HN Books @HNBooksMonth

There are two interpretations of this, one of which is irrelevant to IQ and psychometrics and the other of which has no evidence despite several people spending most of their career looking for it.

Math, music, chess, story telling and social intelligence are all skills, all of which can be improved from a low base. In all of them higher g will be helpful because there’s very little where higher g isn’t helpful. If you want to learn about the science of skill building it’s better known as the study of expertise. K. Anders Ericsson founder the field. He wrote a popular book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp...

If you want the academic treatment there’s a Cambridge Handbook of Expeetise and Expert Performance.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Han...

If you want to read about how multiple intelligence theory á la Gardner has no empirical support start here.

http://www.faculty.mun.ca/cmattatall/Multiple_Intelligences_...

> Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review

> This article reviews evidence for multiple intelligences theory, the Mozart effect theory, and emotional intelligence theory and argues that despite their wide currency in education these theories lack adequate empirical support and should not be the basis for educational practice. Each theory is compared to theory counterparts in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuro- science that have better empirical support. The article considers possible reasons for the appeal of these 3 theories and concludes with a brief rationale for examining theories of cognition in the light of cognitive neuroscience research findings.

If you want attempts at something that kind of looks like multiple intelligence from people who actually know psychometrics look up the work of Robert J. Sternberg. Criticism below

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2003dissectin...

> Dissecting practical intelligence theory: Its claims and evidence

> Sternberg et al. [Sternberg, R. J., Forsythe, G. B., Hedlund, J., Horvath, J. A., Wagner, R. K., Williams, W. M., Snook, S. A., Grigorenko, E. L. (2000). Practical intelligence in everyday life. New York: Cambridge University Press] review the theoretical and empirical supports for their bold claim that there exists a general factor of practical intelligence that is distinct from ‘‘academic intelligence’’ ( g) and which predicts future success as well as g, if not better. The evidence collapses, however, upon close examination. Their two key theoretical propositions are made plausible only by ignoring the considerable evidence contradicting them. Their six key empirical claims rest primarily on the illusion of evidence, which is enhanced by the selective reporting of results. Their small set of usually poorly documented studies on the correlates of tacit knowledge (the ‘‘important aspect of practical intel- ligence’’) in five occupations cannot, whatever the results, do what the work is said to have done— dethroned g as the only highly general mental ability or intelligence.

First, congratulations on learning the guitar, I'm really happy that it brings joy to your life.

However, research in the area of expert performance shows that when it comes to this practice, not just the amount, but the type of practice matters tremendously. How practice is done is such a major factor in improvement that taking the 10,000 hour rule by itself is like solving physics problems with the formula F = a instead of F = ma.

Research in the area shows that performers usually plateau after reaching competence, which is the point they no longer struggle with regular operations. At this point, automaticity takes over, which for example is the reason that whilst most people can walk, few get consistently better at it despite walking a lot. This means, that out of the 10,000 hours put into learning the task, 9,000 are potentially wasted.

In order to leave plateaus, one needs engage in "deliberate practice", a term coined by the cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson. It's presence, or lack thereof has been shown across a wide variety of disciplines between masters and people who are merely good after having spent similar amounts of time on practice.

Deliberate practice is practice where you consciously strain for a point that is just outside your current skill level. In the case of musicians for example, it can manifest as slowing down a song to a crawl until every note is hit in the right way, and then slowly speeding up or slowing down again at the line where one starts making mistakes.

My point is that whilst the 10,000 hour rule is useful for setting time expectations to become a master at a task and helps illustrate how expertise is attainable for all of us if we put in the time and work, it lacks predictive power for whether you will become great at something after spending this amount of time.

For a hobby, this may only result in some wasted practice time getting to competence(I've eyeballed this at about a factor of 2 doing some testing learning the piano, unscientific, I know), which is perfectly fine. You're doing it for fun. Pain periods and all.

For an occupation, however, it can lead to endless grief. You've read about the 10,000 hour rule, you want to become very good, but after a year of work, you don't ever become significantly better. You sit there, grasping at the problem, but it's elusive, like you're wildly tweaking screen settings things to fix a kernel bug.

