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gwern comments on November 2014 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Everything is heritable:
Politics/religion:
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
How often does correlation=causality?
Psychology/biology:
Technology:
I absolutely loved this. The concept of the adaptive immune system as something that gives the ability to get a slight advantage over your conspecifics, at the expense of selecting your pathogens to be more virulent such that loss of the adaptive system becomes fatal, reminds me forcefully of all sorts of things in prokaryotic and eukaryotic genome structure. Things that happen because they can and then get locked in place by other things built on top of them even though they themselves are harmful, or sheer selfish elements. Like poison/antidote pairs of genes in bacteria that stick around even though they increase average generation time because fluctuations in the levels of the two make a small fraction of bacteria grow extra slowly and be stress-resistant, or the evolution of the spliceosome to make sure self-splicing introns always leave leading to vertebrate genes that are 90% spliceosome-requiring introns, or the sheer abundance of transposons that make up more than half of our genomes...
I thought the Dominic Cummings post, in particular, was excellent. Perhaps the best blogpost I've read this year. I've already recommended it to several other people. But, warning:
Do you actually read that amount of links every month? If so, can I borrow your time-turner?
Don't tell anyone, but I've been stealing links from previous months to pad out the compilations, compensate for month to month variance, and create a sort of link directory.
The deliberate practice link is dead for me, but this works.
Two more about deliberate practice:
The Sports Gene-- debunks some of the research-- there's a lot of variation, not a simple requirement of 10K hours. Also, elite achievement in at least some sports requires very specific physical qualities.
Effortless Mastery-- a jazz musician develops a system of deliberate practice on his own in the 80s/early 90s. He works earlier in the process of taking action by teaching a meditative state, then teaching how to maintain it as one plays. This isn't easy-- the first challenge is maintaining a meditative state while touching one's instrument.
Also, even if it's true that all masters have put in 10K hours of deliberate practice, this is not equivalent to the idea that anyone who puts in 10K hours of deliberate practice can become a master, nor is it equivalent to the idea that anyone can become a master at anything (or anything physically plausible) with 10K hours.
This being said, I still believe (without evidence) that putting in some deliberate practice on whatever you care about is a good idea.
A fun link: this guy is racking up 10000 hours golfing, with no previous experience.