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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Except that instruments don't come with a backspace. If you want a closer approximation simply refuse to edit your texts at all: write it out in one go and refuse to fix any mistake that you make. What you will find is that your speed initially drops to maybe 10% or even less of what it was before, but after a while it speeds up again and at some point you'll be typing faster than ever before because fixing mistakes takes a lot of time.

Your nick, by the way, is perfectly suited to this endeavor.

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>Except that instruments don't come with a backspace. If you want a closer approximation simply refuse to edit your texts at all: write it out in one go and refuse to fix any mistake that you make.

The other day someone posted a webapp they wrote that doesn't let you edit and that blurs all the text except the current line while you're typing. If you want to edit your text, you need to download the file. His aim was to separate writing from editing, which I think it's an interesting approach.

Anyone have a link for this?

Found it! [1]

https://write.sonnet.io/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34183244

> What you will find is that your speed initially drops to maybe 10% or even less of what it was before, but after a while it speeds up again and at some point you'll be typing faster than ever before because fixing mistakes takes a lot of time.

I've never been entirely convinced by this argument. I will always make mistakes, so I could argue that I need to be able to quickly fix those mistakes, so I should practice doing so to some degree. The implication that fixing your mistakes somehow trains you to make mistakes seems tenuous.

I will admit that for me, my "end goal" allows me to see what I'm typing and requires me to correct my mistakes. If, for instance, your end goal has you not even seeing the text you're typing then there's probably no reason to go back and fix your mistakes.

This is where the musical instrument comparison breaks for me. If your goal with an instrument is a performance, then with a musical instrument you can't fix your mistakes during the performance. You will still make mistakes, of course, you just won't be able to fix them.

That said, if you're making a lot of mistakes then perhaps you're getting enough practice fixing them and should stop. It's just that I don't necessarily accept a hard rule that you should carry on regardless and the outcome will be better. I've never seen any research on this subject.

No, the implication is that if you slow down to the point that you become once again more conscious of what you are doing that you will re-train your muscle memory to the point that mistakes will become less likely. If you 'practice your mistakes' you will make mistakes!

This is a problem many people have when practicing to play an instrument, they end up practicing but making so many mistakes that their muscle memory sees exposure to too many mistakes to get the right pattern down. By avoiding that through slowing down and practicing the right moves instead of a mixture of the right moves and the mistakes you will lay down patterns that are much more dependable.

When performing that pays off because then there is no way to fix your mistakes. So the best way to practice is to not make mistakes. And any practice method that helps you to do that is a good one. This is pretty much the philosophy being pianojacq.com, a sightreading / practicing application that I've been building over the last couple of years and the effect on my own ability to learn and practice without mistakes has been huge. That does not imply that this is for everybody but from my own experience to slow down, even if that means being agonizingly slow for a number of passes without mistakes has a pay-off that is much higher than practicing the same piece with mistakes at a higher speed. Once you do the right thing, speed is easy. As long as you don't do the right thing speed is irrelevant.

Ah, that does make sense but it wasn't what I was originally replying to. You didn't say why we were losing 10% speed after refusing to fix our mistakes, and I actually thought that this was supposed to be due to the software penalizing us for the mistakes when we could have got a higher speed overall if we'd corrected them ourselves.

Slowing down during your deliberate practice to the point where you don't make many mistakes could well be optimal, and something I should probably do more of. Albeit it still isn't clear to me what we should do with the occasional mistake we make even while going slow, but I accept that you think we should ignore them.

The basic idea is to lay down repetitions of the 'perfect' pattern to the point that you are no longer thinking about it and any mistake will mar that process, so it is better to slow down to the point where you are no longer making mistakes (or at least, very few, initially, and hopefully after practice so few that they no longer happen at all).

For me, depending on the complexity of a given piece that can be anywhere from 5% to 20% or so of indicated tempo for the first times that I practice a piece. One of the hardest things to take into account when practicing slow is that you should still use the exact same fingerings as you would when playing fast because otherwise all of your practice is for nothing!

>Except that instruments don't come with a backspace

In practice it does. The common advice is to go back to the start of the phrase when you make a mistake practicing instrument.

Yes, but in performance it doesn't. And reason why you want to go back to the beginning of the phrase is to make sure that the pattern remains whole, if you just do the little bit where your mistake was chances are you'll end up with alternate fingerings or other artifacts that will make the fix at best useless and at worst a net negative.

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