Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
> In shu, we repeat the forms and discipline ourselves so that our bodies absorb the forms that our forebears created. We remain faithful to these forms with no deviation. Next, in the stage of ha, once we have disciplined ourselves to acquire the forms and movements, we make innovations. In this process the forms may be broken and discarded. Finally, in ri, we completely depart from the forms, open the door to creative technique, and arrive in a place where we act in accordance with what our heart/mind desires, unhindered while not overstepping laws.
Ineffective practice is usually just repetition, expecting improvement without focusing on correcting problems
Purposeful Practice - has well-defined, specific goals - Is focused (giving practice your full attention) - Involves feedback (success or failure) - Requires getting out of one’s comfort zone (is not easy, pushing barriers)
Harnessing Adaptability - Practice and training can actually change the brain - London taxi drivers that master the standard training develop larger hippocampus - Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training - Younger brains are more adaptable than adult brains, training can have larger effects - Development in one area may come at the price of regression in another - Trained abilities fade after lack of use
Mental Representations - Blindfold chess illustrates the importance of pattern memory - Experienced chess players can remember chess positions from a real game, but are not skilled at remembering random arrangements of pieces - they remember patterns, familiar arrangements of several pieces - Short-term memory can be extended by referring to familiar patterns or chunks - Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations for the activity under practice - Familiar patterns are internalized so that they can be automatically recognized and fluidly give rise to the appropriate actions - Knowledge of a domain has to be organized and accessible in a way that can be used in expert performance - Planning separates novice performance from expert performance - Experts tend to have detailed planning processes that can be refined - Experts have higher quality mental representations that help guide them in performance, and can help provide them with feedback to adjust their practice - Physical activities are mental too
What I fail to see are any recommendations of how to apply this to software development. In my own personal investigations, things like programming competitions have shown not to translate well to professional software development (outside of maybe the search or AI algo developers at Google). Practice problems like Eulers and Programming Pearls are a bit contrived and limited, so I'm not sure where else to turn. Do others wonder the same thing?
Working on side projects may be practice, but not necessarily deliberate, and many side projects may not be addressing our individual weaknesses.
This was directly inspired by the technique Benjamin Franklin used to become a great writer.[0]
[0]http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6220/ Search for the word spectator in the link for the relevant paragraph.
In my experience with deliberate practice, there are a couple of ingredients from that brief article:
* Breaking a skill down into achievable progressions
* A roadmap of how progressions lead to different "sweet spots" of expertise within that practice
> When I spoke with Ericsson by phone in May, he told me that people who think practice can only get you so far aren't talking about the same kind of practice as he is.
> As for whether genetic differences - say, in cognitive or physical ability - account for variations in achievement, Ericsson is skeptical.
The whole article, Ericsson sticks to "deliberate practice" (as defined by him) as being the sole determiner of mastery of a skill. Other researchers claim to debunk his findings. He claims that they conflate "practice" with "deliberate practice" and therefore didn't debunk him.
I don't know enough to judge which is correct (Ericsson or his detractors), but your comment isn't how I'd summarize the article, or the conclusions I'd draw from it.
>he claims that they conflate "practice" with "deliberate practice" and therefore didn't debunk him.
This seems unfalsifiable since we don't (and presumably he doesn't) have theories about either talent or intentions which might distinguish the two cases.
Myself I practiced the piano very deliberately in my late twenties and it didn't lead to improvement. In fact it lead to RSI. However, in overcoming the RSI I learnt about what talent means (inexplicitly, I'm afraid, so I can't explain it yet). Hence my claim that it is singular across all disciplines. This includes purely intellectual skill which, following Michael Polanyi, can be thought of as a connoisseurship of ideas.
You had a teacher who provided a lesson plan and guidance, until such time as you could follow the plan on your own and self-correct mistakes? As another element, were you constantly pushed to do things that were just out of your reach? His claim is that 10,000 hours of practice/learning structured in that way would make you an expert piano player. Somehow, I suspect that if you hit 90% of his requirements, he'd "no true Scotsman" you and say that it wasn't "real" deliberate practice.
Personally, I'm dubious about Ericsson's claims too. Some people have more limitations than others do, either physical or mental. Plasticity has its limits.