I am also oversimplifying a bit for brevity here, but there's some books on the topic. For an in depth review, there's the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance"[0].

For a lighter book more along the lines of Outliers, theres "The Talent Code"[1] by Daniel Coyle. AFAIK, both draw from the Cambridge book.

Both of them are worth a look, the 10,000 hour rule might tell you "I can do it", but these will tell you "How to do it".

[0][https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handb...] [1][https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born-Grown/dp/0...]

⬐ scott_s

Good post, but one nitpick: the author of the submitted piece made a point that the 10,000 hour was for music students at about 20 years old who were not yet masters.

⬐ None

None

⬐ 50CNT

I like the 10,000 hour rule as an order of magnitude estimation. Somewhere between hour 5001 and 49999, you become very good, given the right kind of practice. It's an acceptable heuristic for that, and research throws up similar numbers in a range of fields.

⬐ kinleyd

With focused, deliberate practice, I'm hoping I crack the electric guitar in 5001. :) But seriously, I know it's the journey that's more important - the heuristic really does give me confidence when I look at where I am and where I want to be.

⬐ 50CNT

One thing I found with psycho-motor skills like the guitar or piano is that slowing it down significantly at the start is really helpful. I downloaded a metronome app onto my phone and I'd start out at a rate of 10 BPM (which is agonizingly slow), and then bump it up in 10 BPM, and then 5 BPM increments. The other thing I'm thinking about is getting a skilled spotter, because early on your error correcting feedback mechanisms aren't all that great. Whilst I could focus on hitting the right keys at the right time, things like posture and how I hit the keys were things where I couldn't differentiate between good and bad. Might as well start out with good form.

⬐ kinleyd

Yes, from everything I've read, the key to grasping a new motor skill is to break it up in chunks and then to really slow it down. This has worked for me, and the interesting thing I noticed is that if I don't break it down and do it slowly, the level of frustration from doing it even for a short while tempts me to end the session right there.

If you can get a skilled spotter, or a coach who knows his/her stuff, nothing like it! I have to rely on myself unfortunately, and am very grateful for the super materials that I've found for learning the guitar. Like you, I am focusing on the fundamentals and patiently letting my skills build up. 2 years into it I am happy to say that it's looking good!

⬐ kinleyd

Thank you for the reference to the Cambridge Handbook. Having read The Talent Code and Talent Is Overrated, both of which I recommend, I look forward to this one as well.

⬐ 50CNT

It takes a bit of time to go through, the chapters take me about a day if I take notes, and it's 40 chapters, so I'm personally only up to chapter 15 right now.

This is interesting, but the hours are vastly overestimated, at least compared to similar metrics (e.g. from the deliberate practice and expertise literature):

If we figure a 40-hour work week... it wasn't my only activity. Let's knock that number down by 20% to account for my occasionally having to spend time on other things.

There's no way anyone spends 40 or even 30 hours a week writing. Most authors spend something like 3-4 hours a day writing - and that's a good day!

See for example the chapter on writers in Cambridge Expertise Performance Handbook (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...).

In general this type of reasoning (40h work week => time for 40h of writing) makes time estimates troublesome in my opinion. Another example is people who claim to write code for 40, 60 or even 80 hours a week. A look at actual RescueTime data gives a sober picture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209195

Of course, you could claim a lot of the work happens in breaks, and I would agree. But then the actual weekly number for our most beloved artists, programmers, and scientists is more like 24*7, literally. In that case, it makes more sense to talk about it in on the timescale of days, weeks, months or years.

⬐ unfamiliar

I think that the lesson here is that it is kind of silly to try and put a time estimate on these things. How do you define time spent "writing"? Does it include time spent researching? Time spent thinking of the structure? If you pause to formulate the next sentence or line of code, should you stop the clock? Maybe we should only measure time taken in each individual key press.

It makes much more sense, and is less ambiguous, to talk about "time to complete a project". Like a book, for example.

⬐ TheOtherHobbes

I find the hours amazing. My understanding is that a typical tech publishing cycle is three months for a first draft, with an SD of around 1.5 months, and a page count of 300-600. Not infrequently the book will be a side project and not the author's main gig.

E.g. When iPhone OS (as it was) first appeared, in-depth guides like Erica Sadun's were on the shelves almost as soon as it was released.

