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> Someone who consistently practices a craft for 8 hours a day will accumulate >10,000 hours in just 4 years, sufficient to become an expert in most non-professional activites.

That assumes that all those hours result in skill impfovemeonts. They do not. Commuters don't become expert drivers just because they get stuck in traffic for hours a day.

That's a false equivalence if there ever was one. When you get stuck in traffic, you aren't choosing conditions of adversity which will guide you towards higher difficulty. One could easily make the comparison between traffic jams and monotony. When one practices a skill, they get to choose the level of difficulty as well as a number of other factors related to the activity. A traffic jam is hardly comparable and it's not surprising that monotony does not really improve anyones' driving skills. However, compare your driving skills to someone from India where there are no traffic lights, and you'll probably go running out of the car. They are able to take higher risks because they deal with it every day.

> When you get stuck in traffic, you aren't choosing conditions of adversity which will guide you towards higher difficulty.

Neither do you or anyone in general when working a 9-to-5 job.

Hours spent on a job do not represent skill increases. They only represent how much of your life you spent on something.

I'll also add that "5 years of experience vs 1 year of experience 5 times" is a known thing.

Traffic jams, 9-to-5 job.. I'm not sure what those have to do with the topic at all. Yes, the 10,000 hours thing doesn't include every possible human (in)activity, no-one thinks it does.

Actually we do have traffic lights. They are just optional.

Jokes aside, the conditions are different. Most traffic in India is extremely slow moving, which makes those risks possible. Go to a country where the to Urban driving speed is over 50 kph (~30 mph), say 80-100 kph, Indian drivers will refuse to take those risks.

>Most traffic in India is extremely slow moving, which makes those risks possible. Go to a country where the to Urban driving speed is over 50 kph (~30 mph), say 80-100 kph, Indian drivers will refuse to take those risks.

That explains a lot.

You say that, but my clutch control jumped leaps and bounds (back when I drove a manual for commuting), to the point that I could keep distance with the car in front while half a sleep and without needing to tap the break peddle.

Some of the other skills I learned were less admirable. Eg learning to use a touch screen phone while keeping an eye on the car in front (I'd only do this if traffic was stationary though). And learning how to accelerate quickly because I needed to steal a small gap at a busy junction.

Indeed, I would imagine that thousands of hours of commuting would make one an expert at those specific skills. That said, I imagine the skill ceiling is quite low and likely reached long before 10,000 hours, and the skill set is certainly different from what most people mean by “expert driver.”

> That said, I imagine the skill ceiling is quite low and likely reached long before 10,000 hours, and the skill set is certainly different from what most people mean by “expert driver.”

It doesnt take much practice to become a marginally-skilled driver. But that doesn't mean there's little difference between marginal drivers and people who spend their entire day behind the steering wheel...

I once guesstimated that I spent maybe 7,500 hours (over 3.5 years) driving around in taxis. Towards the end of that period I started to notice things that the other cars on the road would likely do, and point this out to my passengers. "See that car? it's going to change lanes and that other guy is going to have to slam on his brakes..."

After I 'retired', I was driving with my mother. Our light turned green, but I saw that the car in the cross traffic couldn't see that his light had turned red (on account of the sunset). I waited, and watched as he slammed on his brakes.

There's something to putting in time on any activity. I think the relevant saying is not "practice makes perfect", but "perfect practice makes perfect". If you spend 10,000 hours practicing something wrong it won't be as helpful as 1,000 hours practicing it right.

Bruce Lee said, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

That’s a great anecdote. I’d also suggest that there are a bunch of people who could spend exactly the same period behind the wheel as you and not develop those skills though. Some people plateau and something about their makeup stops them from developing those higher ‘intuitive’ skills

I really wonder how all this unspoken communication is going to change with self-driving cars.

On the German Autobahn, the amount of observing and consideration is very high, and if people are new it can be very stressful. You basically have to keep in mind everyone around you, their respective speeds, potential moves and how a move from you will change their options and responses.

One common situation is when you come up behind a slow car on your lane, but the lane to the left (where you need to go to keep your current speed and overtake) has somebody coming up fast from the back. If you move there, you might force that person to brake. Now, they obviously see your situation and might slow down a little or speed up, so you can adjust your speed (speed up and pull into the left lane or lay off the gas and delay switching just long enough to let them pass). If there is another left lane they might move over to that too if possible. In this case, the communication is mostly in those small changes in speed that tell you their intention.

Now how should I read an automatic car? It's going to be very chaotic before we figure it out.

One option is that the cars explicitly communicate, and make a joint plan that minimizes acceleration, danger and unexpectedness.

Of course a legacy non-robot car is a special case the robots have to think about carefully. The robots will give you similar signals to those given by human drivers now. These have been active areas of research for a while now.

I worry that driving is the last continuous attention/frequently applied skill thing humans do, and that they will quickly deskill when they assume that a machine will automatically take them where they want to go.

I worry about the transition as well.

Hopefully it won't be as bad as you are thinking if all the car AI's make the same choices in every situation. That way you can get a much better feel for how those cars operate.

