Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
After his book 'David and Goliath' received numerous bad reviews for oversimplifying things and pinning causes on things that don't make sense, Gladwell lashed out at his critics and basically said that his books are not written for experts. [3]
Almost all of Gladwell's books are written in a style that categorically states that the subjects of his writing have a predetermined cause and effect. He doesn't leave much to chance, uncertainty or some other unknown cause. Everything is certain. His stories and narrations always imply a cause. That's the real secret of his writing.
[1] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/11/14/the-tipping-po...
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sorry-malcolm-glad...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/29/malcolm-gladwe...
1. Take research findings in psychology, sociology, etc., all fields which are having big replication problems.
2. Pick out findings that are surprising enough to write a pop-science book about. These are less likely to be true -- that's why they're surprising.
3. Oversimplify for popular consumption, sound very confident, and omit things that don't fit the story. (This makes for a much better read, as epistemically sinful as it may be.)
Each step makes good commercial sense, and I can't hate him for it, but the resulting books are unlikely to be Actually True.
What I find interesting is that people who discount most of Gladwell’s theories, will oftentimes agree with others, as long as it confirms their own biases.
But calling a pharmaceutical company an "amphetamine company" seems a bit obtuse. For one, amphetamines are commonly prescribed by doctors and are used to successfully treat a lot of serious problems with patients. Secondly, those companies makes lots of other drugs too.
But I guess it doesn't sound as bad if you say he accepted money from "insulin companies".
Sometimes pop-psychology, if it gets us more interested in subjects, may not be that harmful.
He is a fair story teller but is closer to opinion than non-fiction.
He says if his books are too simplistic for you, don't read them. I am also likely to tell friends and family to not read them.
was proven not to be valid
1) HN is supposed to link to the original report about the research, which is done by the Guardian (linked in the first sentence!) here [1]
2) "Anders Ericsson [original study author] said the new paper actually replicated most of their findings."
3) Gladwell pushed the 10k rule to the point of breaking, by that I mean he extrapolated way beyond the original research. Gladwell's point may not hold up (as the title reads) because he pushed it too far, he drew his own imaginary conclusions that make for a nice story.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/21/practice-doe...
However, he never said the 10,000 rule would create experts. He said it would create proficiency.
It's become a major theme in society (especially online at places like Reddit) where someone misunderstands a statement, and then promptly attacks or disproves it, instead of asking the person for clarification first.
If there is one thing I've learned over the years is people tend to be well intended, and by asking for clarification, one has more of an opportunity to learn than shutting it down immediately. At worse you've learned where they're coming from, which imho is more valuable than the initial statement itself.
"Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours"
True expertise is not mere proficiency.
What I found really interesting was that how you practice is so important and how we often get it wrong. When I think about things I've picked up mastery in over the years and things which eluded me, I see a lot of similarities. Mastery for me comes from varying the activities, not from rote repetition and "muscle memory."
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NH2YUq...
The Pros identify the specific scales and short sections of pieces they hit problems with, and focus almost all their practice on those tricky parts. As a result they get as much as 10x or 20x or more utility from the time they spend on it.
In other words, is it necessary to go through the rote work of practicing basics before becoming a pro? I would guess the answer is yes.
It would be far more telling to track many people, from beginner through their musical (in this case) careers, and determine who became pro and who didn't, and what their practice was like throughout.
The central theme of [Peak] is to review what things all experts have in common, irrespective of their varied fields: these being a habit of deliberate, purposeful practice and mental maps.
[Peak] Peak: Secrets from the new science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
[Outliers] Outliers by Malcom Gladwell
We all know this at some level. Nobody expects to be a mediocre violinist at the 59th minute of the 9,999th hour and to be a master one minute later. To me the book read like an extended musing on folk wisdom such as "practice makes perfect" and that famous Coolidge quote about persistence. Obviously talent, genius and education are factors, but persistence and determination are huge.
Thanks for catching it.
Honestly, those who are excellent communicators will be able to persuade people in masses to follow what they preach. I find this extremely interesting.
Now is the 10k hour rule flawed or not? I have no idea. I tend to focus on what works for me vs. the masses. We're all different.
Malcolm Gladwell declaring something based on cherry-picked anecdotes does not give anything a "scientific basis".
While Gladwell (very) often drives me crazy (he's a walking, talking Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect machine), I find Outliers to be his best book. You just have to reframe it mentally as "mastery generally involves a whole lot of practice, here are some stories illustrating that". Even when I vehemently disagree with his conclusions, he really is an excellent storyteller.
Anyways it seems obvious that the relationship between hours in and performance starts to get skewed at top percentages of human performance. Doing well in the NBA requires a lucky draw of genetic height / strength as well as practice. But a lot of deliberate practice will probably make you better than your neighbors at pickup games.
