It seems to me, based on purely anecdotal experience, that people in this community are unusually prone to feeling that they’re stupid if they do badly at something. Scott Adams’ The Illusion of Winning might help counteract becoming too easily demotivated.
Let’s say that you and I decide to play pool. We agree to play eight-ball, best of five games. Our perception is that what follows is a contest to see who will do something called winning.
But I don’t see it that way. I always imagine the outcome of eight-ball to be predetermined, to about 95% certainty, based on who has practiced that specific skill the most over his lifetime. The remaining 5% is mostly luck, and playing a best of five series eliminates most of the luck too.
I’ve spent a ridiculous number of hours playing pool, mostly as a kid. I’m not proud of that fact. Almost any other activity would have been more useful. As a result of my wasted youth, years later I can beat 99% of the public at eight-ball. But I can’t enjoy that sort of so-called victory. It doesn’t feel like “winning” anything.
It feels as meaningful as if my opponent and I had kept logs of the hours we each had spent playing pool over our lifetimes and simply compared. It feels redundant to play the actual games.
I see the same thing with tennis, golf, music, and just about any other skill, at least at non-professional levels. And research supports the obvious, that practice is the main determinant of success in a particular field.
As a practical matter, you can’t keep logs of all the hours you have spent practicing various skills. And I wonder how that affects our perception of what it takes to be a so-called winner. We focus on the contest instead of the practice because the contest is easy to measure and the practice is not.
Complicating our perceptions is professional sports. The whole point of professional athletics is assembling freaks of nature into teams and pitting them against other freaks of nature. Practice is obviously important in professional sports, but it won’t make you taller. I suspect that professional sports demotivate viewers by sending the accidental message that success is determined by genetics.
My recommendation is to introduce eight-ball into school curricula, but in a specific way. Each kid would be required to keep a log of hours spent practicing on his own time, and there would be no minimum requirement. Some kids could practice zero hours if they had no interest or access to a pool table. At the end of the school year, the entire class would compete in a tournament, and they would compare their results with how many hours they spent practicing. I think that would make real the connection between practice and results, in a way that regular schoolwork and sports do not. That would teach them that winning happens before the game starts.
Yes, I know that schools will never assign eight-ball for homework. But maybe there is some kid-friendly way to teach the same lesson.
ETA: I don’t mean to say that talent doesn’t matter: things such as intelligence matter more than Adams gives them credit for, AFAIK. But I’ve noticed in many people (myself included) a definite tendency to overvalue intelligence relative to practice.
people in this community are unusually prone to feeling that they’re stupid if they do badly at something
I suspect this is a result of the tacit assumption that “if you’re not smart enough, you don’t belong at LW”. If most members are anything like me, this combined with the fact that they’re probably used to being “the smart one” makes it extremely intimidating to post anything, and extremely de-motivational if they make a mistake.
In the interests of spreading the idea that it’s ok if other people are smarter than you, I’ll say that I’m quite certainly one of the less intelligent members of this community.
I’ve noticed in many people (myself included) a definite tendency to overvalue intelligence relative to practice.
Practice and expertise tend to be domain-specific—Scott isn’t any better at darts or chess after playing all that pool. Even learning things like metacognition tend not to apply outside of the specific domain you’ve learned it in. Intelligence is one of the only things that gives you a general problem solving/task completion ability.
Intelligence is one of the only things that gives you a general problem solving/task completion ability.
Only if you’ve already defined intelligence as not domain-specific in the first place. Conversely, meta-cognition about a person’s own learning processes could help them learn faster in general, which has many varied applications.
It seems to me, based on purely anecdotal experience, that people in this community are unusually prone to feeling that they’re stupid if they do badly at something.
This is certainly true of me, but I try to make sure that the positive feeling of having identified the mistakes and improved outweighs the negative feeling of having needed the improvement. Tsuyoku Naritai!
I don’t mean to say that talent doesn’t matter: things such as intelligence matter more than Adams gives them credit for
I think the relative contribution of intelligence vs. practice varies substantially depending on the nature of the particular task. A key problem is to identify tasks as intelligence-dominated (the smart guy always wins) vs. practice-dominated (the experienced guy always wins).
