HN Gopher Feed (2017-08-25) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become
experts (2016) [pdf]
90 points by lainon
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~tymerski/ece101/Expert_mind_scientifica...ientificamerican0806-64.pdf___________________________________________________________________
adrice727 - 1 hours ago
One of the books that has had the biggest influence in my life is
"The Art of Learning" by Josh Waitzkin, the child chess prodigy of
"Searching for Bobby Fischer" fame.https://www.amazon.com/Art-
Learning-Journey-Optimal-Performa...
jonmc12 - 3 hours ago
Related - "Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games,
Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis" -
http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/07/Macn...Gives some context for the kinds of
fields where deliberate practice improves performance.
GregBuchholz - 1 hours ago
Your mention of deliberate practice prompted me reinvestigate the
guy who was doing the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to
become a golf pro. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, he did
get to 10,000 hours, but it doesn't seem like it panned out.
Anyone have further sources of information?http://thedanplan.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_McLaughlin_(golfer)
tunesmith - 1 hours ago
There was a recent HN discussion on it, I believe - I think he
got to around 6,000 hours, and was doing really well at golf
actually, but then injuries started happening.
brianwawok - 1 hours ago
Maybe a slightly different topic.. but from what a lot in the
running field think, its all about how fast your body
recovers.There are 10,000 amazing marathoners in the world.
If you gave them all the same training, they would all be
absurdly good, as they got better and better. But 9,990 or so
of them would get injured and wash out.So it seems at least
in some sports, your limiter is not how genetically gifted
you are the SPORT, but how genetically gifted you are at
recovering from training so that you can train more.So
perhaps this guy has the genetics to be a pro golfer, but his
body can't take the strain and recover between sessions.. so
he would never quite make it.
jtuente - 1 hours ago
If his body cannot take the strain and recover between
sessions then wouldn't that suggest that he does not have
the genetics to be a pro golfer, but merely a good one?
jinfiesto - 54 minutes ago
I'm not convinced that the recovery is genetic (well it is,
but that's not the point.) People give themselves
repetitive motion injuries in music all the time. It causes
tons of otherwise amazing musicians to wash out.It's become
such a problem, that it's basically become the biggest
issue the pedagogy community as a whole is actively trying
to address. This is interesting, because there has been a
lot of progress made in injury-preventive technique.Even in
running, a quick Google search revealed that injury
preventive techniques exist.So I guess, I'm not convinced
that injury isn't technique related and that not being
injured doesn't have more to do with luck (in terms of
natural technique) than genetics.
bsder - 2 minutes ago
> It's become such a problem, that it's basically become
the biggest issue the pedagogy community as a whole is
actively trying to address. This is interesting, because
there has been a lot of progress made in injury-
preventive technique.Could you please give me some
references for this? Guitar has loads of famous people
who encourage people to do things that will cause
injuries. Having some actual research to fight against
this would be really useful.An egregiously bad example:
Paul Gilbert (who is like 6'5" and has enormously long
arms and fingers) actually SELLS an especially long
guitar strap that is practically guaranteed to give you
RSI. I wish I were joking: https://www.youtube.com/resul
ts?search_query=paul+gilbert+gu...Side note: this made me
hugely disappointed in Paul Gilbert. Prior to this, I
thought of him as an amazing guitar player with a very
wry/dry sense of humor who was simply making fun of the
guitar stereotype crowd. Actually encouraging something
which is damaging in order to profit from it crosses the
line whether he is serious or joking--too many people
will listen and believe him.
StanislavPetrov - moments ago
>So I guess, I'm not convinced that injury isn't
technique related and that not being injured doesn't have
more to do with luck (in terms of natural technique) than
genetics.Certainly luck is a factor, but genetics is an
important factor as well. Many studies have linked
genetics to a predisposition for inflammation, wound-
healing, and other injury-related phenomena.https://www.s
ciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160302135149.h...https:/
/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16472051
Trundle - 13 minutes ago
Kind of related is that one of the biggest advantages of
using performance enhancing drugs/steroids is the greatly
reduced recovery time. Even if someone tests clean before
an event because they genuinely are clean rather than being
on something undetectable, they still benefit from all of
the extra training they managed to get in in-between events
when they were juicing.
danharaj - 1 hours ago
I'm having a bit of trouble interpreting these numbers.If I look
at deliberate practice in musical proficiency amongst the general
populace, it'll look like deliberate practice is responsible for
almost all of the proficiency. However, if I look at the top 100
musicians in the world, they would have all practiced thousands
of hours and I expect practice to have diminishing returns, so it
should be responsible for very little of the variation in their
ability.I would expect also that in more multifactorial
activities which are often the basis of professions that it is
both A) difficult to ascertain what expertise is (often reducing
to an empty social credential) B) difficult to evaluate what good
deliberate practice is.The meta-analysis talks about such factors
as the predictability of the environment correlating with the
effect size of deliberate practice. I think that's just the tip
of the iceberg.
