K. A. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance, 38(685-705), 2-2.
jhp123 2y ago
I don't believe this stuff at all. Your average AP student has better study habits than Evariste Galois, and about a 0% chance of understanding Galois theory by the age that he invented it (19).
- ducttapecrown 2y ago
  What? There are a lot more 19 year olds that understand Galois theory today than when Galois was around.
  - jhp123 2y ago
    Deliberate practice seems to be very important in sports. And the modern regime of sports practice, where people specialize early and follow a strict regimen over years, produces results that leave earlier generations in the dust. Almost every athletic record is held by people alive today, and the best performance of 1900 would be considered amateur-level today in most sports. The same is clearly not true in mathematics. The modern regime of math practice, which involves lots of schoolwork, homework, tutoring, and other regimented practice, has not left 19th-century standards in the dust. The achievements of Galois would still be utterly extraordinary today. The notion that sports-style "deliberate practice" is universally beneficial towards a vague notion called "expertise" is simply not true.

Xcelerate 2y ago

> The next biggest factor is genetics I think it depends where you’re at in the progression curve. I’ve always thought that most people can reach the top 1% of just about anything with hard work. Beyond that, it comes down to other factors: genetics, environment, luck, etc. I ran track in college and reached roughly the top percentile of my age and gender (i.e., the level of a typical D1 athlete), but there is absolutely no way I would ever have come remotely close to a 12:37 5k. You could have started the training from birth under a team of experts, and it simply just would not have happened.

FuckButtons 2y ago
In basically any other field of endeavor, this is fine though, most things people do aren’t judged as though there can only be one best person in the world at it.
- jgeada 2y ago
  Yes but no. The problem is that many very important things in life are winner takes all. If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate, you get no job. If your bid is 99.99% as good as the other one, you likely don't get the deal. If you're 99.99% as good as the other guy, you don't get the medal, the fame or the recognition. Little differences can have hugely significant consequences. And sometimes the difference is just luck, but still the same huge consequences.
  - InitialBP 2y ago
    Your example isn't a very good one. If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate you get no job? How about you get a different job because you're still a top performer. Most (all?) jobs don't have only a single role to be filled across the entire world. Sure you might not get THE singular highest paid/best position to do what you do really well, but you can certainly still get the 2nd or 3rd or be among the top 100/1000 well paid people who do X. I stand by the previous commenter, in the vast majority of cases you're still going to have some significant benefit from being near the top even if you aren't "the best".
    - jgeada 2y ago
      fair enough
  - __alexs 2y ago
    It is delusional to think that even the top 0.01% of interviewers can detect the difference in candidates that accurately.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >Little differences can have hugely significant consequences. And sometimes the difference is just luck, but still the same huge consequences. Those differences compound too with one success leading to further success.
  - kspacewalk2 2y ago
    >If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate, you get no job. For the vast, vast majority of jobs, this is simply false. You will get an equivalent job elsewhere. But yes, if you're applying to be Prime Minister, this is definitely the case. >If your bid is 99.99% as good as the other one, you likely don't get the deal. This is very often false as well, when you look at the metric of whether you'll get work/income, rather than this specific unit of work. There are some industries where you're competing for a few massive winner-takes-all bids, but there are many where this isn't the case. And oftentimes in the former industries, bids are made by consortia and there will be plenty of sub-contracting. >If you're 99.99% as good as the other guy, you don't get the medal, the fame or the recognition. This is definitely true in sports, music and some other fields. I would say, unless you're a founder and are seeking to have massive disruptive impact in some field, this does not apply to anyone who visits HN. Good and great programmers, engineers, researchers and managers will always be well off and have a reasonable amount of recognition/impact, and the exceptional ones will not take such a disproportionately large chunk of the pie to leave the rest in the dust.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

nonameiguess 2y ago

That has to be misphrased. If we take "beyond the edge of one's capabilities" literally, that means you can't do it. You can't practice what you can't do. But even just hitting the edge of your capabilities is something athletes almost never do. Practice is certainly still deliberate. It's planned. Every workout has a purpose. But lifters don't hit a one-rep max every single day. Runners don't run a race every single day. The overwhelming majority of practice is intentionally submaximal because the stress of trying to max out every time you do something is too much to recover from and limits your ability to accumulate large volumes of practice over time. "Performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition" is almost incomprehensible in some realms of performance. I'm not some high level athlete or anything, but I ran 9 miles this morning with 5 of them slightly below lactate threshold and that took a bit fewer than 13,000 steps. Do we really expect each of those steps to involve feedback and improvement? Fatigue is a thing. Nobody gets better with every step. You get better very, very slowly, often after very long cycles of functional overreach and recovery in which you first get worse before you get better.

