wedrifid comments on Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality - Less Wrong

105 Post author: patrissimo 14 September 2010 04:17PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 14 September 2010 10:48:09PM *  20 points [-]

The 6 tenets of deliberate practice are that it:

  1. Is not inherently enjoyable.
  2. Is not play or paid practice.
  3. Is relevant to the skill being developed.
  4. Is not simply watching the skill being performed.
  5. Requires effort and attention from the learner.
  6. Often involves activities selected by a coach or teacher to facilitate learning.

Whoever came up with this list of tenets is wrong. The development of expertise in skills is something I have taken a particular interest in, both as part of my qualification as a teacher and as an independent passion.

A prominent introductory reference to the field as it is studied academically is of course The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology) although it is a field in which research has begun to accelerate. While the findings of the studies are completely in line with your overall contention they contradict some of the 'tenets' that you put forward here. Specifically:

  1. Is not inherently enjoyable. FALSE! Deliberate practice is vital whether it is inherently enjoyable or not but if it is also something that you find inherently enjoyable then so much the better.
  2. Is not play or paid practice. True. Play is a great way to pick up competence in field but to master it you need to leave it behind. The 'flow' component of play remains useful but this isn't casual or carefree, it must be intensive.
  3. Is relevant to the skill being developed. True
  4. Is not simply watching the skill being performed. False. Watching the skill performed can make up a component of deliberate practice, so long as the watching is deliberate and active. Humans are equipped to learn through observation and visualisation and this particularly applies when the full focus and concentration is applied to the task. This is particularly useful when the physical demands or stresses from the task prohibit excessive physical implementation.
  5. Requires effort and attention from the learner. TRUE! And this cannot be emphasised enough. It is approximately the opposite to what the typical blog participant will feel inclined to do.
  6. Often involves activities selected by a coach or teacher to facilitate learning. True.
Comment author: gwern 24 September 2010 08:03:34PM *  5 points [-]

On a sidenote, are there any ways to get the Cambridge Handbook? My local libraries don't have it (closest holder in Worldcat is Yale), there are no ebooks floating around, Google Books has a quite limited preview, and the cheapest I can find it for is around $50 paperback used (!).

(I'm thinking of just interlibrary loaning it and scanning it. I mean, sheesh.)

Comment author: wedrifid 25 September 2010 12:19:42AM 0 points [-]

A couple of months after the handbook was released I was trying to get access to it. At that time I didn't have university library access and even if I did there were only two copies in the entire city. I actually drove 45 minutes away to a university that had the book not checked out and spent a couple of days reading it and consolidating the information in the form of notes and supermemo entries.

Comment author: gwern 25 September 2010 07:42:29PM 9 points [-]

To my great surprise, turned out my library had access to an e-copy of it. I took an hour and printed out all 47 entries to PDFs, and combined them to get this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/cambridge-expertise.pdf

(I would like to crop the margins, but pdfcrop results in doubled file size; I'd also like to remove the headers & footers, but none of my PDF CLI tools seem to support that.)

LW! Never say I have done nothing for you!

Comment author: wedrifid 26 September 2010 03:59:17AM *  0 points [-]

Wow. Nice work.

If I were the sort of person who did morally grey things like that I would totally have used TextAloud and selected an academic sounding voice (Graham) to read the text to mp3 files. Then right now I would have it on my ipod so that I could listen to it on my ipod while commuting and exercising. Actually, that isn't quite true. I would have the first chapter and expecting the rest to be spoken to file by tomorrow.

Comment author: patrissimo 16 September 2010 03:52:29AM 2 points [-]
  1. Contrasting work, play, and deliberate practice, Dr. Ericsson (author of the book you cite and founder of the study of deliberate practice) writes (emphasis mine):

The external rewards of work activities include social recogni-tion and, most important, money in the form of prizes and pay,which enables performers to sustain a living. In play and deliberate practice, external rewards are almost completely lacking.The goal of play is the activity itself, and the inherent enjoymentof it is evident in children who spontaneously play for extendedperiods of time. Recent analyses of inherent enjoyment inadults reveal an enjoyable state of "flow," in which individualsare completely immersed in an activity (Csikszentmihalyi,1990). Similarly, analyses of reported "peak experiences" insports reveal an enjoyable state of effortless mastery and execution of an activity (Ravizza, 1984). This state of diffused attention is almost antithetical to focused attention required by deliberate practice to maximize feedback and information about corrective action.

In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance.Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance. In addition, engaging in deliberate practice generates no immediatemonetary rewards and generates costs associated with access toteachers and training environments.

  • "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" , K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer.

So while I appreciate feedback from someone who has actually read the material, and while the list I used was certainly abbreviated and lacking nuanced, the same author uses the exact phrase "is not inherently enjoyable". Does not mean that it can't be enjoyable, only that if it is, it will be by random coincidence, so it usually won't be. It could be that the research has changed - the handbook you cite was published in 2006, the paper I cite was published in 1993.

Comment author: wedrifid 16 September 2010 08:33:37AM *  4 points [-]

and while the list I used was certainly abbreviated and lacking nuanced

An abbreviation of "Not necessarily inherently enjoyable" would be less misleading abbreviation. (Albeit still seeming out of place if found anywhere near the top of the list of tenets.)

Does not mean that it can't be enjoyable, only that if it is, it will be by random coincidence, so it usually won't be.

The "usually won't be" is not implied by the source and isn't the point they are trying to convey. The "will be by random coincidence" is clearly false. There is a strong (and rational) motive for people wishing to achieve mastery to alter their intrinsic motivation responses (using mind hacking, etc) such that they do find deliberate practice inherently enjoyable. Apart from that there is a significant selection effect in place - people who find deliberate practice inherently enjoyable are far, far more likely to do it in volumes that are at all significant. This applies to me, for example - I take near masochistic pleasure in that kind of physical and mental exertion and so structure my life such that I do more of it.

I couldn't tell you whether the phrase 'is not inherently enjoyable' is in the 1996 reference. I don't recall it but it also isn't something I pick out as a take home message in the quote you make so I most likely wouldn't have included it in my supermemo notes on the subject in any case, at least not with that wording.

Contrasting work, play, and deliberate practice, Dr. Ericsson (author of the book you cite and founder of the study of deliberate practice) writes (emphasis mine):

I again appreciate the overall contrasts we're considering here. What I reject is the claim "IF enjoyable THEN NOT deliberate practice" which is what is implied by the tenet list. From your reply I don't think that is a position that you are trying to take and I do appreciate the clarification and reference.

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