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The Expert Mind
Vicissidude writes "Teachers in sports, music, and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity. There is usually no way to tell, from a recital alone, whether a young violinist's extraordinary performance stems from innate ability or from years of Suzuki-style training. The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. In fact, it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music, and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others. It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after László Polgár published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier."
Teachers in sports, music, and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity.
Except that at a young age, are not tremendous ability and precocity the same thing?
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Never mind, the slashdot hive mind is ready and waiting for you!
.....
Mod points at the ready
the problem with those 10 years is, that Mozart took public concerts when he was 6 (to the emperrors btw).And was able to repeat incredible hard compositions.If its not born, then what is it?
...In my opinion, I just can't see this kind of post getting very far in life.
While I believe, definitely, that it has to take work to master something, and that work is the defining characteristic of a grand master, it's also important to have some inborn ability. You can't be a chess master or genius mathematician or amazing athlete without some genetic preponderance toward intelligence or coordination or speed. This becomes extremely evident in bodybuilding; genetic makeup matters big time. Yes, I realize the article is focused on intellectual pursuits, but the same thing is still true.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
In the early '90-ies Michael J.A. Howe published a book called "The origins of exceptional abilities", which concluded the same by studying the life history of exceptional people like Mozart. Mozart did not write any music worth listening to before after about a decade of hard training. His father made him practice several hours a day from a very young age. Compare that to the "loose your beer belly" gymnastics commercials "five minutes a day for a month for great results", and you understand why Mozart became great!
By the tender age of 10, I was regional champion couch potato.
In another 10 years I'll be a world-class Slashdot Humorist. Obviously, I'm still working on that one.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think they're onto something there. Whilst I'm no prodigy, I've been a fairly enthusiastic devilstick juggler for about 12 years now, and probably better than 95% of the others I've met. That said, my skill level probably hasn't changed all that much in the last 5 years or so, since I slacked off on the 'effortful study' phase, which saw me never leaving the house without a set with which to play/practice.
I don't really feel any pressing need to get better at that particular field, but I've been getting more interested in improving my firestaff twirling this summer (southern hemisphere). I might take the articles implied advice and see what sort of results it yields. Granted it's not chess, but I'll see where it takes me.
You will never find a "master" at what they do that does not practice and have lots of experience. That is, of course, a given. I don't think any one says otherwise - to a large extent the article implies it. No coach thinks raw talent alone will win the olympics, it takes practice, practice, practice, and more practice.
It also requires Chess to be a near perfect look into intellect and ability - the author obviously understands this as roughly half the article is an attemp to prove it. If this is not true then the whole theory falls apart and I do not think enough is shown for this to be true (not being in that field I do not know if it is considered a given, but again I doubt it is. I can not see chess having much bearing to archery).
I can assure you that innate talent exists. It is not hard to find. I have two fairly good archery students - one shoots only the one day of our course and the other shoots at home every day. If hard work and focus was the deciding factor the wrong one is getting much higer scores.
We can all find people in our own schooling that exemplifies this. In science/math courses I did very very little and was generally one of the higer grades. I knew quite a number of people who were obsessed and spent WAY more time than I ever did who never came anywhere close to my ability. I knew people who surpassed me that worked less and some that worked more. Of course I still spent quite a bit of time at it. I could not learn how something worked without reading about it or taking it apart, yet I needed only to do so once or twice. Some could do it hundreds of times and never get it, some would only need to get halfway before they understood it. That's innate talent.
It's so trivial to find people that break this theory I can not see how it is talked about much. Obviously hard work will get you a long ways, pure talent on never using it is horrid, and pure talent with hard work is what makes world champions. I can (and have) practiced enough to be a champion in Archery, I'm nowhere close and I'll never be - I just can not hold the bow steady enough. No amount of practice will overcome it.
Coaches and teachers say this because after running thousands of people through thier programs it is obvious that a thing called "talent" exists.
And, lastly, they gloss over that all of thier examples were considered prodigies even before they invested years and years of hard work, to be a world champion requires both. The study pre-assumes that talent is the same, notes that practice is different so it *must* be the cause (how can you say that with more than one variable?). How about we try and hold everything that affects the outcome constant that we can (practice, initial novice level, user motivation, etc) and see if everyone performs at the same level. I bet they do not. Right now there are too many variables from the study listed to draw any conclusion - talent could very well still play a large role, it has not been ruled out. Just as it is obvious that hard work is needed to be a world champion it should be obvious that not including talent will make talent irrelevant in thier study. Unless you control or adjust for a variable you *can not* make any conclsuion on how much it affects your outcome.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
In case anyone else prefers one, nearly ad-free, page over 6 skinny pages full of blinky bits.
