This did not go too badly. I had this posting 90% written when the Discussion section started so I had already decided to plunge into top post. Next time I am going to post into Discussion first and if there are only fourteen comments I would leave it there.
Most of the comments are about the 10 000 hours topic and I have given this one a little more thought and have a line for possible further inquiry. This is the amount of time it takes to establish the habitual brain cell connections of a programmer, a doctor, a violinist. It takes more than an afternoon to train a dog. And it may take more time to train a wild horse than is worth it. This is a much simpler system than the human brain.
What happens over the training or learning interval is a large complex set of nerve cell connections is established and stabilized through repetition. There was a “most-popular” article in the New York Times a few weeks ago that said latest research findings indicate we should study in a variety of environments to expedite learning.
I just want to say thanks for writing this. The replacement-level player in particular made it immediately obvious once I examined my prejudice that the average drop in quality as you go down a tier in graduates of highly ranked graduate programmes will be very, very low, almost swamped by noise.
If something apart from the Cambridge Handbook of Expert Performance was particularly helpful for figuring out when people peaked or if peaking time was a function of invested time or of age I’d be very interested.
K. Anders Ericson is one of the editors of that Cambridge Handbook and he is also the author of that study linked above. I have not read the handbook yet, but as near as I can tell he is the world’s leading authority on this question and I found that linked paper easy to grok. The quickest way into the literature is probably to follow his citations.
I have not done this yet either. If you do it and find something useful I would like to know about it. I am going through a mid-life career transition and wary of biting off more than I can chew up and swallow.
Follow-up
This did not go too badly. I had this posting 90% written when the Discussion section started so I had already decided to plunge into top post. Next time I am going to post into Discussion first and if there are only fourteen comments I would leave it there.
Most of the comments are about the 10 000 hours topic and I have given this one a little more thought and have a line for possible further inquiry. This is the amount of time it takes to establish the habitual brain cell connections of a programmer, a doctor, a violinist. It takes more than an afternoon to train a dog. And it may take more time to train a wild horse than is worth it. This is a much simpler system than the human brain.
What happens over the training or learning interval is a large complex set of nerve cell connections is established and stabilized through repetition. There was a “most-popular” article in the New York Times a few weeks ago that said latest research findings indicate we should study in a variety of environments to expedite learning.
I have found the techniques in this book useful:
Study is Hard Work by William H. Armstrong.
I just want to say thanks for writing this. The replacement-level player in particular made it immediately obvious once I examined my prejudice that the average drop in quality as you go down a tier in graduates of highly ranked graduate programmes will be very, very low, almost swamped by noise.
If something apart from the Cambridge Handbook of Expert Performance was particularly helpful for figuring out when people peaked or if peaking time was a function of invested time or of age I’d be very interested.
K. Anders Ericson is one of the editors of that Cambridge Handbook and he is also the author of that study linked above. I have not read the handbook yet, but as near as I can tell he is the world’s leading authority on this question and I found that linked paper easy to grok. The quickest way into the literature is probably to follow his citations.
I have not done this yet either. If you do it and find something useful I would like to know about it. I am going through a mid-life career transition and wary of biting off more than I can chew up and swallow.