

The Myth of Massed Practice - jlhamilton
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/20/ditch_the_10000_hour_rule_why_malcolm_gladwells_famous_advice_falls_short/

======
tokenadult
There is no such myth. Until seeing this headline (which is linkbait, even
after the title change by dang of the HN moderation team), I had never seen
the term "massed practice." That's not the term in the scientific literature
on the development of expertise. The term in that literature is "deliberate
practice," and what deliberate practice is gets a lot of detailed description
in that literature.[1] Even the example at the beginning of the article is
contrary to the spirit of the deliberate practice literature, which makes me
wonder how well they've really thought about the prior literature.

The byline of this article is interesting: "Peter C. Brown is a writer and
novelist in St. Paul, Minn.; Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel are
professors of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis." That looks to
me like two professors of psychology were hacked off that they weren't getting
as much attention as the originators of the deliberate practice research, so
they decided to hire a ghostwriter to help them write a popular book. (I could
be mistaken about how this collaboration originated.) Anyway, the book is
gaining some favorable reviews[2] (with the help of their university press
office?[3]), so maybe it will be worth a read for us even thought it isn't
really a response to what this excerpt suggests it's a response to. Another
excerpt from the book[4] has actionable advice that is quite good.

[1]
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22deliberate+prac...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22deliberate+practice%22+expertise)

[2] [http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/make-it-stick-
th...](http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/make-it-stick-the-science-
of-successful-learning-by-peter-c-brown-henry-l-roediger-iii-and-mark-a-
mcdaniel/2012346.article)

[http://blog.coreknowledge.org/tag/henry-l-
roediger/](http://blog.coreknowledge.org/tag/henry-l-roediger/)

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/is-
america/201404/test-p...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/is-
america/201404/test-pilots)

[3]
[http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/26780.aspx](http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/26780.aspx)

[4] [http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/03/09/how-learn-
bet...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/03/09/how-learn-better-any-
age/JCxes7YTWRsqEKu67V5ZNN/story.html)

------
teach
The title is link-baity and overreaching, but the article itself is actually
good. It's a shame.

~~~
dang
I changed it to the title of one of the sections. This is a trick we often use
when the article title (which is often by a headline writer, not the article
author) is linkbait or misleading. Assuming it covers the scope of the
article, it's often better.

~~~
teach
Thank you. Glad to see HN shifting to a more nuanced approach than the "almost
always prefer the original headline" that was in vogue there for a season.

~~~
dang
You're welcome! If I may, though, on the procedural point: neither the policy
nor the practice re headlines has changed. We're doing just the same things we
used to. The fact that it seems otherwise is an optical illusion, albeit a
benign one which perhaps I shouldn't try to mess with.

The real change here is moderator feedback (two-way) in the threads, which
people seem to agree is helping. I fear how meta it is, but we're still in a
transitional phase. We'll eventually try receding a bit, after it's had time
to sink in.

------
robotys
Malcolm specifically said that "it takes 10000 hours of _deliberate_ practice
to achieve mastery."

There are two component here: 1) 10000 hours and 2) deliberate practice.

What op present us are "you can ditch 10000 hours because deliberate practice
is enough" but when you go through the article it shows that all test subject
were trained for very narrow set of mastery for short time period (bean bag
tossing, microsurgey) or very wide set of mastery for long period of time
(football play)

~~~
dnautics
moreover, Gladwell's use of practice in the book I think is more meant in the
general sense (as in _practicing an art_ ) because those 10000 hours are not
necessarily "sitting down and playing czerny on the piano" but also things
like "playing around on a mainframe" \- basically anything that gains you
experience, which is usually going to be more variegated in the way that the
article suggests.

------
tiquorsj
The author misses Gladwells premise from go. He said deliberate, not
obsessive. His discussion was specifically focused on variance of experience
and learning over that time.

~~~
dang
The article doesn't mention Gladwell, and is actually quite good. (Edit: The
title does, of course, and is quite bad. That's why we changed it. Misleading
and/or linkbaity titles get changed.)

~~~
jamesaguilar
There's also that picture of him at the very top of the article.

~~~
dang
I hope Hacker News readers are smart enough to distinguish between the text of
a serious article and bait applied by magazine editors, especially when the
two are unrelated.