Even if some of those authors had limited distribution beta versions, they still worked their way through all the new features of the OS, wrote and tested sample code, and wrote all the content in a couple of months.

I understand Meyers wants to make sure the content represents industry practice, and that takes longer than just cranking out some code and making sure it works.

But even so - that's still a surprisingly long time for a tech book.

What a bunch of negative bullshit. What do you expect Michael Phelps to say? "Hey kids who look up to me, don't follow your dreams because you probably don't have the right set of genes. Just acknowledge it's difficult and move on."

People act like being "world class" is some big mystery, but not in the 21st century. Extensive research has come to the conclusion that deliberate practice, over a long period of time, with the appropriate guidance of coaches and mentors is necessary and mostly sufficient to produce expertise in a field.

No, I don't think anyone can be Michael Phelps. In fact, it is clear that physical advantages go a long way in sports and athletic events. In almost everything else though, the right approach can produce mastery. The Polgar family is a living example of that w.r.t. chess. And most people are not looking to become world champions - they simply want to be successful in their endeavors. For that to happen, you must apply the same principles. To lose weight, I agree that saying "just diet and work out" is difficult, but most effective programs are either a result of intrinsic motivation or someone implementing a gradual program where you first cut out some sugar, then all soda, then cake, then you start eating one good meal a day, and so on and so forth.

In my view, this post marginalizes human willpower, which I consider one of the strongest forces in the world. Sure you won't be Michael Phelps, but you could say "No matter how hard you try, you will never become a Redwood," and I think the result is the same. Most people don't aspire to be world champion swimmers or extremely tall trees. They want to be successful in their endeavors, and for reasonably well off people in the Western world (which I think describes a large part of this board), there really isn't anything holding you back.

Ericsson et al. published a review of this field (expertise) in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...). It's 900 pages but if you can't make it through a serious book then you sure as hell can't succeed in anything that requires real dedication.

⬐ einhverfr

Also don't underestimate the importance of dreams in inspiring us. Inspiration can be seen as what makes perspiration possible. I have seen people who had significant physical disabilities become inspired and overcome those to a large extent within the domains of one activity or another. Inspiration can make us extraordinary, if we are willing to follow it and put in the effort.

⬐ xiaoma

An emotional reaction to this kind of realism is understandable considering how much people want to believe they can be be great at anything.

But the truth is that innate differences matter not just in athletics, but in any endeavor. Even the famous Polgar sisters you mention both trailed men who had later starts and less formal early training for their entire careers. UK marathoner Paula Radcliffe's career is similar in many respects.

In general, the "purer" an endeavor is the more decisive innate differences are. By this I mean that innate differences will matter more for runners than for basketball players, more for speed skaters than hockey players, more for mathematicians than for hedge fund quants, etc...

But there is a great deal of evidence that innate differences create uncrossable chasms in skills far outside of athletics.

Music: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1209186.stm

Motor Skills: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1209186.stm

IQ & Cortical Thickening: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/science/30brain.html?_r=1

Language: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050517063228.ht...

Facial recognition: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/face-recognition/

None of this means that willpower doesn't matter. Of course it does. However, at least accepting the reality that we don't all have the exact same potential at every pursuit can be beneficial. For one thing, it's signal not to heavily invest in a tournament-style career, such as modelling or concert violin playing, unless you have a clear aptitude. Even for more forgiving careers, where merely being competent is enough to make a good living, it's rational to choose a career that aligns with your natural talents. Why put X amount of effort to be in the 70th percentile of some field when the same amount of effort would make you 90th percentile in another comparably in-demand field? Most people are happier doing what they're good at.

⬐ NathanRice

I agree that world champion level aspirations are not realistic for everyone. This doesn't mean the people who do not have innate talent are leagues below world champions though. In my observations, talent causes an athlete to become proficient faster, and to end up being very slightly better than untalented people who work very hard. Of course, at the level of world champions, very slightly better is the difference between first place and middle of the pack.

⬐ xiaoma

The problem is that in tournament-style professions, their prospects are leagues below that of the world champions.

