Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Misleading title: the thesis is more accurately “Tacit knowledge is why NDM methods are more useful than deliberate practice”.

It also doesn't actually do much to explain that thesis, dismissing delivered practice with the quick an for shallowly-addressed claim that it only works in field with established pedagogy, which may be the case, but most of the fields that it dismisses deliberate practice for on this basis have established pedagogy (with, sure, some pedagogical controversies, but that's true if the field that it acknowledges have the requisite established pedagogy for deliberate practice, too, so it's not at all clear what, if anything, the distinction being drawn is), and doesn't actually do much to establish that NDM methods are particularly useful for developing tacit knowledge. Basically, the piece is an extended discussion of the idea of tacit knowledge, with the whole primary argument, to which most of the piece is only tangentially relevant, rushed through at the end as if it were an afterthought.

> dismissing delivered practice with the quick an for shallowly-addressed claim that it only works in field with established pedagogy

This is the actual definition of deliberate practice. As in, Ericsson explicitly says deliberate practice CAN ONLY exist in domains with a long tradition of pedagogical development.

Go and read the original papers by Ericsson. Or the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Or his popular science book Peak.

One of the nice things about writing a blog is that you get to bring an audience along on a journey of discovery. In this case, you don't actually have to go very far — the blog has done the work for you. This is a 5k word-ish summary of Peak: https://commoncog.com/blog/peak-book-summary/ ... and this is a 5k word summary of all the criticisms arrayed against deliberate practice, also linked from the piece above. https://commoncog.com/blog/the-problems-with-deliberate-prac...

If you want to read about NDM techniques — surprise, surprise! It turns out that the techniques are described in about 10k words over at https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to-practice... and https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to-practice...

And those posts are also linked from the piece.

(Edited to remove snark).

I think there is room for nuance here. True deliberate practice is easiest to apply in those domains, but there are some lessons from Ericsson's work that can be applied using the NDM framework. I think the point that people miss often is that it is deliberate practice, not just practice. While we may not be able to practice like a potential chess grand master, we can deliberately challenge ourselves and look to learn from our mistakes. If you squint hard enough, some of what Klein writes about in "The Power of Intuition" seem like attempts to deliberately practice something in a field without that long tradition of pedagogical development (or fields that don't train for tacit knowledge). His paper with Peter Fadde, "Deliberate Performance" also talks about this. That said, you sometimes don't learn the right lessons, and if the situation changes too dramatically, all your tacit knowledge might work against you.

One tangent comment to go with this: One of Klein's occasional coauthors, Robert Hoffman, co-wrote a book on expert weather forecasters that I really liked. Weather is hard to predict, but one thing they found that what the best forecasters did was to look at the data before looking at what the computer models predicted. Once they had an idea of what they thought the weather might look like, they compared with the model. This kept their skills sharp and ensured that they continued to learn.

In Peak, Ericsson seems to finally settle on one definition, which was what I used in the end. He calls what you just describe "not being able to deliberately practice like a grandmaster" a completely different thing — purposeful practice.

There's a whole chapter in Peak where he tries to talk about what to do if you are in a field with badly developed pedagogical methods. It's basically a badly written copy of The Power of Intuition (Klein). I was incredibly dissatisfied with it, because I was mostly interested in putting DP to practice, and his recommendations were far from practicable. I wish he had just referred to Hoffman or Klein, both of them practitioners in NDM, and therefore both more familiar with attempts to design training programs for fields where no pedagogical rigour exist.

I know you're inclined to give Ericsson a pass, and pass things off as deliberate practice even when his definition clearly excludes said thing. But my view is that we should call a spade a spade and use the exact definitions the man used. If he thought it was good enough for his popular audience, it should be good enough for me.

That makes sense, a couple of years ago there was a lot of misleading interpretations going around, precise definitions help clear things up. I read Peak a while back, and I must’ve forgot that distinction.

I found the Klein book you mentioned more useful than Ericsson’s as well, that Fadde/Klein paper I mentioned was also pretty helpful. I need to reread both, and put them into practice more than I have. I read too much, and I don’t get the tacit knowledge that comes from experience...

Another good book is Surpassing Ourselves by Bereiter and Scardamalia. They studied how students developed writing skill. Their definition of expertise is a bit different than Ericsson’s, but I think it is more useful.

Thanks for the recommendations! Adding to my toread.

Thanks for the pointers! Not original commenter, but familiar with the literature a bit. One thing that confused me reading your article is that you are criticizing one, fairly narrow way Ericsson has defined deliberate practice.

But in Hambrick, Campitelli, and Macnamara's volume on expertise, they do a good job showing that he has not been consistent with definitions (e.g. 3 definitions: must have, sometimes must have, doesn't require a teacher).

Not a problem for your post, but I was pretty confused about what you were calling deliberate practice until reading this response.

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