"must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others"
someone needs to find an example of one of those genius 5 year olds that can play the piano like they were taking lessons in the womb.
The question I have is, had Mozart been taught to write and to write constantly, would he be a famous writer? Or would his interests lie elsewhere and writing simply serve to be a hobby?
I think what seperates genius from someone who is simply "good" at something is a geniuine love for what they do later in life. They tend to be more well-rounded and express themselves through the various mediums, but the true geniuses excel in one or more of these modes of expression. The fact that they're well-versed in some skill just makes it all the more likely they'll end up producing something of great value in that area of the arts or science.
Theres a fundamental truth different people pick different things up more quickly than others. Some are "naturally" good at math and others at sport (and some at both but not nitting). Not everyone's going to react like Mozart to the same music training.
:-)
So if you're good at something from the start you're going to get more positive feedback earlier on and you're going to get further and progress more quickly through the same training. But fundamentally yes both the gifted person and the talentless hack are going to need to be exposed to the same tools, techniques and ideas to progress in anything. Mozart wouldn't have gotten anywhere with the piano and orchestras if he'd grown up in a culture that didn't have pianos and orchestras. With his innate abilities perhaps he'd have been Africa's best drummer or a killer on the diggeri doo instead
Another thing. It's important to do things you're not good at for a couple of reasons. One is that some things you're not good at are fun...go to a karoke bar and you won't see people trying to perfect their world class opera voices. You don't even discover what you like if you don't try and life is there to be embraced and tasted. The other is that not everyone progresses at the same rate. It is possible to spend weeks (but probably not more than a few weeks) and make a breakthrough in understanding that suddenly means you improve dramatically even if you're never going to be world class.
However yes, nothing replaces hard work and training. If you're good at something without these you could be much better with the correct focused training.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Just as with the nature versus nurture debate, it's not a question of which one it is; but of how much of each one.
Obviously, the surroundings, encouragement, over-stimulation, lack of stimulation etc are going to have an tremendous on a child. Anybobdy saying anything else is a loony.
On the other hand, it's a well known fact among strategy gamers that everybody has, more or less atleast, a limit to how good they get. During 5-6 years of steady play, most people just max at some point, usually after a couple of years and stop becoming better. Be it lack of intelligence, lack of patentience, lack of anal-retentivness, it still happens. They hit their roof.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field.
... you know who...
For nerds in Computing and IT, this means a lot. Which programming languages to learn? Which editor to use? Which IDE to get addicted to? All the answers would slant in the direction of Open Source and Free tools. It makes absolutely no sense for an intellectual, one whose primary assets are cervaux, to go in for expertise and proficiency in proprietary stuff.
This will be the reason why "Developers, Developers and more Developers" will simply abandon proprietary IDEs and languages, despite loud calls and offers of money from
It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after László Polgár published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier."
After MS-DOS, Microsoft has stopped publishing any meaningful literature on it's products. Hell, it looks like it doesn't want to document it's protocols and interfaces either.
This also explains why Sun atleast makes more noises about going Open Source.... they don't want to be eclipsed into obscurity, a decade from now.
With devleopers moving away in hordes, it would be an uphill task for even a behemoth like Microsoft to survive a decade, let alone stay relevant and contemporary.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
There has been a big change in the state of "employment" in the past 10 years. Previously, you went to work, 8-9 AM and and left at 5-6 PM, after that, you didn't belong to the company. You could party, short coke, smoke dope, drink till you got ill, but as long as it didn't affect your standing or performance at work, they didn't care. I'm, not saying that drug use is good or acceptable, but it was YOUR time. Now you are being evaluated for life-style choices such as over consumption of (food), tobacco, hazardous activities and god knows what else. When this happens, we lose freedom, to snort coke, but also to jump out of a plane, or climb a rock wall. Employees have just become assets on the bottom line, to be evaluated much like a piece of machinery.
JimD.
