The Illusion of Winning

I find the following long quote a bit of a tangent,but for some reason I find it relevant:

" How long will you need to find your truest, most productive niche? This I cannot predict, for, sadly, access to a podium confers no gift of prophecy. But I can say that however long it takes, it will be time well spent. I am reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, too, because, for all his potential, he lacked focus. He had been a history major in college, and a linguistics minor. On graduating, though, he concluded that, as rewarding as these fields had been, he was not really cut out to make a living at them. He decided that what he was really meant to do was study economics. And so, he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at the University of Wisconsin. And, after only a semester, he dropped out of the program. Not for him. So, history was out; linguistics, out; economics, out. What to do? This was a time of widespread political activism, and Ed became an aide to Senator George McGovern, then running for the presidency on an anti-war platform. He also wrote articles for political journals like the Nation and the New Republic. After some months, Ed realized that politics was not for him, because, in his words, it demanded qualities he did not have, foremost among them common sense. All right, then: history, linguistics, economics, politics, were all out as career choices. What to do? Ed suddenly realized that he was really suited to study mathematics. So he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at Princeton. I met him midway through his first year there--just after he had dropped out of the mathematics department. He realized, he said, that what he was really meant to do was study physics; he applied to the physics department, and was accepted.

I was happy for him. But I lamented all the false starts he had made, and how his career opportunities appeared to be passing him by. Many years later, in 1987, I was reading the New York Times magazine and saw a full-page picture akin to a mug shot, of a thin man with a large head staring out of thick glasses. It was Ed Witten! I was stunned. What was he doing in the Times magazine? Well, he was being profiled as the Einstein of his age, a pioneer of a revolution in physics called "String Theory." Colleagues at Harvard and Princeton, who marvelled at his use of bizarre mathematics to solve physics problems, claimed that his ideas, popularly called a "theory of everything," might at last explain the origins and nature of the cosmos. Ed said modestly of his theories that it was really much easier to solve problems when you analyzed them in at least ten dimensions. Perhaps. Much clearer to me was an observation Ed made that appeared near the end of this article: every one of us has talent; the great challenge in life is finding an outlet to express it. I thought, he has truly earned the right to say that. And I realized that, for all my earlier concerns that he had squandered his time, in fact his entire career path--the ventures in history, linguistics, economics, politics, math, as well as physics--had been rewarding: a time of hard work, self-discovery, and new insight into his potential based on growing experience."

http://www.colby.edu/colby.mag/issues/84n3/ivory.html

I think Adams makes a couple of mistakes in his post.

1) He implies that practice is something to be less proud of than inherent ability to play pool. Life is all about making decisions to practice/pursue/play certain things over another.

The other thing is that few people have the willpower/dediction/stamina to devote time to activities that truly challenge them. Sure, I can play chopsticks on a piano, but beyond that I couldn't sit still. Yet, I don't hear a great musician and think, "They just practiced more than I did."

That's why certain activities are viewed with more respect. For example, being great at Modern Warfare 2 is not something that will win you much praise. People don't view it as taking much willpower to play a video game for hours on end. It's kind of like the default state of most people. But people will likely praise you for being great at math.

2) He also seems to think that inherent ability plays no role (I presume that 5% luck, is luck in the instance of the game, not luck being gifted at it). While practice is important. I suspect there is probably large variance in the initial condition of various people for various activities.

The only thing you can probably be confident of is that with good practice you will improve. But no guarantee that if you do more hours of practice than another person that you will be better.

Tracking something like this in class I suspect is more likely to actually teach kids that practice isn't sufficient. In fifth grade I spent many of hours trying to breakdance, and I never could do a headspin that friends of mine could do almost out the womb. I think I'd only be more discouraged to see how much time I wasted on it. Although looking back, it was worth it, and it strengthened my upper body for other activities. I just can't head spin for some reason.

Adams doesn't address the issue of quality of practice. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.

There is a huge advantage to practicing something useful even if you're not very good compared to the best. Like he says, he can beat 99% of people in eight ball, even though he'd probably be easily defeated by most professionals. Of course, playing billiards is pretty much useless. I don't consider my computer skills in any area to be top notch, but when I help out non-technical people they think I am some kind of wizard. I say "hey, I barely did anything!", but to them any interaction with a computer is a complete mystery. So I'm not a great programmer, and I'm definitely not a great sysadmin, but with just some basic skills 99% of people will defer to mean on technical issues.

I agree that this is a vital lesson to teach kids. It is even more important to give them the freedom and support to discover what endeavor they really want to apply that effort to.

Adams has a point about using pool in schools to teach the correlation between effort and effectiveness.

