
The Mundanity of Excellence  - prakash
http://books.google.com/books?id=55hTSMDJ2dEC&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=mundanity+of+excellence&source=web&ots=dq4hDNtvx3&sig=5zRc0nkEQAj10bfcIwM2cgzBMMg&hl=en#PPA29,M1
======
nostrademons
I remember having a conversation with a couple coworkers and my former boss
about the nature of "talent". My hypothesis is that what we think of as innate
talent or giftedness really arises from slight differences in pain/reward
pathways in the brain, such that "gifted" people derive enjoyment from
activities that the average person finds very boring. This leads to them
practicing those activities more often, which leads to them becoming more
skilled, which leads to _more_ enjoyment, and a positive feedback cycle
ensues. The amazing feats we see are the cumulative results of years of this
feedback cycle - at each stage, the gifted person is just a little bit better
than the average folk and enjoys the activity just a little more, but over
time that lead compounds.

That was my experience with math, and has for the most part been my experience
with computers. Even when I was "on strike" in 6th grade and refused to do any
schoolwork, I found it very difficult to avoid the math tests or homework. I
tried once and found it so boring that on all further math work, if I wanted
to protest how stupid the assignment was, I'd just do all the work and write
down the wrong answers in the answer column or do it and refuse to turn it in.

When I quit my job to work on my startup, my former boss threw up all sorts of
objections like "You have no idea if this'll work, and if it doesn't, you
might find yourself writing lots of code for nothing, and that really sucks."
And I just kinda looked at him a little funny. What I wanted to say was,
"Dude, that's what I do anyway. That's what I do for you, that's what I do
when I get home, and that's what I'd continue to do even if I cashed out for
millions. There's nothing wrong with writing lots of code for nothing, and on
the off chance it succeeds, it means I won't have to work for superficial
idiots like you." (I didn't; I just said "Okay. I'm still leaving" and left.)

~~~
mynameishere
_what we think of as innate talent or giftedness really arises from slight
differences in pain/reward pathways in the brain_

Wrong.

 _There's nothing wrong with writing lots of code for nothing_

Wrong.

~~~
SirWart
I think you might want to add a little more analysis there.

~~~
mynameishere
I think that the person who makes a claim has to prove it. Especially when it
is _prima facie_ nonsense. Presumably no one is disagreeing with my 2nd
"wrong", but who knows.

~~~
derefr
I think "for nothing" meant "for fun" or "just because I feel like it," not
"to procrastinate." And no, a person who makes a claim simply has to defeat
any challenges to it--in science, this is known as 'falsifiability'.

~~~
mynameishere
A statement is falsifiable if it can potentially be shown false. His
statements are certainly falsifiable, and I'm not criticising them on those
grounds, but they are so annoying, almost unnatural, that I don't even want to
bother with it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability>

 _...is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an
observation or a physical experiment._

It's probably stupid of me to respond to people by saying "wrong", but like
everyone else I get weary, and so I have two conflicting feelings:

One feeling, to show why someone is wrong.

A second feeling, to merely assert that he is wrong.

The latter is quite a bit more efficient. I have this feeling almost every
time I read one of nostro's comments, but usually suppress the urge. Oh, well.
I mean, here's what he's positing: That abilities are based on different
capacities for pleasure/pain, or somesuch. It's so silly, so unrealistic, that
such a claim really does require actual evidence to even be taken seriously.
The whole evolution of man would be nothing but redirecting pleasure and pain,
rather than language, and intelligence, and motor skills, (etc, etc, etc) if
that was the case. NONSENSE.

Of course, since no evidence exists for such a thing, no evidence was
presented. And that is that. It's not easy to _prove a negative_ and so I just
say, "Wrong". This rubs people badly. Oh, well.

~~~
dhs
You're wrong. At least I think so. Because you're not meeting your opponent at
the same level of argument.

I'm simplifying somewhat, but...you appear to be saying that, for some
definition of "cause", the evolution of man is "caused" by "language, and
intelligence, and motor skills, (etc, etc, etc)". It is wrong, you say, to
claim that the "cause" could be "nothing but redirecting pleasure and pain"
(I'm not sure from where in the original you get that "redirection" aspect,
but I'll copy it over).