“We’re obsessed with things like coherence, consistency, neatness of argument. Readers are indifferent to those things” - Malcolm Gladwell
Separately, the research he based this on is about deliberate practice. If you're not going to practice deliberately, you might in fact be better off not practicing at all.
"""MALCOLM GLADWELL: The 10,000-hour stuff that I put in Outliers was really only intended to perform a very specific narrative function — or not narrative function, but argumentative function. To me the point of 10,000 hours is: if it takes that long to be good, you can’t do it by yourself. If you have to play chess for 10 years in order to be a great chess player, then that means that you can’t have a job, or maybe if you have a job it can’t be a job that takes most of your time..."""
> But according to a new study published in Royal Society: Open Science that attempted to replicate the findings of the original, practice alone doesn't account for mastery. In the study, deliberate practice only accounted for a quarter percentage of the skills difference, which doesn't account for what makes someone an expert.
> Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, and researcher Megha Maitra interviewed three groups of 13 violinists, each rated as less accomplished, good, and best. The violinists were told to keep a diary to log practice hours, and those hours were then tallied. While the less accomplished violinists had logged an estimated 6,000 hours by age 20, the good and best had both logged around 11,000 hours.
> That is to say: The good and best violinists saw no huge difference, as opposed to the not so good violinists, who didn't practice as much. The implication: practice didn't account for all the differences in performance.
And the abstract:
> We sought to replicate Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer's (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer 1993 Psychol. Rev.100, 363–406) seminal study on deliberate practice. Ericsson et al. found that differences in retrospective estimates of accumulated amounts of deliberate practice corresponded to each skill level of student violinists. They concluded, ‘individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice’ (p. 392). We reproduced the methodology with notable exceptions, namely (i) employing a double-blind procedure, (ii) conducting analyses better suited to the study design, and (iii) testing previously unanswered questions about teacher-designed practice—that is, we examined the way Ericsson et al. operationalized deliberate practice (practice alone), and their theoretical but previously unmeasured definition of deliberate practice (teacher-designed practice), and compared them. We did not replicate the core finding that accumulated amounts of deliberate practice corresponded to each skill level. Overall, the size of the effect was substantial, but considerably smaller than the original study's effect size. Teacher-designed practice was perceived as less relevant to improving performance on the violin than practice alone. Further, amount of teacher-designed practice did not account for more variance in performance than amount of practice alone. Implications for the deliberate practice theory are discussed.
First was that Asian children, at least those who speak languages that function this way, grok the concept of addition faster than their Western counterparts because the counting systems are extremely regular, so they pick up on the patterns easier because 11 isn't the arbitrary "eleven" instead it's simply "ten one".
Second was success in math is in part a function of perseverance. Impossible problems were given to groups of kids and something like the American kids gave up after 9 minutes on average and the Japanese kids gave up after 14 minutes on average. My memory is fuzzy on the details but that particular metric correlated really well iirc. Been a long time since I read it.
Gladwell never defines Asian, instead shifting between definitions that rely on nationality (cherrypicked test scores from a number of well-off Northeast Asian countries), language (where he brings up the Chinese counting system used only in some but not all Asian Languages), and ethnicity (where he compares Asian-American children to other American children, many of whom share little to no commonalities with the former two groups). He uses the classic tactic of generalizing these three groups as one through the nefarious concept of "culture", which is poorly defined and can not objectively measured.
He then makes the claim that "Asians" are "better at math" without backing up the point with anything other than cherrypicked standardized test scores.
Aside from that, he only shows vague correlations without ever proving causation in any rigorous way. Even if the Chinese counting system leads to a faster understanding of arithmetic, Gladwell does not prove that this leads to significantly better math performance. Likewise, he simply claims without any solid proof that growing rice is more difficult than wheat (what units do you measure that in?), or that this increased difficulty would actually provide enough pressure to create a "culture of perseverance" (again, what objective units do you measure that in?).
Individual claims in Gladwell's writing may be true, but they never connect together in any rigorous way to prove the claims he tries to make.
And then I'll say some long thing about how when you're giving someone advice, you should hold yourself to a higher standard, not a lower one. Especially if you're an institution.
> because it was just a supporting detail for the point they wanted to make anyway.
The people who make arguments whose evidence is just a supporting detail for the point they wanted to make anyway are common--some are some of my friends, family and coworkers, but I take what they say a lot less seriously than I do people who have high standards for evidence.
>We didn't really need a study to tell us that
Perhaps not, but we can ask for studies on what kind of practice, how much and how old you are when you practice et cetera. Yes you "have to practice." But you can be interested in how to practice well, and one way to know that is good studies (i.e. not dubious ones).