As a first observation about this problem, notice that clearly definable or objective tasks (chess, pool, basketball) tend to be practice-dominated, whereas more ambiguous tasks (leadership, writing, rationality) tend to be intelligence-dominated.
I never valued intelligence relative to practice, thanks to an upbringing that focused pretty heavily on the importance of effort over talent. I’m more likely to feel behind, insufficiently knowledgeable to the point that I’m never going to catch up. I don’t see why it’s necessarily a cheerful observation that practice makes a big difference to performance. It just means that you’ll never be able to match the person who started earlier.
Those games don’t really improve any sort of skill, though, and neither does anyone expect them to. To teach kids this, you need a game where you as a player pretty much never stop improving, so that having spent more hours on the game actually means you’ll beat anyone who has spent less.
There are schools that teach Go intensively from an early age, so that a 10-year-old student from one of those schools is already far better than a casual player like me will ever be, and it just keeps going up from there. People don’t seem to get tired of it.
Every time I contemplate that, I wish all the talent thus spent, could be spent instead on schools providing similarly intensive teaching in something useful like science and engineering. What could be accomplished if you taught a few thousand smart kids to be dan-grade scientists by age 10 and kept going from there? I think it would be worth finding out.
I agree with you. I also think that there are several reasons for that:
First that competitive games are (intellectual or physical sports) easier to select and train for, since the objective function is much clearer.
The other reason is more cultural: if you train your child for something more useful like science or mathematics, then people will say: “Poor kid, do you try to make a freak out of him? Why can’t he have a childhood like anyone else?” Traditionally, there is much less opposition against music, art or sport training. Perhaps they are viewed as “fun activities.”
Thirdly, it also seems that academic success is the function of more variables: communication skills, motivation, perspective, taste, wisdom, luck etc. So early training will result in much less head start than in a more constrained area like sports or music, where it is almost mandatory for success (age of 10 (even 6) are almost too late in some of those areas to begin seriously)
Yes, but what would it matter if 200 billion hours was spent refining wikipedia? There is only so much knowledge you can pump into it. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.
So what else could we also accomplish? I didn’t read it as ‘wikipedia could be 2,000 times better’, but ‘we could have 2,000 wikipedia-grade resources’. (Which is probably also not true—we’d run out of low-hanging fruit. Still.)
There’s a large difference between the “leveling up” in such games, where you gain new in-game capabilities, and actually getting better, where your in-game capabilities stay the same but you learn to use them more effectively.
ETA: I guess perhaps a better way of saying it is, there’s a large difference between the causal chains time->winning, and time->skill->winning.
I’m guilty of a sort of fixation on IQ (not actual scores or measurements of it). I have an unhealthy interest in food, drugs and exercises (physical and mental) that are purported to give some incremental improvement. I see this in quite a few folks here as well.
To actually accomplish something, more important than these incremental IQ differences are: effective high-level planning and strategy, practice, time actually spent trying, finding the right collaborators, etc.
I started playing around with some IQ-test-like games lately and was initially a little let down with how low my performance (percentile, not absolute) was on some tasks at first. I now believe that these tasks are quite specifically-trainable (after a few tries, I may improve suddenly, but after that I can, but choose not to, steadily increase my performance with work), and that the population actually includes quite a few well-practiced high-achievers. At least, I prefer to console myself with such thoughts.
But, seeing myself scored as not-so-smart in some ways, I started to wonder what difference it makes to earn a gold star that says you compute faster than others, if you don’t actually do anything with it. Most people probably grow out of such rewards at a younger age than I did.
But I’ve noticed in many people (myself included) a definite tendency to overvalue intelligence relative to practice.
I’m not sure I agree with that. In what areas do you see overvalue of intelligence relative to practice and why do you think there really is overvalue in those areas?
I’ve noticed for example that people’s abilities to make good comments on LW do not seem to improve much with practice and feedback from votes (beyond maybe the first few weeks or so). Does this view represent an overvalue of intelligence?
In what areas do you see overvalue of intelligence relative to practice and why do you think there really is overvalue in those areas?
