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This article is total bullshit. "practice accounted for just a 12% difference in performance in various domains" is not contrary to "10,000 hours of deliberate
by xname 12y ago
This article is total bullshit.
"practice accounted for just a 12% difference in performance in various domains" is not contrary to "10,000 hours of deliberate practice are needed to become world-class in any field".
For example, A) 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are needed to become a professional chess player, B) practice accounted for just a 12% difference in performance in professional chess. A and B can both be true at the same time.
- gwern 12y agoAnd yet, (A) is simply not true, see the other mentioned study of chess players in the fulltext, a previous study involving Hambrick which found many top players falling short of 10k and many inferior players exceeding 10k, for a net explained variance of not-that-much.
- mckeygeeky 12y agoI believe that Gladwell was merely suggesting that talent is not innate and the difference is somebody's ability was due to the amount of time they put into it. The top players might have spent several hours on a related field, like what futsal is for football.
- gwern 12y ago> I believe that Gladwell was merely suggesting that talent is not innate and the difference is somebody's ability was due to the amount of time they put into it. Neither is true. Everything is heritable, as the behavioral geneticists like to say, and increasingly the genetics are being defined and nailed down; and the latter is completely refuted by the OP study and the previous Hambrick study - time spent on a field has only a weak relation with results. > The top players might have spent several hours on a related field, like what futsal is for football. Chess players study chess. There is no related field from which meaningful transfer will happen - at the top levels of chess, the problems are only about chess.
- p1esk 12y ago12% difference in performance can be huge. For example, in 100m sprint race, Usain Bolt is 'only' 12% faster than me.