This is an interesting comment. Some thoughts after reflecting a bit:
Awhile ago you wrote a comment saying something like “deliberate practice deliberate practice until you get really good identifying good feedback loops, and working with them.” I found that fairly inspiring at the time.
I didn’t ever really dedicate myself to doing that thoroughly enough to have a clear opinion on whether it’s The Thing. I think I put maybe… 6 hours into deliberate practice, with intent to pay attention to how deliberate practice generalized. I got value out of that that was, like, commensurate with the “serious practice” noted here (i.e. if I kept that up consistently I’d probably skill up at a rate of 5-10% per year, and at the time that I did it, my output in the domains-in-question was maybe 10-20% higher, but more costly), but it required setting aside time for hard cognitive labor that feels in short supply.
There were at least some domains (a particular videogame I tried to deliberate practice), that seemed very surprisingly hard to improve at.
I do have a general sense (from this past year as well as previous experience) that in many domains, there are some rapid initial gains to be had for the first 20 hours or so.
None of this feels like “things are actually easier than described in the karate kid essay.” I would agree with the claim “the karate kid essay sort of implies you just have to try hard for a long time, and actually many of the gains come from actually having models of how things work and you should be able to tell if you’re improving.” But that doesn’t make things not hard.
It seems plausible that if you gain the generalized Deliberate Practice skill a lot of things become much easier, and that it’s the correct skill to gain early in the skill-tree. But, like, it’s still pretty hard yo.
I also agree that most people aren’t actually even trying to get better at disagreement, and if they were doing that much at all that’d make a pretty big difference. (“years” is what I think the default expectation should be among people that aren’t really trying)
Right, that first 20 hours gets you to the 80th-90th percentile and it takes another 200 to get to the 99th. But important cognitive work seems multiplicative more than additive, so getting to the 80-90th percentile in the basics makes a really big difference.
This is an interesting comment. Some thoughts after reflecting a bit:
Awhile ago you wrote a comment saying something like “deliberate practice deliberate practice until you get really good identifying good feedback loops, and working with them.” I found that fairly inspiring at the time.
I didn’t ever really dedicate myself to doing that thoroughly enough to have a clear opinion on whether it’s The Thing. I think I put maybe… 6 hours into deliberate practice, with intent to pay attention to how deliberate practice generalized. I got value out of that that was, like, commensurate with the “serious practice” noted here (i.e. if I kept that up consistently I’d probably skill up at a rate of 5-10% per year, and at the time that I did it, my output in the domains-in-question was maybe 10-20% higher, but more costly), but it required setting aside time for hard cognitive labor that feels in short supply.
There were at least some domains (a particular videogame I tried to deliberate practice), that seemed very surprisingly hard to improve at.
I do have a general sense (from this past year as well as previous experience) that in many domains, there are some rapid initial gains to be had for the first 20 hours or so.
None of this feels like “things are actually easier than described in the karate kid essay.” I would agree with the claim “the karate kid essay sort of implies you just have to try hard for a long time, and actually many of the gains come from actually having models of how things work and you should be able to tell if you’re improving.” But that doesn’t make things not hard.
It seems plausible that if you gain the generalized Deliberate Practice skill a lot of things become much easier, and that it’s the correct skill to gain early in the skill-tree. But, like, it’s still pretty hard yo.
I also agree that most people aren’t actually even trying to get better at disagreement, and if they were doing that much at all that’d make a pretty big difference. (“years” is what I think the default expectation should be among people that aren’t really trying)
Right, that first 20 hours gets you to the 80th-90th percentile and it takes another 200 to get to the 99th. But important cognitive work seems multiplicative more than additive, so getting to the 80-90th percentile in the basics makes a really big difference.