One heart breaking example I witnessed personally was a family member. He wanted more than anything to be a classical musician. From the age of four, he was taught by the same teacher who trained a very successful NY Philharmonic pianist (opera coach). He practiced many hours a day all through his school years and earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees in clarinet performance. By any objective measure he was a very good clarinetist. But he wasn't good enough to make a real living at it. Unlike his mother, who had perfect pitch by the end of grade school, he never developed it. He saw more than one talented peer surpass him in despite his extreme work ethic. In the end, after putting over 25 years of his life and his passion into it, he finally gave up on his dream and became a programmer. Unlike his experiences in music, he very quickly rose to the top of development groups and it was he who was the one surpassing others who had been working at it longer and harder.

I often wonder what he could have done if he'd given up his initial dream after just 10 years instead of 25.

I think a point that is often glossed over here is the extreme value of compound interest and self-inforced feedback loops. Calling someone a genius is a cop-out, in my opinion.

If you're a Tao or Feynman, chances are you have been doing "maths" intuitively since a very young age. All these moments add up and reinforce each other. Is that the same as being a genius? Maybe, but then we are dealing with definitions - in my mind genius is a myth created by society to explain "unexplainable" things. That and an excuse for people's relative incompetence - see Hamming in his article "You and Your Research" [0].

The science of experts and deliberate practise [1, 2] is actually quite solid, despite its gladwellification. For example there have to my knowledge not been found a single person who defies the "logic of practise" - oft cited examples are Mozart and Woods, which are more of a myth making than based in any known facts (consider how both their fathers pushed them extremely hard with the right type of practise from a very early age).

Of course, there will always be variations (but these could in my opinion just as well be ascribed to right-time-right-place mechanisms). I suspect a large "problem" is - if the next 11 year old Tao has already had thousands of hours of something akin to deliberate practise, how on earth are other people - who don't share this natural inclination - going to catch up?

0: From http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

On this matter of drive Edison says, ``Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.'' He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it. That's the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn't get you anywhere. I've often wondered why so many of my good friends at Bell Labs who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn't have so much to show for it. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberate_practice#Deliberate_...

2: http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

"The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance" - http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

Here are some excerpts:

- http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...

- http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.mem.exp.htm...

One logical flaw in their argument, one I've seen frequently made by professors of psychology who focus on individual differences, is that they don't know whether or not the difference among participants in the Study of Exceptional Talent (a group of young people who score high on the SAT at a young age, a group that includes an immediate relative of mine) is from what they call "talent" or from practice. Nothing about the way the Study of Exceptional Talent gathers its rather limited data about study participants allow distinguishing one possibility from the other. There is no basis from the data-gathering done in that study to conclude that there is ANY difference between the "99.1 percentile" and the "99.9 percentile," especially given the error bands around SAT scores.

One of the really amazing things about the export performance literature by Ericsson, Charness, and others

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

is that it comes out of a tradition in psychology--individual differences psychology--that very readily defaults to genetic explanations and very readily ignores possible environmental explanations of the same individual differences. Ericsson's experimental results in training digit span (which is part of the item content of same IQ test batteries) were completely surprising when published in peer-reviewed journals--no one ever imagined that digit span

http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~kantor/t/MLIS/551/public_dump/m...

was such a malleable ability.

But digit span, which is malleable (trainable), is closely related to the "working memory capacity" that the authors are implicitly claiming is not malleable. That is not at all clear, and much experimental work suggests that working memory capacity is more malleable than the authors acknowledge in this opinion piece.

Also on-point here is pg's comment from his essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known"

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

"I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."

⬐ bitsoda

Reading this article bummed me out until I was reminded of my own experiences with increasing working/short-term memory through the use of N-Back games. In my own n = 1 study, I struggled through dual 2 back initially, but with a few weeks of practice, I gradually was able to climb up to the dual 4 back level, and stopped there out of sheer laziness.

Anyways, for anyone interested in N-Back games, check out the Brain Workshop software and website.

http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

⬐ Fliko

Did you feel there was actually any benefit between your day to day life? I'd suppose that the benefit would be different person to person due to what they do in their average day but am still curious.