It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after László Polgár published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increased after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier
Nobody (so far as I know) is saying that geniuses pop into existance fully formed and with no effort on their part. But the above statement is perfectly consistent with the idea that some people are born with some inate ability that allows the possibility of genius, but then require support or training or whatever to realise that genius. If Polgar's book was good (I presume it was) then it opened the way for a bunch of people who's ability would otherwise never be realised. Ditto whatever Mozart's father did.
If hard work and training is the key, then your childhood home and other surroundings play a major part by allowing and motivating whatever you are doing. Also, parents can provide material for a child to build on so that learning new things is easier (chunking theory, from the article). This is a form of doing some of the work of learning on the child's behalf... and "success builds on success" (quote from the article)
Maybe "being born into experthood" is still effectively what happens in many cases, through being born into a family in which you are helped to grow in a healty way.
In other words, what counts, is that practices (good or bad) are transmitted from generation to generation.
Just another way to look at the same thing. Now I'm going back to work.
The basis of the article threads itself into and througout chess, and whilst I have a fondness for it, it cannot be the only form of being an expert, mental prowess, etc., can it?
If it had been "The Expert Chess Mind", that would be a different thing altogether.
I'd expected more until I realized the cover picture depicted the meat of the article.
I haven't renewed my subscription yet, but if it had come under the label of a subscription, I'd have asked for an extension to compensate for an inferior issue.
This covers a lot of ground. My parents bought a subscription for me when I was eight or nine and I'd borrow [older] copies from the library to have something to read when sitting in the back row of boring classes.
I don't remember having felt this way about any other issues.
I am, however, looking forward to the annual "single-topic" September issue.
I've always believed that dedicated work is important along with learning better methodologies and a positive mental approach. Unless someone has a passionate belief in themselves and can immerse themselves in their field they will find it extremely difficult to master anything. Genetics does play some part in this as well, but there are many cases of people overcoming great obstacles (such as Django Reinhardt, the great gypsy guitarist that lost full use of his fretting hand after a serious accident).
Some people do have natural ability, and some find things difficult at first, but it is often the frustrated ones that delve more deeply into the topic and can become as good or better than those who find it easy. Traditionally In Japan they say it takes 20 years to become a master, something which in the west seems to have been downgraded to 3 or so years. In the case of music, only when technique / performance (and theory) is second nature you can focus on the essence, and surf the waves of inspiration and expression.
Music, Games, Media Art and Programming
Of course "It takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field."
In music for example, certainly Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Berlioz had to work hard to learn their craft, with some of the best teachers.
Nonetheless, most people would not benefit from that tutelage, because they would be unable to grasp what was important and what was not. A work of genius is not the result of privilege, but of someone whose innate ability to absorb, digest, and then apply in strikingly original ways are simply beyond the grasp of most of us.
The answer to the question of nature vs. nurture is that both are necessary. A genius feral child will not recreate social skills alone. Nor will a privileged imbecile be able to govern a nation.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I'm no expert in "back roads" (ie, collectors in this case) but while travelling down a state highway 217 back home, traffic stopped. I'm no expert in direction, but I have travelled along the collectors here enough in a few short years to extimate the best combination. And to prove my lack of total prowess here, I took some roads that allowed me to travel up to 45 MPH, much faster than the highway traffic along 217. I learned when I got home that I made one error that added at least 2 miles to my trip. Was I a complete idiot? No. I just took the roads that felt right. In my estimation I made good time. I probably could have used an expert in the Portland area to tell me whether the route was the best (I didn't have Mapquest, Google Maps, or GPS, mind you). But I didn't do too bad, compared to how I would have done a couple years ago. I would have clung to the Freeways like my life depended on it.
Before reading the summary and (starting to read) the article, I found that I didn't do half bad.
After seeing this article, I realized that if I had spent most of my life learning these "back routes" I would have done pretty darn good. I didn't have a map fully visualized in my mind, but a feeling of the routes. One part of the article sparked interest for me:
"... In 1894 French psychologist Alfred Binet, the co-inventor of the first intelligence test, asked chess masters to describe how they played such games. He began with the hypothesis that they achieved an almost photographic image of the board, but he soon concluded that the visualization was much more abstract. Rather than seeing the knight's mane or the grain of the wood from which it is made, the master calls up only a general knowledge of where the piece stands in relation to other elements of the position. It is the same kind of implicit knowledge that the commuter has of the stops on a subway line...."
