
Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf] - lainon
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~tymerski/ece101/Expert_mind_scientificamerican0806-64.pdf
======
jonmc12
Related - "Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports,
Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis" \-
[http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/07/Macn...](http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/07/Macnamara-et-al.-2014.pdf)

Gives some context for the kinds of fields where deliberate practice improves
performance.

~~~
danharaj
I'm having a bit of trouble interpreting these numbers.

If I look at deliberate practice in musical proficiency amongst the general
populace, it'll look like deliberate practice is responsible for almost all of
the proficiency. However, if I look at the top 100 musicians in the world,
they would have all practiced thousands of hours and I expect practice to have
diminishing returns, so it should be responsible for very little of the
variation in their ability.

I would expect also that in more multifactorial activities which are often the
basis of professions that it is both A) difficult to ascertain what expertise
is (often reducing to an empty social credential) B) difficult to evaluate
what good deliberate practice is.

The meta-analysis talks about such factors as the predictability of the
environment correlating with the effect size of deliberate practice. I think
that's just the tip of the iceberg.

~~~
6stringmerc
As basically a lifetime musician (and second generation) I'd like to give some
counter-points to your hypothesis regarding the "diminishing returns" notion
and deliberate musical practice.

I'll try to keep this light hearted - so as a guitarist, one learns the rules,
and practices them, then grows and grows and grows. Eventually, one learns how
to break a rule, but over time, bend it into something that resembles an
existing rule or otherwise still interests an audience, and create rules
whereby none existed before. Sometimes minor mistakes or oddities become
wholesale innovations in the right hands (ex: Jimi Hendrix, Tom Morello) but
are very much a byproduct of deliberate, routine, intense attention and
practice.

My experience is that music performance has an incredible power to both be-
shaped-by-and-reciprocally-shape the human brain. The inherent elasticity and
plasticity cross cultures. Generations. One of the most consistent
observational effects though is that practice makes better in most cases.

~~~
Can_Not
There's one or more quotes about this, one of them supposedly by Picasso:
"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."

------
hellbanner
If you want to improve this chess, I recommend this playlist by International
Master John Bartholomew:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao9iOeK_jvU&index=5&list=PLl...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao9iOeK_jvU&index=5&list=PLl9uuRYQ-6MBwqkmwT42l1fI7Z0bYuwwO)

I recommend [https://lichess.org](https://lichess.org) over chess.com for a
far superior UI.

~~~
afro88
Lichess is excellent. I run my in person games through it's analysis. They
have a great feature where you practice the correct move where you had made a
mistake or "blunder".

And it's open source:
[https://github.com/ornicar/lila](https://github.com/ornicar/lila)

~~~
hellbanner
Open source, awesome!

I'm so impressed with their UI. You can watch games in real time and there's a
dashboard showing you your Ping + Server Processing Time per Move (usually
2ms).

------
jasode
Fyi... this a 2006 publication. (Not sure why HN submission says (2016).)

Being 11 years old isn't an issue because the chess memory observation is
interesting data. The age is significant because virtually every pop
psychology & brain book in the last 10 years mentions this chess study as one
of the anecdotes. (Similar to how all the pop psych books mention the
Invisible Gorilla, Marshmallow Experiment, Stanford Prison Experiment, etc)

~~~
Bucephalus355
Hey want to provide some quick clarification on your point.

First, you are dramatically, 110% right that pop psychology books plunder
really valuable research such as this for ultimately banal insights that they
manage to hide in a 300 page book that could be 10 pages.

K. Anders Ericsson, the absolute giant in the field of expertise research, is
quite dismissive of Malcolm Gladwell and upset at his mis-interpretations of
his work. Go look at his book, "Peak", which goes into depth on this (and
funny enough looks like every other stupid pop psychology book, although it is
not).

Finally, if you want to explore the best research we have from the present
through the last 40 years, highly recommend you check out "The Cambridge
Handbook of Expertise". It's 40 chapters written by nothing but PhDs.

They compare what expertise means across History, Firefighting, Surgery,
Ballet, even Truck Driving and Software Design.

~~~
civilian
Got any links for when K. Anders Ericsson slams Gladwell? Was it in a blog
post or a podcast or something?

~~~
Bucephalus355
Just looked at the physical book. I work in DevOps but just in general want to
say physical books are great and highly underrated for how quickly you can
access info / other things.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqmmlf1jpdexmav/Gladwell-
Peak.jpeg...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqmmlf1jpdexmav/Gladwell-
Peak.jpeg?dl=0)

Lol you'll see in the comments I even wrote "hates Gladwell!".

In fairness to Ericsson, he is very civil and it's a very respectable
"takedown".

------
adrice727
One of the books that has had the biggest influence in my life is "The Art of
Learning" by Josh Waitzkin, the child chess prodigy of "Searching for Bobby
Fischer" fame.

[https://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Optimal-
Performa...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Optimal-
Performance/dp/0743277465/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503698225&sr=8-1&keywords=art+of+learning)

~~~
djg3
My experience was the complete opposite. I genuinely do not understand why
this book is recommended. It's been years since I've read it but whenever i
see it recommended it irritates me. Especially as people who do never list
anything of actual significance that's to do with learning, other than
clichés.

