The Myth of Massed Practice | Hacker News Reader

The Myth of Massed Practice

salon.com

33 pointsjlhamilton12 comments

There is no such myth. Until seeing this headline (which is linkbait, even after the title change by dang of the HN moderation team), I had never seen the term "massed practice." That's not the term in the scientific literature on the development of expertise. The term in that literature is "deliberate practice," and what deliberate practice is gets a lot of detailed description in that literature.[1] Even the example at the beginning of the article is contrary to the spirit of the deliberate practice literature, which makes me wonder how well they've really thought about the prior literature.

The byline of this article is interesting: "Peter C. Brown is a writer and novelist in St. Paul, Minn.; Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel are professors of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis." That looks to me like two professors of psychology were hacked off that they weren't getting as much attention as the originators of the deliberate practice research, so they decided to hire a ghostwriter to help them write a popular book. (I could be mistaken about how this collaboration originated.) Anyway, the book is gaining some favorable reviews[2] (with the help of their university press office?[3]), so maybe it will be worth a read for us even thought it isn't really a response to what this excerpt suggests it's a response to. Another excerpt from the book[4] has actionable advice that is quite good.

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22deliberate+prac...

[2] http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/make-it-stick-th...

http://blog.coreknowledge.org/tag/henry-l-roediger/

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/is-america/201404/test-p...

[3] http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/26780.aspx

[4] http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/03/09/how-learn-bet...

The title is link-baity and overreaching, but the article itself is actually good. It's a shame.

I changed it to the title of one of the sections. This is a trick we often use when the article title (which is often by a headline writer, not the article author) is linkbait or misleading. Assuming it covers the scope of the article, it's often better.

Thank you. Glad to see HN shifting to a more nuanced approach than the "almost always prefer the original headline" that was in vogue there for a season.

You're welcome! If I may, though, on the procedural point: neither the policy nor the practice re headlines has changed. We're doing just the same things we used to. The fact that it seems otherwise is an optical illusion, albeit a benign one which perhaps I shouldn't try to mess with.

The real change here is moderator feedback (two-way) in the threads, which people seem to agree is helping. I fear how meta it is, but we're still in a transitional phase. We'll eventually try receding a bit, after it's had time to sink in.

There's also an intro mentioning him, plus a big photo of him, and he's listed in the topics. But I think you're substantially right: the article text proper doesn't mention him at all... as if it's been link-baited by Salon, and the article authors are innocent. This makes it less annoying to read.

Spaced and varied learning is more effective - which fits with Gladwell's/Dweck's "deliberate practice"/growth mindset anyway.

Malcolm specifically said that "it takes 10000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery."

There are two component here: 1) 10000 hours and 2) deliberate practice.

What op present us are "you can ditch 10000 hours because deliberate practice is enough" but when you go through the article it shows that all test subject were trained for very narrow set of mastery for short time period (bean bag tossing, microsurgey) or very wide set of mastery for long period of time (football play)

moreover, Gladwell's use of practice in the book I think is more meant in the general sense (as in practicing an art) because those 10000 hours are not necessarily "sitting down and playing czerny on the piano" but also things like "playing around on a mainframe" - basically anything that gains you experience, which is usually going to be more variegated in the way that the article suggests.

The author misses Gladwells premise from go. He said deliberate, not obsessive. His discussion was specifically focused on variance of experience and learning over that time.

The article doesn't mention Gladwell, and is actually quite good. (Edit: The title does, of course, and is quite bad. That's why we changed it. Misleading and/or linkbaity titles get changed.)

There's also that picture of him at the very top of the article.

I hope Hacker News readers are smart enough to distinguish between the text of a serious article and bait applied by magazine editors, especially when the two are unrelated.

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