jasode - 2 hours ago
Fyi... this a 2006 publication. (Not sure why HN submission says
(2016).)Being 11 years old isn't an issue because the chess memory
observation is interesting data. The age is significant because
virtually every pop psychology & brain book in the last 10 years
mentions this chess study as one of the anecdotes. (Similar to how
all the pop psych books mention the Invisible Gorilla, Marshmallow
Experiment, Stanford Prison Experiment, etc)
Bucephalus355 - 1 hours ago
Hey want to provide some quick clarification on your point.First,
you are dramatically, 110% right that pop psychology books
plunder really valuable research such as this for ultimately
banal insights that they manage to hide in a 300 page book that
could be 10 pages.K. Anders Ericsson, the absolute giant in the
field of expertise research, is quite dismissive of Malcolm
Gladwell and upset at his mis-interpretations of his work. Go
look at his book, "Peak", which goes into depth on this (and
funny enough looks like every other stupid pop psychology book,
although it is not).Finally, if you want to explore the best
research we have from the present through the last 40 years,
highly recommend you check out "The Cambridge Handbook of
Expertise". It's 40 chapters written by nothing but PhDs.They
compare what expertise means across History, Firefighting,
Surgery, Ballet, even Truck Driving and Software Design.
bfung - 18 minutes ago
So...(start internal monologue)- The 10x engineer is so because of
10x practice (numbers not precise nor accurate). Companies - need
to keep challenging people to get experts. Bootcampers - keep
practicing.- As with the soccer study in the article, boys ended up
as the "bigger kids" in computer science and due to motivational
factors, there's more boys in the tech industry today [1]- Refutes
a large portion of [2]; did the google engineer read these studies
before?[1]
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...[2]
http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-div...
hellbanner - 47 minutes ago
If you want to improve this chess, I recommend this playlist by
International Master John Bartholomew:https://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=Ao9iOeK_jvU&index=5&list=PLl...I recommend https://lichess.org
over chess.com for a far superior UI.
afro88 - 40 minutes ago
Lichess is excellent. I run my in person games through it's
analysis. They have a great feature where you practice the
correct move where you had made a mistake or "blunder".And it's
open source: https://github.com/ornicar/lila
hellbanner - 2 minutes ago
Open source, awesome!I'm so impressed with their UI. You can
watch games in real time and there's a dashboard showing you
your Ping + Server Processing Time per Move (usually 2ms).
lainon - 39 minutes ago
There's also this paper which gives a general overview on which
aspects of the game you should focus improving on once you
mastered the basics of chess."Training in chess: a scientific app
roach"https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2dd/31c7db68667f1485f80d0
e...
HappyKasper - 2 hours ago
"Talent is Overrated" is a great pop exploration of this and
similar findings. If you find this interesting, I highly recommend
that book as a jumping off point for exploring similar findings.
drivers99 - 1 hours ago
Another very good book is "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of
Expertise" by Anders Ericsson. I'm in the middle of reading it
now. As I suspected (since he mentions studies on chess masters),
he's part of this article, and in fact he's the author of 2 of
the 5 "More to Explore" sources listed at the end of the article.
Bucephalus355 - 1 hours ago
Just posted above on K. Anders Ericcson and the book Peak is
great.Main point is the 10,000 hour rule comes from Ericcson's
study that the best violinists in the world practice about
7,000 hours by the time they are 18. They average between 3-4
hours a day. This last point is really interesting because the
ceiling for what qualified as good practice consistently was no
more than 4 hours. So if you do 4 hours of top notch practice /
studying, it would seem like no matter your field you are done
for the day.Continuing on, the 10,000 hour rule was stupidly
expanded by 3,000 hours just to make it easier to remember, and
additionally that number is COMPLETELY ARBITRARY anyway.The
only reason violinists practice that much is because everyone
else is competing that hard. Old, well defined fields like
Violin or say Chess have pretty clearly defined ways on how you
get better, meaning the "secrets" are somewhat known. Therefore
the only way to get better is via practice, which of course
everyone does, which drives up these insane numbers.In other
fields which are much newer and far less defined, expertise is
up for grabs and there are no well-defined broadly agreed on
ways to get better. If you do 800 hours of the "right" practice
you can be far ahead of anyone else, since no one really knows
what's right.That being said, Ericcson's research still shows
lots of correlation before time and skill, so alas no easy
shortcuts.EDIT: between time and skill
wslh - 2 hours ago
In the introduction I would begin telling the story of Najdorf
playing blind chess:
http://www.blindfoldchess.net/blog/2011/12/after_64_years_ne...
subroutine - 2 hours ago
Magnus has some youtube videos playing with his back to a series
of boards, then after he wins he writes down every move that was
played on every board.