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Morendil comments on Raising the waterline - Less Wrong
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That's my biggest problem too. :)
I can't speak entirely to the evidence he offers, it does feel like skill acquisition in many domains works as he suggests with very rapid gains initially, then a period where progress feels like you work for it, then you reach a plateau and breakthroughs become few and far between and require insane amounts of effort.
This is what happened when I was playing Go, for instance. The "waterline" in amateur go is roughly around 1dan, the rank most players find it hardest to reach. However in Go the evidence doesn't support that particular shape very well. There are ways this could be explained, such as by frustrated "permanent kyu" players quitting the game. (As I did eventually - at a KGS 2nd kyu rank I'm not sure I even deserve, as it's mostly from playing blitz games.)
I think it's mostly the shape of that curve. Why does it hit 80% gain at only 20% effort? Is that the same across many different tasks?
I'm a writer (novelist), and it's a common statement in writing circles (the ones I'm in, at least) that every writer has a million words of crap to get out. That's a rough estimate, of course, and I've always taken it to show that you have to work hard at your craft to improve. At an average of 1k words/hour, that's a good thousand hours of nothing but writing to get out.
Is that 20% effort? 50% 80% How does one chart or measure that?
Because otherwise it wouldn't fit into the 80/20 principle. :/