If I had to gauge my expertise on the area, I'm still a beginner, despite my years as a driver, and living in this area. But I think the above helps explain quite a bit.
Back to Mozart: How was he capable of touring a big chunk of Europe by ~6 on his talents? I don't think he had photographic memory of the score to play, he probably (even at an early age) had a feeling for each part. I am not a musician, but I bet with enough practice, I could gain a feeling for each piece and play it decently. I am sure Mozart mastered that and was able to give some of the best performances ever.
BTW, I have a friend at work, who, without any further cue than a request for one of many hundreds of songs (e.g. "Hey, play Hot Blooded by Foreigner!," or "Play Take a Picture by Filter!") and early memory of the song to produce it almost flawlessly on a grand piano. I always wondered how he could do it, and I'm starting to feel I understand how now.
For what it's worth, Peter Norvig has already pointed this out (he cites research from John Hayes and Benjamin Bloom).
Check out his short essay on how to learn to program in 10 years.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Yes, that sums it up exactly. Inate ability is essential, as well as hard work over a long time, to achieve true mastery.
The thing that really annoys me is talented people (whether in sports, the arts, science, or any other intellectual area) who say "I got to the top of my chosen field through hard work". My problem is that there is a strong implication in that statement that anyone else could have done so if only they'd chosen to work that hard. This is simply not true. Yes, they have worked hard - but the difference between them and all the other people who worked equally hard is luck - the luck to have been born with more talent/aptitude.
The myth that it 'only' takes hard work to get the most outstanding results is a corrosive and unpleasant put-down for the vast majority of us who toil away for modest results. By all means acknowledge the dedication of those who reach the top, but remember they also partly owe their position to simple luck.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
This article is going to bring up the subject of formal study vs. hard work. It's very simple: You will get nowhere without hard work. But you will go farther and faster with formal study.
Example: Dizzy Gillespie was an amazing trumpet player, but the way he played was all wrong. Does this mean that our idea of the "right" way to play is wrong? No; Dizzy succeeded despite playing the wrong way, simply because he practiced so goddamned hard. But if you want to learn to play the trumpet, should you just shirk all advice and just practice? Of course not. You'll be a better player if you don't have obstacles - and the "right" way is "right" because it has fewer obstacles. Just don't think you can relax, because you'll get blown away by those who are working hard.
Now take for example the computer programmer. The computer programmer who studies on his own not only has to figure out what is going on from scratch (this is actually beneficial), but he has has to figure out what to study. An education in computer science will prepare this programmer for that. But all too often the computer programmer with an education uses this as a crutch - they soon become stagnant.
FAQ
Can you succeed without working hard? No.
So, do you need education? Maybe not, but it helps.
Would you be better at what you want to do if you have education? Undoubtedly.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
You're mixing up different things which have nothing to do with each other.
A computer plays chess in a very different way from a human; it mostly just calculates game state trees to see how good each play is. Humans rely very heavily on intuition, pattern recognition and strategic principles which no computer so far has mastered (and it is doubtful that they will need to master them anyway, since computers are getting so fast at calculating game trees that the era of computer dominance in chess is probably about to begin any year now).
Sometimes, humans rely on calculation of (very reduced) parts of the game tree, but to go from there to saying that a human learning chess is just learning how to follow the rules and strategies of a computer program is invalid reasoning.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
practice makes it perfect, practice makes it perfect, practice makes it perfect,practice makes it perfect .......
Mozart wrote his first symphony (and not some half-assed attempt) before he was ten years old. So unless he received training while still a sperm, I think it's safe to chalk that case up to something other than ten years of hard work. Of course we're talking about people operating at the genius level, not just the expert level. Anyone of sufficient intelligence can become an expert at whatever they work at. I like the quote that I read in a Feynman book a while back as I think it sums it up fairly well:
"There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre." - Mark Kac
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Whoever posted this article probably never met anyone who can't sing, or who had formal training and still can't sing, or those who think they can sing but it's way off, or in my sister's case, can sing, but in a different key eventhough she hears the song at the same time in karaoke.
What I meant by "can't sing" isn't the inability to give a tonal vocal jibjab, but that no matter how hard they try, can't really grasp the trick to singing (ignoring the breathing factor already here). But at the same time there're those who never had formal music training and can sing perfectly well on their first try (first poke at karaoke).
