I disagree with the karate kid essay. People have a really hard time with interventions often because they literally do not have a functioning causal model of the thing in question. People who apply deliberate practice to a working causal model often level up astonishingly quickly. Don’t know if you have the appropriate causal model? Well, when you apply deliberate practice do you not get better? You’re pulling on fake levers.
People have cognitive dissonance about this because a bunch of their life UI is fake levers, and acknowledging one would lead to acknowledging others.
I propose an alternative model. People don’t resolve disagreements because there are no incentives to resolve them. In fact the incentives often cut the other way. The pretense of shared intent and avoidance of conflicting intents is short term workable, long term calcifying. Conflict resolutions that would need to be about intents often disguise themselves as conflicts about strategies or implementations instead, because bike shedding, and people not even being aware of their own inconsistencies in this regard.
People who apply deliberate practice to a working causal model often level up astonishingly quickly.
This is (sort of) true but I think you’re overstating it. For instance, TIm Ferris’ whole thing is about breaking down skills into functional causal models, and he certainly does a good job of becoming proficient at them, but you’ll notice he never becomes EXPERT at them.
Similarly, Josh Waitzkin also wrote a whole book about learning and breaking down skills into causal models, but still wanted at least 5 YEARS to train BJJ 24⁄7 before being comfortable going to the world finals (he never actually ended up going to the world finals so we’ll never be sure if this was enough time).
Your example below is a solo skill, but I wager if it was a competitive skill you’d find that while you outpace your peer newbies, it still feels quite slow to catch up to veterans.
I suspect something similar with disagreements. Someone skilled at disagreements can take a deep disagreement that would have taken 10 years and turn it into 5 years. But that’s still 5 years.
People have a really hard time with interventions often because they literally do not have a functioning causal model of the thing in question. People who apply deliberate practice to a working causal model often level up astonishingly quickly.
Could you give an example of a functioning causal model that quickly helps you learn a topic?
I’m not sure whether you’re thinking about something more meta-level, “what can I practice that will cause me to get better”, or something more object-level, “how does mechanics work”, and I think an example would help clarify. If it’s the latter, I’m curious about what the difference is between having a functioning causal model of the subject (the precondition for learning) and being good at the subject (the result of learning).
When I was trying to improve at touch typing I had to distinguish between causes of different kinds of errors. If my model was ‘speed is good’ and ‘tried to go faster’ I’d face constant frustration at the seeming interplay between speed and error rate. Instead, I built up a model of different errors like ‘left right finger confusion’, ‘moved wrong finger off home row’, ‘tendency to reverse key presses in certain sequences’, etc. Then I could find ways of practicing each error specifically, finding really cruxy examples that caused the worst traffic jams for me. This is a simple example because feedback loops are immediate. In many cases the added complexity is VoI calculations because gathering data on any given hypothesis costs some time or other resources.
Learning the causal model as you practice is a meta skill that levels up as you try to be careful when learning new domains.
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.
I disagree with the karate kid essay. People have a really hard time with interventions often because they literally do not have a functioning causal model of the thing in question. People who apply deliberate practice to a working causal model often level up astonishingly quickly. Don’t know if you have the appropriate causal model? Well, when you apply deliberate practice do you not get better? You’re pulling on fake levers.
People have cognitive dissonance about this because a bunch of their life UI is fake levers, and acknowledging one would lead to acknowledging others.
I propose an alternative model. People don’t resolve disagreements because there are no incentives to resolve them. In fact the incentives often cut the other way. The pretense of shared intent and avoidance of conflicting intents is short term workable, long term calcifying. Conflict resolutions that would need to be about intents often disguise themselves as conflicts about strategies or implementations instead, because bike shedding, and people not even being aware of their own inconsistencies in this regard.
This is (sort of) true but I think you’re overstating it. For instance, TIm Ferris’ whole thing is about breaking down skills into functional causal models, and he certainly does a good job of becoming proficient at them, but you’ll notice he never becomes EXPERT at them.
Similarly, Josh Waitzkin also wrote a whole book about learning and breaking down skills into causal models, but still wanted at least 5 YEARS to train BJJ 24⁄7 before being comfortable going to the world finals (he never actually ended up going to the world finals so we’ll never be sure if this was enough time).
Your example below is a solo skill, but I wager if it was a competitive skill you’d find that while you outpace your peer newbies, it still feels quite slow to catch up to veterans.
I suspect something similar with disagreements. Someone skilled at disagreements can take a deep disagreement that would have taken 10 years and turn it into 5 years. But that’s still 5 years.
Could you give an example of a functioning causal model that quickly helps you learn a topic?
I’m not sure whether you’re thinking about something more meta-level, “what can I practice that will cause me to get better”, or something more object-level, “how does mechanics work”, and I think an example would help clarify. If it’s the latter, I’m curious about what the difference is between having a functioning causal model of the subject (the precondition for learning) and being good at the subject (the result of learning).
When I was trying to improve at touch typing I had to distinguish between causes of different kinds of errors. If my model was ‘speed is good’ and ‘tried to go faster’ I’d face constant frustration at the seeming interplay between speed and error rate. Instead, I built up a model of different errors like ‘left right finger confusion’, ‘moved wrong finger off home row’, ‘tendency to reverse key presses in certain sequences’, etc. Then I could find ways of practicing each error specifically, finding really cruxy examples that caused the worst traffic jams for me. This is a simple example because feedback loops are immediate. In many cases the added complexity is VoI calculations because gathering data on any given hypothesis costs some time or other resources.
Learning the causal model as you practice is a meta skill that levels up as you try to be careful when learning new domains.
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.