⬐ bitsoda

Honestly, I haven't noticed any dramatic improvements. However, as strange as it may sound, I feel better about myself knowing that I was able to increase my short-term memory within that specific N-Back game since I was almost positive I would never make progress in it. I'm unsure if it has translated into other activities, but overall I feel sharper for what it's worth.

⬐ Fliko

Totally makes sense, part of the reason why I play musical instruments so much.

I think I'm gonna try doing it for a few minutes every day and see what happens. When I was younger I used to be able to remember everything vividly very effortlessly and I envy that again.

I can recommend reading "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

I upvoted your comment to agree with your recommendation of the definitive book on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

To answer the question you pose above about other domains, I have not seen language learning reported in the expert performance literature, but I was a language learner (native speaker of English who was studying Chinese) who perhaps arguably did reach expert level in my acquired language (I passed testing to be a contract Chinese-English interpreter for the United States federal government). It took perhaps 10,000 learning contact hours (many of those hours during a three-year stay overseas after completing my undergraduate degree in Chinese) to reach that level of language proficiency, which was confirmed by other tests. I also had excellent instruction in Chinese with some of the best materials then avaiable, and a lot of supportive help from linguistics that I studied at the time. Some of my advice on language learning

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

would probably help other learners get the most benefit per hour in their language learning situations that they can.

What I find most interesting about K. Anders Ericsson's research on expert performance is the suggestion that some domains have few or no experts, when experts are defined as persons with statistically reliably superior performance in the domain. The example I recall from one of his research papers is choosing common stocks in which to invest for sustained high returns. Some people beat the market for a while, but most stick-pickers do very little better than simply investing in a diverse basket of stocks chosen without conscious thought.

Here's one of the original papers that put forth the theory of deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule (though in the paper it is given as a 10-year rule):

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance also covers a wide range of research on performance and expertise in various areas http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

The summary is missing a couple very important points

1. There a ramp up of deliberate practice time in all experts developments starting from 20-30m a day to the noted 4 hours a day.

2. There is a ramp up in skill level of the teachers of experts starting from parents, to local experts, to recognized experts, to the tops of whatever field you're trying to master.

You can't just increase your skill, you need a better coach.

These points are not made clearly in Ericssons paper. Please check out (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...) for a more complete and useful overview of the topic.

More interesting by far than hacking yourself is investigating the neural basis for why this method of learning works. Expertise is not special, but a special case of normal learning. It's noticing what you could be learning rather than what you need to get by. Once this is accepted you can recognize the common thread of skill, information and descriminatory ability aquisition throughout the animal kingdom. Heck you can train Aplysia to be an expert! It's all based on fundamental properties of neuronal systems and that, frankly, is amazingly cool.

The claim originally came from the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...).

⬐ studer

Umm, that's a bit backwards -- the 10k hours number comes from research by K. Anders Ericsson et al, and the first papers mentioning this are from the early nineties, if not earlier (as for book references, it's discussed in Ericsson's "The Road To Excellence" that predates the Cambridge Handbook by a decade).

⬐ limist

Yes, here's one of Ericsson's landmark papers on the topic, 1993:

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

If you'd like to skip all the pundits (Gladwell included) and go straight to source of all this discussion about developing expertise, look no further than this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

It's a compilation of academic papers and was the basis for Gladwell's book. It is not lightweight entertainment reading, but it's the real deal.

The formal study of expertise

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Expertise-Expert-Pe...

suggests that it takes longer than a week to become an expert (by a reasonable definition of "expert") in any domain of significance.

Useful novelty, that I would act on?

I've been immersed in my specialty for 15 years.

As it happens, this number of years is pretty much the norm for the highly creative (10 years is the lower bound). For details, see:

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Expertise-Expert-Pe...

Interesting because it is in direct contradiction to a lot of research on expertise which strongly suggests that expertise takes time (and surprisingly, regardless of the field, it takes more or less 10 years) - summarized in this book http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Expertise-Expert-Pe...

Of course we've all read Peter Norvig's "Teach yourself programming in 10 years" http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Caveat: Just doing the same thing for 10 years does not an expert make. To quote Norvig's article

"the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve."

⬐ inklesspen

You need ten years to know how to program, yeah. But once you've done that, you can probably get solid in Java/Ruby/Blub++ in six months.