I've also found that those who can't sing usually can't whistle. As whistling is like blowing with a specific vocal cord position.
And this article's telling me, if my sister goes thru the same training I did (pretty shitty, 2 years of highschool band, 1 year in choir and that's it), she'll be singing like me. I don't chink so.
Question: If I learn the rules of baseball until I can chant them in my sleep, including the current stats on all current players and teams, what is my skill on the field?
Answer: Who the hell knows.
Or how about creative expression? How many years do I have to study Picasso to become a leading force in a revolutionary new art movement?
What about personality? How long do I have to intern with Bill Gates to become a billionaire?
Using chess is an awful example because it's a small closed system with a simple set of rules. Skills for chess are roughly in the same category as "factory worker" where if you push button A it does thing B.
So, there basically trying to say that someone with Dyslexia only has Dyslexia because they haven't trained hard enough even though it runs in famalies.
There also trying to say that someone who has always had a low IQ can become an expert if they spend ten years in the field.
Given the number of things I cannot do even though I have tried as hard or harder that most people and compairing them to the things I can do and always have been able to do without even thinking about them I'd say this artical is a load of crap.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
...didn't read a book. So it makes no sense to say that after him, and because of books about him, people got better and therefore experts are made, and not born, because clearly some experts ARE born, and they're the ones that are more interesting to read about. Sure, there are loads of good programmers, musicians etc, but it's obvious that you can become one of those by learning, practise, reading etc, but to me it's more fascinating to discover about how 5 year olds tour europe performing piano recitals.
The key term being "effortful study". The science almost directly contradicts what you said. The difference is the quality of the training. If you're training for hours and producing modest results, take a look at the way you train.
Deleted
Bach, Beethoven, Motzart, and many others lived in roughly the same time period(granted Bach died before the other 2 were born) and all lived in roughly the same area of the world. How much effect did the setting have on their works? If you took Motzart out of 18th century Vienna and put him in 19th century Argentina, even with training, would he have gone on to create such brilliant classical works? Maybe he would have been a musician in another genre, maybe even after death nobody would have noticed his work because he wasn't creating the "in" music at the "in" time at the "in" place.
Things to ponder I guess....
Hardly a fair enucleation, but given his pompous expertism and preponderance I can hardly blame myself.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
That's strange, I always thought capatilist retoric was that we are all born equal so all have an equal chance in life.
Socilist retoric is that we are all born differerent but should be treated equal so those with more tallent should support those with lesser tallent because it's not the fault of those with lesser tallent that they cannot do so well.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
There is a book out called Effortless Mastery and It's written by jazz pianist Kenny Werner. A very good read for anybody, not just musicians. I highly recommend it if this topic interests you.
From Amazon
"Werner, a masterful jazz pianist in his own right, uses his own life story and experiences to explore the barriers to creativity and mastery of music, and in the process reveals that 'Mastery is available to everyone,' providing practical, detailed ways to move towards greater confidence and proficiency in any endeavor. While Werner is a musician, the concepts presented are for every profession or life-style where there is a need for free-flowing, effortless thinking."
The idea that they just worked harder, or rather, better than you is uncomfortable. It means that you're just lazy, don't have the necessary drive or don't know how to train.
It's much easier to believe that they are just innately better and it's not really your fault that you can't reach their level.
Deleted
I believe in the context of being able to play instruments TFA has a point about how good you appear being related to how long you've been practising.
Mozart was remembered for being a great creator - that kind of insight cannot be given by training alone, though it *usually* does help to know the ground rules of whatever field you are in to be able to be a visionary in it.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
I played trombone for about 10 years, starting in elementary school ending in university, and I observed that while hard work and study were a major, major factor in how good you were, talent was necessary. You had to have a certian "it". I can't put a name to it or tell you how to check, but it had to be there if you were ever to be really good. I think it most likely had to do with a talent in hearing music. I could tell you, just by listening to the tone (sound charestic) of a player if they had "it" or not.
If they did, they had the potential to be quite good. How good they were depended in a large way on how hard they worked, but that "it" allowed for them to do it. If they didn't, no amount of work could make up for it. There was just a wall that they could not surpass with any amount of effort.