I should probably note that my overvaluing of intelligence is more of an alief than a belief. Mostly it shows up if I’m unable to master (or at least get a basic proficiency in) a topic as fast as I’d like to. For instance, on some types of math problems I get quickly demotivated and feel that I’m not smart enough for them, when the actual problem is that I haven’t had enough practice on them. This is despite the intellectual knowledge that I could master them, if I just had a bit more practice.
I’ve noticed for example that people’s abilities to make good comments on LW do not seem to improve much with practice and feedback from votes (beyond maybe the first few weeks or so). Does this view represent an overvalue of intelligence?
That sounds about right, though I would note that there’s a huge amount of background knowledge that you need to absorb on LW. Not just raw facts, either, but ways of thinking. The lack of improvement might partially be because some people have absorbed that knowledge when they start posting and some haven’t, and absorbing it takes such a long time that the improvement happens too slowly to notice.
I’ve noticed for example that people’s abilities to make good comments on LW do not seem to improve much with practice and feedback from votes (beyond maybe the first few weeks or so). Does this view represent an overvalue of intelligence?
That’s interesting. I hadn’t got that impression but I haven’t looked too closely at such trends either. There are a few people whose comments have improved dramatically but the difference seems to be social development and and not necessarily their rational thinking—so perhaps you have a specific kind of improvement in mind.
I’m interested in any further observations on the topic by yourself or others.
It seems to me, based on purely anecdotal experience, that people in this community are unusually prone to feeling that they’re stupid if they do badly at something. Scott Adams’ The Illusion of Winning might help counteract becoming too easily demotivated.
ETA: I don’t mean to say that talent doesn’t matter: things such as intelligence matter more than Adams gives them credit for, AFAIK. But I’ve noticed in many people (myself included) a definite tendency to overvalue intelligence relative to practice.
I suspect this is a result of the tacit assumption that “if you’re not smart enough, you don’t belong at LW”. If most members are anything like me, this combined with the fact that they’re probably used to being “the smart one” makes it extremely intimidating to post anything, and extremely de-motivational if they make a mistake.
In the interests of spreading the idea that it’s ok if other people are smarter than you, I’ll say that I’m quite certainly one of the less intelligent members of this community.
Practice and expertise tend to be domain-specific—Scott isn’t any better at darts or chess after playing all that pool. Even learning things like metacognition tend not to apply outside of the specific domain you’ve learned it in. Intelligence is one of the only things that gives you a general problem solving/task completion ability.
Only if you’ve already defined intelligence as not domain-specific in the first place. Conversely, meta-cognition about a person’s own learning processes could help them learn faster in general, which has many varied applications.
This is certainly true of me, but I try to make sure that the positive feeling of having identified the mistakes and improved outweighs the negative feeling of having needed the improvement. Tsuyoku Naritai!
I think the relative contribution of intelligence vs. practice varies substantially depending on the nature of the particular task. A key problem is to identify tasks as intelligence-dominated (the smart guy always wins) vs. practice-dominated (the experienced guy always wins).
As a first observation about this problem, notice that clearly definable or objective tasks (chess, pool, basketball) tend to be practice-dominated, whereas more ambiguous tasks (leadership, writing, rationality) tend to be intelligence-dominated.
This is true. Intelligence research has shown that intelligence is more useful for more complex tasks, see e.g. Gottfredson 2002.
I like this anecdote.
I never valued intelligence relative to practice, thanks to an upbringing that focused pretty heavily on the importance of effort over talent. I’m more likely to feel behind, insufficiently knowledgeable to the point that I’m never going to catch up. I don’t see why it’s necessarily a cheerful observation that practice makes a big difference to performance. It just means that you’ll never be able to match the person who started earlier.
Make them play some kind of simplified RPG until they realise the only achievement is how much time they put into doing mindless repetitive tasks.
I imagine lots of kids play Farmville already.
Those games don’t really improve any sort of skill, though, and neither does anyone expect them to. To teach kids this, you need a game where you as a player pretty much never stop improving, so that having spent more hours on the game actually means you’ll beat anyone who has spent less.
Go might work.
There are schools that teach Go intensively from an early age, so that a 10-year-old student from one of those schools is already far better than a casual player like me will ever be, and it just keeps going up from there. People don’t seem to get tired of it.