His experiment might have interesting side effects. Number of hours spent practicing isn't the only variable that affects skill - it matters what type of practice you do. The kids who practice deeply and push themselves to the limit of their abilities will see much greater return on their investment of time. The kids who just mess around won't get that much better.

It would be interesting to see the look on the kid's face who spent 100 hours practicing over the course of a year, after he gets beaten by the kid who spent 50 hours practicing. I wonder if he'd understand the concept of "intentional practice", or if he'd just be humiliated.

Just another example of how easy it is to measure the wrong thing.

I think this is a better article than most of the commenters here imply. I think Adams realizes that genetics plays a role, that there is such a thing as good and bad practice. But he's not claiming any universals: rather he's proposing a deft experiment to show how ability correlates to practice rather than to innate talent with regard to one particular arbitrary skill.

I don't know exactly how his experiment would turn out. And it would be hard to decorrelate practice time from innate ability --- I certainly find it difficult to keep dedicating time toward activities in which I see no progress being made. But it's a good experiment, and a style of reality-based learning we should encourage.

My intuition is that he's right, and that the winners would be dominated by those who spent the most time practicing. But I'd love to have real numbers against which to test that intuition.

Wait a minute -- doesn't school already offer repeated examples of the effects of practice on results? After all, what is studying but practice? And what is an exam, but a way to measure one's skills (and therefore compare them)?

In other words, this message is already pounded into students' heads every day.

The problem is, there's not always a direct link between the number of hours of studying and a student's grade on a test. How many times have you or a friend spent hours and hours preparing for a test only to get a barely passing grade, when the guy in the next row barely studied but got an A?

Incidents like these tend to be demotivating and have the opposite effect of what Adams is striving for. Students then feel that effort doesn't yield results. Sometimes they just give up and stop expending more effort.

Certainly that's not the correct reaction. (Those students should get help adjusting the way they study and what they study until their effort pays off.) But I imagine it's probably the same reaction that you'd get if you were to try an experiment like Adams is suggesting with 8-ball or bowling or soccer or whatever activity you choose.

Calling athletes "freaks of nature" does both a disservice to athletes in general and his argument in particular. He falls into the same trap of missing the fact that regardless of talent or genetics, if you don't work your tail off, you aren't ever going to amount to much. Just because you're born tall, doesn't mean you can play basketball any more than if you're born as Scott Adams, you can play pool. It still takes an inordinate amount of work to become a "professional" at anything regardless of your starting point.

I don't see how it's impractical to keep a log of how much time you spend practicing something. It can be as simple as placing an X on a calendar or as complex as keeping a detailed journal. Once a person does that, they can typically begin to track their personal progress in any particular skill.

I couldn't find any warning that practising doing it wrong counts against you. Thinking back to when I was ten years old and we practised sums in school I would get nine out of ten of while many in the class would get four out of ten.

We diverged and I went on to study mathematics at Cambridge, but I'm left with a question about the origin of the divergence. At ten years old I wasn't putting in extra hours on arithmetic. On the other hand, if you only get four out of ten there is probably a reason, such as not understanding carrying. When you add up, with carries stuck in at random as you hope for the best, you both get half marks, and you practise doing it wrong. What is the value of an hour of practising doing it wrong? 1/2? 0? -1? -2?

I don't believe that winning others is a sustainable source of motivation in the first place.

A true master must learn to love one-upping himself again and again. Otherwise his skills are dependent on continuously finding someone greater to compete against. This becomes harder and harder when he gets better.

Similarly I believe that you can't build a successful business solely based on beating the competition. People talk about competitiveness and competence all the time and I smell false. I think that success is a side-effect of doing what you can't not do.

He's missing the differentiation between strategy and execution when it comes to games. From what I understand of pool, the strategy isn't overly complicated and, while the execution takes thousands of hours of practice to have the required manual dexterity, it is probably achievable by a good percentage of the population.

However, lets look at something like basketball. The vast majority of the population, no matter how much practice, will never be able to dribble a ball as quick as Kobe Bryant, or jump five a five foot vertical, etc.

Chess, on the other hand, has almost no 'execution' barrier to entry. Most everyone can move pieces around and understand the rules. However, the strategy and mental state one needs to be in takes a lot of both practice and innate ability. I'm sure if you took his experiment of seeing how much people practiced chess, the winner would not be the one who practiced the most.

A third variable is inventiveness. While such may occur through practice, practice does not guarantee inventiveness. I would argue that it is ultimately the inventive and tenacious choices made during a game leading to a win which people actually enjoy. Such choices can be conditioned by practice and talent, but ultimately are not reducible to such.