But your argument is at a different level that that of the OP. Whereas the OP
offers a theory, or maybe rather a hypothesis, of what could "cause" the
evolution of language, intelligence, motor skills, &c., suggesting
pleasure/pain differentiation as a primitive process, you just claim language,
intelligence, &C. as somehow "primitive" processes in causing human evolution.
You're not even trying to find out what "causes" them, whereas the OP is. You
claim "non-falsifiability" for your opponent's claim, which I don't take for
granted: it seems possible to check whether there are differences in the
pleasure/pain differentiation of individual test subjects, and see whether
that is correlated with those individuals reaching their goals. You just seem
to want to avoid meeting the argument.

Which is wrong, I think.

~~~
mynameishere
_You claim "non-falsifiability" for your opponent's claim_

No, I said the opposite.

 _You just seem to want to avoid meeting the argument_

I didn't want to argue at all. I wanted to _assert_ just like the parent
_asserted_. We both asserted and now it's over.

------
zach
If you all don't mind long articles, I hope I can be forgiven for a long
comment. This is an excerpt buried in Zed Shaw's interview with Geoffrey
Grossenbach transcribed here:
<http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/zed_shaw>

\---

Geoffrey: One thing I’ve always been fascinated whenever I’ve talked to you
about it is just your personal process of development. You’re definitely
someone who tries to pick the best tools and customize them to make them work
as well as you can. You also have something where you keep track of your bug
rate and how many bugs you’re writing, and tests that fail and then you adjust
your process. How does that work?

Zed: That’s not recommended for everyone. You have to basically be really,
really disciplined. I’m actually not really, really disciplined; I’m doing it
on one project, on my U2 project, and I’m tryout basically kind of like a
quality control process – physical quality control. All I do is I track a
bunch of metrics that don’t necessarily say how many bugs there are exactly,
but they’re indicators of the bugs. I track them over time, and then I use
statistics to tell me if I’m starting to suck or if I’m improving.

I’m doing mostly C coding on that project, so a lot of this is I’m running my
program under Valgrind with heavy testing. Then I track what my test coverage
is, and then basically it’s just a series of numbers stream across my screen
as I code. It’s kind of like auto-test – when I compile the thing it codes it
– and then about every maybe 300 sampled I take a break, go in and crunch the
numbers, and I see if I did better than last month.

A lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll try a new technique; I’ll try a technique
for a while and then I’ll go crunch the numbers and see if I actually had a
statistical improvement or not. That’s the biggest thing; I don’t waste my
time on stuff that doesn’t actually improve the bug rate – the defect rate.

For example, at first I wasn’t doing code coverage. I wanted to see if code
coverage improved your testing – coverage of your test code, or your test code
having coverage. I wanted to see if that improved quality. So I didn’t do any
code coverage. I measured all of my defect rates and figured out what my
average defect rate was. I did maybe about 700 or 800 samples.

Then I started doing code coverage and beefing up my code coverage. I spent
maybe about a month improving my code coverage. In C code it’s real hard to
get really good coverage because so many lines do so much stuff. But I got it
up to about 60 percent. Then I went and crunched the numbers again to see if
increasing the code coverage in test improved my defect rate.

What happened was it didn’t improve my defect rate; my defect rate was still
about the same. What it did improve was when I made changes – like if I had to
do re-factoring – it reduced the amount of time to get my defects back down.
So you make a change, you do your re-factoring, your defects go up, your
defects go up, and then you have to spend time fixing all that.

With heavier, more test-coverage it made it go down quicker, but it didn’t
really improve my defect rate much. There’s some complexity in that. When you
have more coverage, you are seeing more of your defects, so that’s part of it,
but I found that test-coverage doesn’t really justify an improvement in
quality initially. It mostly just improves your time to fix later.

But out of the ways, that’s some weird stats crunching. The process actually
comes from the Capability Maturity Models – Skies, Watson Freeze, Personal
Software Process. So all you’ve got to do is rather go get his book, go
through what he recommends. The key is as your code. Keep metrics and then
crunch numbers to see if that’s improving things for you, and that’s really
all that is.

------
gruseom
Wow. This is a wonderful article that contains an analysis of excellence based
on close observation of competitive swimmers over several years. One could
even describe it as an excellent article, using its own definition of
excellence. I doubt I would have run across it otherwise, so it's a really
good example of why I read HN.

Tip: Google Books leaves out a few pages (in my case, 34 and 35). To read
these, I went to Google Books in a different browser and searched for text
from the top of the next page I did have (36). Their back button then took me
to the missing pages. Note that using a different browser is essential (I
suppose they use a cookie).