Every time I contemplate that, I wish all the talent thus spent, could be spent instead on schools providing similarly intensive teaching in something useful like science and engineering. What could be accomplished if you taught a few thousand smart kids to be dan-grade scientists by age 10 and kept going from there? I think it would be worth finding out.
I agree with you. I also think that there are several reasons for that:
First that competitive games are (intellectual or physical sports) easier to select and train for, since the objective function is much clearer.
The other reason is more cultural: if you train your child for something more useful like science or mathematics, then people will say: “Poor kid, do you try to make a freak out of him? Why can’t he have a childhood like anyone else?” Traditionally, there is much less opposition against music, art or sport training. Perhaps they are viewed as “fun activities.”
Thirdly, it also seems that academic success is the function of more variables: communication skills, motivation, perspective, taste, wisdom, luck etc. So early training will result in much less head start than in a more constrained area like sports or music, where it is almost mandatory for success (age of 10 (even 6) are almost too late in some of those areas to begin seriously)
A somewhat related, impactful graph.
Of course, human effort and interest is far from perfectly fungible. But your broader point retains a lot of validity.
Yes, but what would it matter if 200 billion hours was spent refining wikipedia? There is only so much knowledge you can pump into it. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.
So what else could we also accomplish? I didn’t read it as ‘wikipedia could be 2,000 times better’, but ‘we could have 2,000 wikipedia-grade resources’. (Which is probably also not true—we’d run out of low-hanging fruit. Still.)
Go is useful, I figure. As games go, it is one of the best. Perhaps computer games will one day surpass it—but, in many ways, that has happened yet.
There’s a large difference between the “leveling up” in such games, where you gain new in-game capabilities, and actually getting better, where your in-game capabilities stay the same but you learn to use them more effectively.
ETA: I guess perhaps a better way of saying it is, there’s a large difference between the causal chains time->winning, and time->skill->winning.
I’m guilty of a sort of fixation on IQ (not actual scores or measurements of it). I have an unhealthy interest in food, drugs and exercises (physical and mental) that are purported to give some incremental improvement. I see this in quite a few folks here as well.
To actually accomplish something, more important than these incremental IQ differences are: effective high-level planning and strategy, practice, time actually spent trying, finding the right collaborators, etc.
I started playing around with some IQ-test-like games lately and was initially a little let down with how low my performance (percentile, not absolute) was on some tasks at first. I now believe that these tasks are quite specifically-trainable (after a few tries, I may improve suddenly, but after that I can, but choose not to, steadily increase my performance with work), and that the population actually includes quite a few well-practiced high-achievers. At least, I prefer to console myself with such thoughts.
But, seeing myself scored as not-so-smart in some ways, I started to wonder what difference it makes to earn a gold star that says you compute faster than others, if you don’t actually do anything with it. Most people probably grow out of such rewards at a younger age than I did.
I’m not sure I agree with that. In what areas do you see overvalue of intelligence relative to practice and why do you think there really is overvalue in those areas?
I’ve noticed for example that people’s abilities to make good comments on LW do not seem to improve much with practice and feedback from votes (beyond maybe the first few weeks or so). Does this view represent an overvalue of intelligence?
I should probably note that my overvaluing of intelligence is more of an alief than a belief. Mostly it shows up if I’m unable to master (or at least get a basic proficiency in) a topic as fast as I’d like to. For instance, on some types of math problems I get quickly demotivated and feel that I’m not smart enough for them, when the actual problem is that I haven’t had enough practice on them. This is despite the intellectual knowledge that I could master them, if I just had a bit more practice.
That sounds about right, though I would note that there’s a huge amount of background knowledge that you need to absorb on LW. Not just raw facts, either, but ways of thinking. The lack of improvement might partially be because some people have absorbed that knowledge when they start posting and some haven’t, and absorbing it takes such a long time that the improvement happens too slowly to notice.
That’s interesting. I hadn’t got that impression but I haven’t looked too closely at such trends either. There are a few people whose comments have improved dramatically but the difference seems to be social development and and not necessarily their rational thinking—so perhaps you have a specific kind of improvement in mind.
I’m interested in any further observations on the topic by yourself or others.