In highschool I saw this in quite a pronounced fashion. I had "it", something I discovered in 7th grade. I could produce a tone that sounded good, sounded like the kind of sound professionals get. I don't mean I sounded that good, but I mean it was the same kind of sound. My 2nd chair player didn't have "it". His tone was blatty and sounded more akin to a beginner. I felt really sorry for the guy because he busted his ass. I kinda slacked off, as I like to do, and so while I was good I wasn't a star or anything. I'm sure I could have been much better if I'd been willing to commit more time to it (though in retrospect I spent quite a bit of time on it).
He worked his ASS off. I mean I couldn't believe how much he practised, at least 2 hours a night usually more. He really, really wanted to be better, and in particular wanted to be better than me. He just couldn't do it though. The technical aspects he could get down wutie well through all the repetition but the musicality never came. He had private teachers try to help, I tried to help, but it didn't do any good. He lacked "it", he lacked the talent to ever really get good.
Same thing in university. There was a hard cutoff in trombones at the 4th chair. The first 4 all had "it", we all sounded good. Differeing skills of course, but all sounded as a trombone should. The next 5, nope. It was just painfully obvious. I could switch with the and 2nd, 3rd, or 4th chairs on a solo or something and it would work. They didn't sound just like me, but they sounded right. However sub in any of the others and man, you'd notice straight off.
I think it may have something to do with listening ability. There are things relating to that which can't be trained, like perfect pitch (the ability to identify the absolute pitch of a note with no context). It's not perfect pitch that is required (I don't have perfect pitch) but perhaps something like it.
Either way, I certianly don't disagree that being proficiten/an expert/a master requires a hell of a lot of work, in think in many cases talent is necessary, but not sufficient, condition. Maybe it's genetic, maybe it's something that can only be learned during a critical developmental phase, either way if you don't have it, you'll never be great, no matter how hard you try.
Compare that to the "loose your beer belly" gymnastics commercials "five minutes a day for a month for great results", and you understand why Mozart became great!
Those things are funny. About the only thing those gadgets do in 20 minutes of exercise per day performed while you sit in front of your TV, occasionally stopping to munch on a super sized McDonalds menu, is calm your conscience. If you want to lose weight you have to exercise and control your diet. Either one on it's own will not do the job well and it will take more than 20 minutes per day. To rephrase a well known American proverb somewhat savagely: "If somebody offers you a lot of gain without any pain they are full of..." how can I phrase this politely? "...something that came out of the south end of a northbound horse." It amazes me that sane well educated and intelligent people fall for these scams, be they legal (such as miracle weight loss programs) or criminal (such as 419 scams).
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
"It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after László Polgár published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier."
Sure, but there's only one Mozart, as there is only one Kasparov or Einstein or Coltrane or Newton or Cervantes or Picasso, who incidentally said 90% of his work was sweat and the rest, inspiration. Call it inspiration, call it genetic predisposition, call it whatever you want, but the other 10% is out of all the trained geniuses reach.
Yes but what talent are you talking about? The shrewd merchant with his high IQ cannot make as much money as the football player, who in turn has less attractive ladies than the talented and good-looking musician.
We are unequal on many fronts, attempting to rectify the economic alone is pure folly.
http://plif.andkon.com/archive/wc273.gif
"And then I visited Wikipedia
I think just the summary shows a fundamental flaw in this theory -- there was a jump in music experts _after the book was published about Mozart. Sometimes it takes genius to make the leaps in a field. Then, so long as the leaps are properly documented, it is much easier for non-geniuses to tackle the same material. Just think, if that wasn't true then most of us would be stuck with a prehistoric concept of the world. It took a leap to link the movement of the stars with the roundness of the earth, or to think of the concept of zero, or to do or think of a million things that are now taught in elementary school. Did the leaps require hard work? Most of the time, they probably did. But that doesn't mean that with hard work anyone could have done what the people who made those leaps did with the knowledge they had had then.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
It might be that a talent for the given occupation might not be needed but at least you need to have intrest and be a special kind of person with talent for just working hard. I don't think it was only the work of Mozart's father that Mozart started working with music at such an early age. He must have had a intellect that had grown a lot for his age. His mind was probably mature and it simply was ready for learning advanced things at an early age. Just my theory if it is proven that there isn't much of a thing like talent for music.
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
Each genius or prodigy is a result of years of hard work... but there is also a little spark of talent that makes him stand out above the level of simply very good.
