

To Develop Expertise, Motivation is Necessary but Insufficient - bootload
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/25/to-develop-expertise-motivation-is-necessary-but-insufficient/

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espeed
This is great...

"One method comes from the physicist John Wheeler (the PhD advisor of Richard
Feynman). Wheeler recommended that, after we solve any problem, we think of
one sentence that we could tell our earlier self that would have 'cracked' the
problem. This kind of thinking turns each problem and its solution into an
opportunity for reflection and for developing transferable reasoning tools."

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neutronicus
That always struck me as the natural way to compress knowledge for exams. I've
got nowhere near the intellect to remember whole derivations and proofs, so I
_have_ to boil them down just to have any hope of retaining them.

Doesn't always work, though. Turns out that memorizing the form of the Lorentz
transformation will allow you to solve arbitrary length contraction / time
dilation type problems, but nowhere near as quickly as the physics GRE
demands. _C'est la vie_.

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samvelst
"For chess, deliberate practice includes deep analysis of grandmaster games."

If this is true, could studying (reading) good code do the same for
programming? One could, for example, begin to write an application and find
code to a similar application where they would be able to check why things are
implemented a the way they are as they go along. The tricky part here is
deciding which code is worth studying.

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abecedarius
This is why I haven't yet read all of Peter Norvig's coding essays -- you can
depend on him to publish code that's really hard to improve on (by the metrics
he's writing for, like clarity). I like to write my own first before reading
someone else's, because yes, it really does help you suck the juice out of a
learning opportunity. Feynman and Turing both seem to have emphasized this
too.

Really polished code is hard to find. I've been playing around off and on with
Ken Thompson's regular expression search paper most recently.

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DamagedProperty
I feel that the end result of polished code isn't useful unless you can see
the process they went through to get there. It seems difficult to retrace
their footsteps.

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abecedarius
I've found that extra info to be interesting and useful, it's true, when I can
get it. For instance, Norvig's Lisp-in-Python essays came out with the code
still in some flux and I could compare his improvements to mine.

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notaddicted
If anyone else was wondering what the other chess book is, it is Rook Endings
By Grigory Levenfish and Vassily Smyslov.

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nandemo
Did he really read only those 2 books? I'm not a chess player, but still I
find that incredible. Surely he didn't learn all his openings only by playing
and reading one collection of games?

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Stwerner
I'm not really surprised, I went through Josh Waitzkin's chessmaster
tutorials, and one thing that stuck out was him talking about how his coach
had him focus on the mid- an end-game, and hardly any on openings.

The idea I think is that by not knowing openings very well, you end up quickly
getting out of the opening book, neutralizing your opponent's advantage and
into where you're strongest.

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stiff
Who would have thought...

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Maven911
a similar thing occurs for job motivation, which research has shown is not
necessairly linked to job performance