shanusmagnus 2y ago
These are good points. The devil is in the details for how to implement stuff like this, and there are a host of other tradeoffs, e.g., seemingly optimal regimens that people despise and that are de-motivating are, in practice, far worse than theoretically less-good training that people will actually do. If it was as straightforward as some of the "expertise" research suggests, the world would be teeming with super-beings. That it isn't should give one pause about the relative leverage of constructing the problem this way.
JustinSkycak 2y ago
"Beyond the edge of one's capabilities" means that you're working on things outside of your current repertoire. This could mean any of a number of things, e.g.: 1) Maybe you can do it with scaffolding, but you are unable to do it without scaffolding. For instance, a musician might not be capable of playing a difficult section of a musical piece at full speed. So they might practice it while playing slowly (a type of scaffolding), and then gradually ramp up the speed while maintaining accuracy. 2) Maybe you can do it sometimes, but not consistently/accurately. For instance, a gymnast might not be capable of landing a particular flip consistently with proper form. But maybe they can land it 50% of the time with shaky form. So they might practice improving their consistency and form on this skill. --- Working on things outside of one's repertoire, is a core aspect of deliberate practice. Non-experts are often misled to practice within their level of comfort. This tends to be more effortful and less enjoyable, which can mislead non-experts to practice within their level of comfort. For instance, Coughlan et al. (2014) observed this as a factor differentiating intermediate and expert Gaeilic football players: "Expert and intermediate level Gaelic football players executed two types of kicks during an acquisition phase and pre-, post-, and retention tests. During acquisition, participants self-selected how they practiced and rated the characteristics of deliberate practice for effort and enjoyment. The expert group predominantly practiced the skill they were weaker at and improved its performance across pre-, post- and retention tests. Participants in the expert group also rated their practice as more effortful and less enjoyable compared to those in the intermediate group. In contrast, participants in the intermediate group predominantly practiced the skill they were stronger at and improved their performance from pretest to posttest but not on the retention test." --- The idea of practicing outside of one's repertoire can be generalized to the idea of engaging in a cycle of strain and adaptation. This is done in, e.g., Ericsson (2006). Here's a snippet: "When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dormant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated. Over time the cells of the body, including the brain (see Hill & Schneider, Chapter 37) will reorganize in response to the induced metabolic demands of the activity by, for example, increases in the number of capillaries supplying blood to muscles and changes in metabolism of the muscle fibers themselves. These adaptations will eventually allow the individual to execute the given level of activity without greatly straining the physiological systems. To gain further beneficial increases in adaptation, the athletes need to increase or change their weekly training activities to induce new and perhaps different types of strain on the key physiological systems." --- In general, in the phrase "deliberate practice," the word "deliberate" is not just an adjective. "Deliberate practice" has a very specific meaning in the research literature. The way you describe it -- "Practice is certainly still deliberate. It's planned. Every workout has a purpose." -- is not as strict as the meaning in the research literature. For something closer to a proper definition, I'll quote (Ericsson, 2006): "The core assumption of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 1996, 2002, 2004; Ericsson et al., 1993) is that expert performance is acquired gradually and that effective improvement of performance requires the opportunity to find suitable training tasks that the performer can master sequentially -- typically the design of training tasks and monitoring of the attained performance is done by a teacher or a coach. Deliberate practice presents performers with tasks that are initially outside their current realm of reliable performance, yet can be mastered within hours of practice by concentrating on critical aspects and by gradually refining performance through repetitions after feedback. Hence, the requirement for concentration sets deliberate practice apart from both mindless, routine performance and playful engagement, as the latter two types of activities would, if anything, merely strengthen the current mediating cognitive mechanisms rather than modify them to allow increases in the level of performance." --- I don't know much about serious running, but based on how things work in other domains: if "performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition" is incomprehensible at the level you're looking, then it's an indication you need to zoom out a bit. The same confusion can happen in, e.g., deliberate practice in math, if you zoom in too much. When a student solves a math problem, do we really expect every single pen stroke to involve feedback and improvement? No. You have to zoom out to the level of the problem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would expect that in running, the appropriate level to view these deliberate practice cycles is not the level of a single step, but rather, a cohesive group of a taxing "deliberate practice" runs and easier "recovery" runs. At this level, it looks more like that cycle of strain/adaptation that is characteristic of deliberate practice. (And that level seems to align with what's discussed in the literature -- for instance, I was just skimming Casado et al, 2020, Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners, which mentioned that "systematic training ... included high-intensity training sessions considered deliberate practice (DP) and easy runs.") --- References Casado, A., Hanley, B., and Ruiz-Pérez, L.M. (2020). Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners. European Journal of Sport Science, 20 (7). pp. 887-895. Coughlan, E. K., Williams, A. M., McRobert, A. P., & Ford, P. R. (2014). How experts practice: A novel test of deliberate practice theory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(2), 449. Ericsson, K. A. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance, 38(685-705), 2-2.

jhp123 2y ago

I don't believe this stuff at all. Your average AP student has better study habits than Evariste Galois, and about a 0% chance of understanding Galois theory by the age that he invented it (19).

ducttapecrown 2y ago
What? There are a lot more 19 year olds that understand Galois theory today than when Galois was around.
- jhp123 2y ago
  Deliberate practice seems to be very important in sports. And the modern regime of sports practice, where people specialize early and follow a strict regimen over years, produces results that leave earlier generations in the dust. Almost every athletic record is held by people alive today, and the best performance of 1900 would be considered amateur-level today in most sports. The same is clearly not true in mathematics. The modern regime of math practice, which involves lots of schoolwork, homework, tutoring, and other regimented practice, has not left 19th-century standards in the dust. The achievements of Galois would still be utterly extraordinary today. The notion that sports-style "deliberate practice" is universally beneficial towards a vague notion called "expertise" is simply not true.