In reality I think your concern, shared by others will result in cars that act a lot more like buses. Almost always in the slow lane. Going a very safe speed. Leaving the faster/passing lanes to more dangerous humans.

The autonomous cars may soon be required to have visible markings so that they are easy to tell apart as well. Perhaps the color yellow could be reserved for them?

These changes will still be an adjustment, but hopefully one that doesn't result in a major number of accidents.

People can't operate perfectly. "Good practice makes better" is my version, not half as pithy.

"Practice makes perfect" is a bit weird as a motivational phrase, as no one who has practised ever got perfect. In your version, who can practice perfectly?

Bruce Lee was on point though I think.

"Practice makes permanent" is another version, warning against poor form when practicing as those bad habits will stick.

Yes. A good demo of this is starting off in 3rd gear (for demo purposes!). Without training fine clutch control, you'll just stall. After hours of traffic, it's easy.

There's a difference between going through the motion and actually doing something that improves your skill. Commuting doesn't help with improving your "driving skill" (whatever that means) just like eating 3 meals every day doesn't make you a master champion eater that wins the hot dog eating contest.

You say that but after 30 years on this earth I almost never choke on my food anymore.

I think the 10,000h thing should have a caveat that you also must do the 10,000 with the purpose of improving that skill, and not just doing something for 10,000 hours absent-minded.

So if you wanted to improve your driving then you'd do 10,000h of driving in which you'd try to become better than the last hour in every one of those hours.

Similarly, runners don't just do "running for fun" when they try to improve their skill, or count walking as part of their 10,000 hours. They try to beat their previous scores when they train.

This is exactly what Cal Newport talks about in So Good They Can't Ignore You. He calls it "deliberate practice" and gives the examples of playing guitar.

He (Cal) started playing around the same time as [professional guitarist] and claims to have likely played around the same number of hours. The difference was that he stuck to songs he was comfortable with. If he ever tried to learn a song that was out of his reach, he would give up and learn a different song. Contrast with the other guy, who would constantly push himself to not only play songs just outside of his comfort zone, but push himself to play them faster.

I believe he used a phrase that really stuck with me: the idea of "being comfortable with being uncomfortable".

Not a good comparison. We're discussing active practice. It turns out that if you draw for 20 hours a week, you will get better at drawing. If you read art-history books for 10 hours a week during your commute, you'll get better at art history. If you cycle-commute to work for 5 hours a week, you'll get fit.

This story (or at least one very similar) was recently in the Hidden Brain podcast[0], so I'm kinda wondering if there's a clear understanding of who's the dog and who's the tail, influence-wise.

But to your point specifically, in the podcast, I believe the guy was able to play the piano quite soon (I think days or weeks after his accident).

So to me, this points not to just an Adderall-like mental state, but an enhancement (though, sure, due to a compensation of one part of the brain for the damaged part).

To me, it feels like there are triggers or switches that perhaps optimize for certain tasks, or, it's the real default, and it's the majority of us who are off. But it's tough to guess what, if any, are the trade offs, other than potential brain damage, I guess. But it deeply intrigues me to think about what else we'll be unlocking in ourselves in the future.

[0] https://overcast.fm/+Ht3jI6KDw

You're probably right.

But still, I wonder how much of it is enhancement, and how much of it is a reduction in some suppressive mechanism.

Example: It's well known that beginning artists struggle with perceiving the world as symbols rather than raw visual data. When I first started to work on art, I realized I was a much better artist when tired than when fully alert. This was because I was honestly just thinking less about my drawings because I lacked the mental energy to do so. On a similar note, the trick of drawing things upside-down works for so many people because it removes the clear symbolic representation of what they're trying to draw.

So now imagine an adult, who has never trained or dabbled as an artist, receives a brain injury that severely impairs their logical symbol recognition. Due to the same injury, they lose the inhibitions that would normally prevent them from doing nothing but drawing all day, and they create art for 8 hours a day for an entire week.

I can say without a doubt in my mind that the progress that person would show in that first week would be insane. It would seem nothing short of miraculous. Yet, no true enhancement has taken place beyond the training; only a reduction in a conflicting thought process.

When it comes to things like music, I wonder about similar suppressive mechanisms. I wonder if difficulty in learning these skills has less to do with a lack of ability and more to do with conflicting cognition.

LSD and Shrooms reduce the inhibitory mechanisms inside the brain and have the same resulting state of mind.

Thanks for the comment, and I am glad I'm talking to someone else here who draws, because I feel like we may be able to share common mental paradigms. I too dabble in drawing [0] (I'm sharing mine, please, if you have any artwork, I'd love to see it).

But to your point, I think it's probably both, in that there is an enhancement due to a compensation and the enhancing of what one part of the brain is already good at.

But along with that are also reductions in inhibitions (some of which may be natural, as people tend to favor what they're good at, mixed with the novel curiosity of discovering a new talent), with probably a reduction in certain strengths that were competing with other strengths.