~~~
adrice727
You're not the first person who has told me that.

It's been ~5 years since I read it, so I can't remember too many specifics. I
was ~6 months into starting to learn to program and I think I would have
probably given up if I hadn't read Waitzkin's book. He talks about how certain
people tend to give on something if they struggle in order to _protect_ their
intelligence, to keep from feeling stupid or like a failure. It may be common
sense but it's something that really clicked with me as I realized that it was
something that I had done my whole life up until that point.

I kept going and eventually made a career transition into engineering. But
something else happened that was actually much more important, and that was
that I developed a much deeper understanding of and appreciation for the whole
learning process. I was so tuned in to the whole thing that I would have these
insights where I would I could pinpoint almost all of the things he talks
about in the book in my personal experience. Years later, I’m able to make
parallels in my present experience to all the things I experienced then, which
in many cases provides some encouragement because I know I’m on the right
path.

------
kristianp
So what kind of deliberate practice is required to become a highly skilled
developer? Not just to know a language and library. Code kata used be a thing
years ago.

~~~
IgorPartola
IMO code katas are a waste of time. Practically speaking, prolific development
means getting large chunks of the system done quickly, and the best way to do
that is to reuse what others have done. Don't code your CSS from scratch, use
Bootstrap or similar. Don't create an auth system, use the one that comes with
your framework.

Counterintuitively, don't automate all the things until that automation is
sure to pay off. Sometimes manually testing something is just faster, if you
only need to test it a few times before the code never changes again (when was
the last time you rewrote your password reset flow?)

To get prolific, don't do katas. Katas are the same problem solved in
different environments. Do different problems in the environment in which you
are productive. That is what will make you better and faster.

~~~
dahdum
"Katas are the same problem solved in different environments."

Are you sure about that? I thought it was more solving the problem, then
solving it again more efficiently / differently in the same environment. Like
using recursion the second time around, not changing languages.

"Don't code your CSS from scratch, use Bootstrap or similar. Don't create an
auth system, use the one that comes with your framework."

Definitely true for productivity, but a lot to be gained in experience by
knowing how to roll your own.

------
wslh
In the introduction I would begin telling the story of Najdorf playing blind
chess:
[http://www.blindfoldchess.net/blog/2011/12/after_64_years_ne...](http://www.blindfoldchess.net/blog/2011/12/after_64_years_new_world_blindfold_record_set_by_marc_lang_playing_46_games/)

~~~
antaviana
Apparently he did that one also as a means to inform family in Poland that he
was still alive
([http://www.poloniachess.pl/najdorf2017/index.php?page=najdor...](http://www.poloniachess.pl/najdorf2017/index.php?page=najdorf&lang=en)).

I post-war times, doing something highly newsworthy was pretty much like today
making it to HN front page.

------
bfung
So...(start internal monologue)

\- The 10x engineer is so because of 10x practice (numbers not precise nor
accurate). Companies - need to keep challenging people to get experts.
Bootcampers - keep practicing.

\- As with the soccer study in the article, boys ended up as the "bigger kids"
in computer science and due to motivational factors, there's more boys in the
tech industry today [1]

\- Refutes a large portion of [2]; did the google engineer read these studies
before?

[1]
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-
women-stopped-coding)

[2] [http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-
div...](http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-
screed-1797564320)

------
HappyKasper
"Talent is Overrated" is a great pop exploration of this and similar findings.
If you find this interesting, I highly recommend that book as a jumping off
point for exploring similar findings.

~~~
drivers99
Another very good book is "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" by
Anders Ericsson. I'm in the middle of reading it now. As I suspected (since he
mentions studies on chess masters), he's part of this article, and in fact
he's the author of 2 of the 5 "More to Explore" sources listed at the end of
the article.

~~~
Bucephalus355
Just posted above on K. Anders Ericcson and the book Peak is great.

Main point is the 10,000 hour rule comes from Ericcson's study that the best
violinists in the world practice about 7,000 hours by the time they are 18.
They average between 3-4 hours a day. This last point is really interesting
because the ceiling for what qualified as good practice consistently was no
more than 4 hours. So if you do 4 hours of top notch practice / studying, it
would seem like no matter your field you are done for the day.

Continuing on, the 10,000 hour rule was stupidly expanded by 3,000 hours just
to make it easier to remember, and additionally that number is COMPLETELY
ARBITRARY anyway.

The only reason violinists practice that much is because everyone else is
competing that hard. Old, well defined fields like Violin or say Chess have
pretty clearly defined ways on how you get better, meaning the "secrets" are
somewhat known. Therefore the only way to get better is via practice, which of
course everyone does, which drives up these insane numbers.

In other fields which are much newer and far less defined, expertise is up for
grabs and there are no well-defined broadly agreed on ways to get better. If
you do 800 hours of the "right" practice you can be far ahead of anyone else,
since no one really knows what's right.

That being said, Ericcson's research still shows lots of correlation before
time and skill, so alas no easy shortcuts.

EDIT: between time and skill _

