gwern 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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (251)
Tags: instrumental dojo rationality

Comments (251)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit