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comment by veen
veen  ·  3304 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.





_refugee_  ·  3303 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It is highly likely to me that people who are successful in an area have spent significant amounts of time engrossed in all/most/many aspects of that area - for instance, music could include listening to music, playing music, creating music, talking about music, and so on.

However, for all those that are super successful in their area of choice and passion, I do believe there are many who have spent similar amounts of time invested in the same activities who haven't "made it big," become well-respected experts or bastions of knowledge in the area, who haven't gotten jobs related to those skills, who in short have failed to achieve much beyond thorough competency in the area. I think this is the result of many things - luck, connections, opportunity, as well as drive, passion, commitment, and probably a sackful of other qualities. It strikes me that a musician who does not know why what he does musically works, but only knows that it does, does not have the same ability to manipulate sound as the musician who knows exactly why a given chord progression is so powerful and elicits certain emotions.

I think one of my issues with the 10,000 hour rule is that it seems to encourage the idea that if you simply put in enough time, you'll be good. The thing is there is much more than that to becoming a true expert. I do not believe anyone can attain mastery without at least some natural gift as well as an education, but I do believe that someone with moderate talent who has to work very hard to learn his or her craft can beat out those with significant talent but an inconsistent, lazy, entitled, or half-hearted approach. You need to put in more than time. You need to come to the scenario with more tools than simply "lots of time" in your arsenal. And there are people who deserve to make it big, who have put that time in and more, who don't - or at least, haven't yet - for all sorts of factors.

I find both the 10,000 hour rule, and Gladwell's core assertion in Blink, ("think less, make better choices") at their core simplistic and yes, offensive. They both seem to encourage a certain taking of things for granted. They both dismiss effort, although in different ways. The message I get from Gladwell is that success really is as simple as 10,000 hours and the best decisions really are as simple as going with your gut reaction. I really don't like those.

If those are such truisms, what are you supposed to say to all those people who toil away in an area, put in their 10k hours and more, and never make it? What about people who know their gut reactions aren't healthy or helpful? In distilling concepts Gladwell throws nuance to the wind and implies that if what he suggests doesn't work for you, that you must be a failure somehow.

And I just can't agree with a man who tells me to think less before I make a decision, and that decision will magically end up being better than the one I'd come to after 30 minutes' thought.

veen  ·  3303 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    And I just can't agree with a man who tells me to think less before I make a decision, and that decision will magically end up being better than the one I'd come to after 30 minutes' thought.

While I agree with the gist of your post -the 10k rule is indeed insulting, and I think less of Gladwell because of it- I disagree on the last half of this part. Not all knowledge is the same, and using your strong sense of intuition isn't necessarily 'thinking less'.

If you hadn't noticed already, I find it difficult to summarize the argument in the book without it losing some strength. So I'll let my textbook explain:

    It is important to emphasize that when Dreyfus and Dreyfus use the word ‘‘intuition’’ they do not mean some kind of guesswork. For Dreyfus and Dreyfus intuition is a property which each individual uses in everyday life. [...] Take something as mundane as riding a bicycle. Someone able to ride a bike has not formulated a set of rules, which, if followed, can teach somebody else to ride a bicycle. How could we, for example, ‘‘teach’’ the difference between nearly falling and the need to lean over in order to turn a corner? How do we explain the best response to being off balance? Bicyclists can bicycle because they have the necessary know-how, achieved via practical experiences, invariably accompanied by a few childhood scrapes and bruises. Experience cannot necessarily be verbalized, intellectualized, and made into rules.

    [Using intuition] does not mean that experts never think consciously, nor that they always do the right thing. When there is time, and when much is at stake, experts will also deliberate before they act. Their deliberation, however, is not based on calculated problem solving but on critical reflection over the intuition, which the expert applies.

Experiences are the building blocks of intuition. The experiences themselves aren't what makes an expert an expert, it's what you do with it that matters.