~~~
mechanical_fish
It was a wonderful article until it suddenly stopped in mid-argument.

Google Books is like being strapped to a library and tortured. And I do not
have time to dork around with three different browsers.

Could somebody paraphrase this in a blog post and free it from the tyranny of
restrictive copyright?

Note to publisher: I see that your 456-page book costs $45. Today I just want
to read one article that spans 13 of those pages, without leaving my chair,
waiting 2-4 days, losing my train of thought, or spending extra money on other
pages that I don't have time to read anyway. If it were technically possible,
I would happily pay you 13/456 of the book's price -- $1.28 -- for an
electronic copy of the pages in question. I might even pay $2. But it's not
technically possible, so I guess I'll just have to hate you today.

~~~
gruseom
Two different browsers. And at most 30 seconds. But I take your point. Before
that trick I tried googling for the article itself, and all I found was the
publisher offering to sell it for $14. (It would probably take months to
arrive, too.) There you have the market inefficiency. I'd happily pay, but
nowhere near that much, and only if I get to read it immediately.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Mind you, I didn't mean to suggest that your handy advice was not very, very
welcome. :) I might even get around to trying it later.

I just wanted to register my annoyance at the state of online publishing while
it was still fresh.

------
jimbokun
So anyone want to take a stab at the qualitatively different practices that
separate classes of people who program computers?

(Was about to write "people who hack", but think that hacking itself is a
qualitatively different way of writing computer programs than what most people
do.)

~~~
nostrademons
I mentioned some in a comment yesterday:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185105>

~~~
pchristensen
For anyone who doesn't feel like clicking on nostra's link, CLICK ON IT and
read his comment - it's excellent!

~~~
manny
The link doesn't seem to work. :|

------
lliiffee
I couldn't get this from google books, but I was able to read it through
JSTOR. I think my institution is providing this access, but perhaps someone
else has it too...

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/202063>

~~~
gcheong
I was able to get to it through the San Francisco Public library website using
my library card. Best use of my library card in about 3 years!

------
throwawayaccnt
here, I made this for you... Happy Mother's day... back to lurking.
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/2926754/The-Mundanity-of-
Excellenc...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/2926754/The-Mundanity-of-Excellence)

------
mnemonicsloth
Fundamentally important -- this belongs in the instruction manual to the human
brian.

I do wish this author's prose style was less excellent at concealing this
fact.

------
swombat
35 pages to get across the "deliberate practice" idea? I hate to be ever so
demanding, but why are we voting this up when a much shorter article gets the
entire point across?

(see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185533> )

Daniel

~~~
gruseom
_a much shorter article gets the entire point across_

I so disagree. First of all, the article has more than one point; I'm
surprised that's not obvious. For another thing, its supporting evidence and
reasoning are considerable, relevant, and fascinating. More than that, I
personally found it to be rich in subtleties, of the kind that would draw me
back to reread and reflect. Does a vitamin C pill get across the entire point
of an orange?

I know 35 pages of blah blah blah when I see it. This piece deserves closer
attention. Look again.

~~~
tonystubblebine
My coach gave me a printed version of this article in 1997. I'm still thinking
about it and give it the occasional re-read. This discussion thread really
highlights how awful it is that so much research is locked up behind pay
walls. I'm pretty sure the article was originally published in a sports
psychology journal but here we are, a bunch of hackers, who are trying our
best to enjoy it through Google book search (described above as like "being
strapped to a library and tortured").

------
asdf333
bravo for sharing a thought provoking link and not a 5 second sound-bite.

------
DougBTX
Cheers for posting this.