I know for me, some of my lack of artistic prowess comes from wanting to pursue too many fields of interest. So I could see that the reduction of interest in some things would enhance my ability.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's like asking which side of the scissors is doing the most cutting :)

[0] https://www.instagram.com/natecavanaugh/

I recall hearing a Peter Theil interview a couple of years ago where he hypotheses that social awkwardness is over-represented in successful founders because such people have been conditioned to heavily discount mainstream opinions. More socially integrated would-be entrepreneurs are more likely to listen to all the nay-sayers, "that's will never work", "who would want that?", "come join this investment bank/management consultancy with the cool kids" and never start the company.

The older I get, the more I agree with this thinking. The best ideas I've had, business wise, have been shot down continuously by friends/coworkers.

This raises two other questions, though:

1) Was their success due to their idea being weird and nobody else was brave/crazy enough to pursue it or was it because they put in an inordinate amount of effort (and luck)?

2) How many others tried the same idea and failed?

I imagine it was a little of both as well as a few other factors, but I find it unpalatable to basically boil it down to "being crazy enough to follow their dreams" (heavy paraphrasing, obviously).

This reminds me so much of the brainrot of the focused in "a deepness in the sky".

Is there a way to induce temporary brain dysfunctionality in a region- for example by inserting minimal doses of botox. So if i had a small reservoir and a hairthin pipeline, i could experiment with partial temporary deactivation on myself- but why would i do that. I must have been mad.

This sounds like a terrible idea! Just sleep-deprive yourself, and try not to kill yourself when you get depression. At least safer than breaking the blood-brain barrier ... but also counter-productive. No free lunch?

Maybee there is some trickery involved, that allows to train for this sort of intense concentration. I would call this a key-skill.

Maybee if you associate diversion with negative stimuli very early.

Isn't that how TMS is theorized to work, not by enhancing (amplifying) the functionality of a region of the brain, but by interference?

10,000 hours

That 10,000 hours thing is largely a Malcolm Gladwell invention, fwiw.

Don't get hung up on the number. It's shorthand for lots of hours of the right kind of practice.

Isn't the 10K hours thing based the research of Anders Ericsson? I thought Gladwell just came up with a catchy encapsulation for it.

It kind of makes sense. The total behavior is a combination of impulse and regulation. People know themselves and tend to behave (self-regulate) in a learned routine, hence regulate most of their impulses to... what probably amounts to a sort of death. [UPDATED] The insightful part about this is that this goes both ways - that your newly created genius is also unusually dangerous.

Through such an accident, you might lose some or all of your impulse control and logically end up in a completely new configuration, giving way to your (formerly suppressed) impulses and potential. It also means that you need to relearn other aspects of your impulse control too - which was sufficiently shown on Muybridge.

My pet theory is a tad different. It's not about volume too. There are subsystems that make you inspired by ideas; also subsystems that make you hold parameters and relationships of greater size, avoiding confusion and retries. Often I think of it like a larger set of registers (or a larger L1 cache). If you're too constrained, you spend more effort trying to shuffle breadcrumbs that don't connect in your mind. This would require long hours to gradually build intermediate abstraction/compression/patterns and with time finally connect the dots. I believe that quick dot-connecting is a source of pleasure.. (maybe a structural reward because it means you can integrate/validate a new set of neural network links) which makes people do it deeper and/or longer.

I do believe that social subsystems exist along more abstract ones, and it's true that depending on the person and context, social subsystem may very well grab the largest share of mind time. People with less potent or conflicted social areas may thus find pleasure in other ways, contemplating, understanding.

Often I see autists as people who grew the intellectual one faster and larger and try to use that to interact with people; which causes many issues since people and crowd are volatile, complex, stateful; unlike objects which can be reflected upon more easily. As if the social(affective) area are too crippled to yield useful emotions/ideas so they default on their stronger side, intellectual.

Exactly my impression too.

Reduced inhibition reveals formerly hidden skills. Extreme focus (even fanaticism) leads to its improvement.

Yes. From my own experience, it seems to be more about increased impulsivity, while pursuing interests to a level that would be uncommon in a "well-rounded" person.

I think that impulsivity and creativity are the deeper connection, with all the good and bad that that entails. There's like a sweet spot of impulsivity where you're mostly able to function, but also generate a lot of ideas and connections between disparate topics.

So it doesn't really seem that novel that brain damage -> decreased regulation -> increased impulsivity -> creativity. Personality changes like obsession or not caring what others think give the time to work on a problem and harness that increased creativity.

EDIT> The sink is overflowing with dirty dishes, I've got carbon fiber shards all over the floor from getting so jacked listening to "Walk on Water" that I smashed my tennis racket (don't know why), it's been 7 months in this place, and I still haven't got unpacked, I'm totally not ready to pick up the kids tonight, but BY GOD IF I DON'T get my TensorFlow time in today, I'm going to be seriously pissed!

genius is in th e persistence and the a le x a n d e r technique; try and try differently, using what you know, wait, patiently, learn in a flow, then come back, come back, come back, and send yourself out in a zillion pieces to try again.

all your base are belong to us, take your time.