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veen  ·  3305 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why does everyone hate Malcolm Gladwell?

In one of my courses that I have now we talked about the Dreyfus model of expertise. It's a framework for understanding the difference between knowledge and wisdom, competency and expertise that I've found to be very useful. The model asserts there are five stages from total n00b to expert:

1. Novice. You've just got the basic rules. To use the example of driving a car, you learn that the car turns when you turn the wheel and that the brake does something useful. Basic stuff.

2. Advanced beginner. You know the basic, universal rules and start to learn situation-specific rules, e.g. how to do a four-way stop, when to shift into the next gear, how to merge on a highway.

3. Competency: you're a level higher and can now understand everything in terms of rules and actions. You can prioritize your attention and focus on specific tasks. This is the level you're supposed to be when you get your license: you know all the rules and can handle all the situations using those rules.

4. Proficient. Your skill level starts to move beyond just the rules. This is the level where value judgements come in. Intuition also starts to play a role. Not the spiritual kind, but rather the gut-feeling / subconscious kind. You still depend on the rules to do most of your actions but you regularly get into the 'flow'. To put it into gaming terms, it's like when in a heated Super Smash Bros match your thumbs are quicker than your mind, and you do your B attack at the right moment, but you only realize that you did that after the fact.

5. Expertise: So at the level of expert / mastery, you basically transcend the rules and know how to do things without having to formulate your actions into rulesets. When you're in the flow, you don't stop and think about why you're doing what you do: you just do the thing because you know how to do it. Experts operate at a level that can't be reduced to rules and logic. This is because most of those decisions are completely context-dependant, whereas rules and laws are context-independent. A competent person knows all the rules, but most skills are more than just rules. A game of chess is more than just the rules.

The book I have this from argues that to get to that level of expertise, you need to be exposed to an enormous amount of [activity you want to master]. So yeah, if you think of expertise as 'someone who is so good at an activity as to move beyond the rules of that activity', then you are an expert at eating. Which sounds strange but really, how often do you actively think about how you're gonna hold that fork?

This doesn't mean that 10k hours of doing whatever will make you an expert. You can play guitar for 10k hours but if you still have to think about how to form an A minor chord, you're not getting past the competent level. It does mean that to get to the expert level, you do need somewhere in the order of 10k hours.