Here is a personal anecdote to illustrate my point. I was part of a bowling league for a season. I sucked at bowling, and had trouble breaking 70. Throughout the season my teammates patiently critiqued my style and gave me advice until I gradually learned to line up the ball with the arrows and bowl straight. It was very tedious and boring, but I improved per Scott's observation. At the end my high game broke 120.

Then I stopped bowling for about 2 years. On a whim, some friends and I bowled a game. This time I decided to discard everything I learned and just make up my own style, which was more fun. During that game I invented my own technique of curving the ball. However, instead of the gradual, painful process of "practice" and slow accumulation of points I dramatically improved my game, beating my friends despite my lack of practice and rusted skill.

After about 6 visits to a bowling lane over the course of another 2 years I regularly score in the 130s and 140s. Additionally, bowling is now very enjoyable and the game is intuitive.

The difference between the two techniques is quite dramatic. When I switch back to straight bowling my score drops again and I have difficulty climbing above 100. However, I am more consistent with straight bowling. Curve bowling has a much higher variance in score (from a recent game): X, 00, X, /, X00. So, I combine the two techniques and arrive at an augmentation of Scott's view: practiced skill plus innovation/intuition.

I don't like that he mentions music. Music should be about self expression and not competition. It is rewarding, even if you suck at it, and most real musicians would never put someone down for not having fully developed skills, but instead try to appreciate what skills they have developed.

I agree with the point that Adam makes about practice being so important.

Yet, I would also have to disagree, because that may not be the complete picture, but just part of it.

This is how I would put my reason for disagreement:

Where the inherent talent is the same between two people, the one with the higher amount of practice would have higher chances to win.

and

Where the amount of practice is the same, the one with the higher inherent talent would have higher chances to win.

What would happen, when they are more or less evenly matched in talent and practice? Someother factors must be at play.

creativity? Mental, physical and emotional stamina? Ability to perform under severe stress?

Nevertheless, a nice thought illustrated well.

The statistics thrown out seem silly. 95/5% ? Sure.. Maybe if you're really, really, really good.. But as you approach someone with similar skills, your chances of winning drop off.. Probably exponentially. Also, practice is far from everything. Are two people who've never played just as likely to win? Even if they're playing eachother? :). But seriously, there's all kinds of aptitudes and tendencies, and the specific effects of two players individual style/skills affecting the outcome. Winning is finding a way to take whatever odds you show up with and gaming your resources to tip them in your favor. This article ought to be titled "winning is boring because I'm better than, like, everyone."

Winning is a requirement of competition. (School systems take note). From competition comes the very best of the human species; often along with the very worst.

To say that winning is an illusion is to miss this larger reality. Individual wins are irrelevant in most cases, because they are only symptoms of a much more profound and important behavior. Ironically, winning is the most important thing in the world to the human species.

Unless you have some other method to achieve the best of the human species, I'd be careful how much hatred you direct towards competition by discounting winning.

Practice doesn't make perfect. It only get you 80% there and the remaining 20% is from a combination of sweat-equity and talent.

At some point, the efforts of B-grade practice sessions result in a saturated level of performance.

If there's something we should teach our kids, it's that doing "OK" is not good enough - you should focus on doing YOUR BEST.

The spirit of competition and "winning" is that you are giving 100% of your effort to the goal at hand - be it winning a race or leaning a new hacking skill.

I think the experiment that Scott Adams suggests would be a dismal failure. I think some kids would be naturally good and others naturally bad. Among people with similar natural talent, practice would be the main determinant of success. But natural talent likely varies so widely that this correlation would get lost in the noise, and most of the participants would come away with the wrong message.

Or is it the right message?

practice is what you need to be good at everything, but the same amount of practice will lead to very different performances between individuals...

Not just that, maybe I can have the same amount of pool skill than other people from the point of view of number of game won, but I'll have my stile that can be more enjoyable (or less) to watch compared to other players, or can tell something about me to people watching me playing.

Now I'm starting to hope that this "news" of the recent years that practice is an absolutely fundamental factor for success does not get misunderstood in this way. I know plenty of people that practiced years after years in the most different disciplines and they simply suck, because talent is not water.

I'm guessing he chose pool because it's basically a solo sport (certainly the practice he talks about is). He doesn't seem to have a feel for the interpersonal dynamics that occur in a head-to-head game -- think McEnroe vs. Borg, Fisher/Spassky, etc.

The game begins when you have the basics down and a lot of practice behind you. Before that it is a simple game of luck. After that it becomes a game of bluffs, calls and game theory.