My sensei in karate club always said that you can make a very good fighter out of anyone, if only he works hard enough. He used to say "I can make a craftsman in fighting out of almost anyone.. but you have to have that something to become an artist [in fighting]".
Three to five years of training and you have someone who will be able to fight effectively both on the street or in official tournament. But in order to make someone really extraordinary, he (or she) has to have some talent as well. And that's the difference between craftsman and an artist.
As far as I have seen, this observation is perfectly true in all other domains as well. If you don't develop your skill (even if you are talented), you will always be mediocre. If you work hard enough, you can become very good in almost anything you want. But if you have that spark of talent AND you work hard - only that combination can bring you to supreme level.
The article makes a good case about chess.
But what about other skills? How about actually *playing* a musical instrument rather than learning music theory which the article suggests doesn't take talent?
I love music. Last year I bought a guitar to play some of the stuff I love. I tried and tried and tried. I tried different guitars, I tried different styles, from classical to metal. I just can't do it. A full year later and I still can't reliably change 2-3 chords. Some chords are still impossible for me. That's something other players can do in a week. I just don't have it. I still try daily, but I get nothing out of it.
So maybe I would be able to learn lots about music theory, I can't play it on the guitar though.
It seems to me that talent's existence is denied mostly by experts (such as the article author, he's a chess master) so people will get the impression that they reached their level with hard work alone.
To conclude, although I do believe that "talent" is a factor overly exaggerated and sensationalized by the media, it does exist and let no expert make you think otherwise.
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
I think people seem to be getting confused between being an expert at something and an expert in a field.
Most people could become an expert in music just by studying music theory for ten years, but it takes someone gifted to become an expert at music.
The same goes for body building. It doesn't take muscles to be an expert in Body building but it does take the correct generic makeup to become an expert at bodybuilding.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If all you are after is attractive women I'm sure you can find some free porn that fits the bill.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You're interested in the subject, you learn it without seeing that learning as study. You work just as hard at it but don't see it as work, it's fun, your motivation is higher than people who see it as work.
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It isn't true to say that other languages cannot be learned later in life either, though there is evidence that those who learn multiple languages as children are better equiped to learn additional languages as adults.
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Practice makes perfect but to be an expert or pridigy you still need to have some natural talent, and want to do what you're good at.
I'm naturally good at art, but I made a decision not to persue that as a career. It's nothing more than a hobby, even though I love it.
What I want to do is become a mechanical engineer. That was a risky decision because I really struggle with math. It's not that I can't do it, but it takes about ten times the amount of work as most people who focus their life toward math/science. I learn differently somehow, and usually need several examples and more practice. I got an A in my Calc class in college, but I needed nonstop work to get that A. I might be able to work hard enough to learn the required material for what I want to do, but it'll always be obvious my natural talent is in the arts.
"if only i had known i would have been a locksmith." -albert einstein
There's only one way to solve this: Leave your basement and go on a hike with your mother.
I'm sorry for the retard who modded this insightful but you sir are insane. Socialist rHetoric? What the fuck are you on. McCarthy is dead bout time psychos like you joined him.
But these people will never become experts, they don't want to do the work, so they won't do what's required to become expert.
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I'm waiting for someone to publish a book on being lazy...
The mediocracy is marching on. There is no inate talent. There is only prespiration. Just look at Edison. Forget the nature vs. nurture debate, take your pet dog and train him A LOT and really well and he'll be the next genius physicist. Because genetics have nothing to do with it. Never mind, that good eye-hand coordination makes people good artists without even trying. Never mind that Gauss spotted a (later to be called) gaussian sum without ever learning anything about it. Never mind that Mozart could play at -- the age when most people (not for a lack of their parents trying) cannot put together a sentence. How about recognizing that certain people could have slight... tiny really variations in their brains that give the ability to take the most advantage of great training. How about not trying to make social theories from a few statistical experiments on individuals? How about recognizing geniuses as better people rather than as nerds, geaks, freaks, or whatever other ways we choose to ostricize them that ends up discouraging them from receiving that better training that would allow them to improve the world and the lives of all of us? Why must we fear the brilliant instead of being inspired by them?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I've noticed, like many others, that some 'expert' programmers are perhaps 8x as
productive as regular programmers; their work does not require checking,
they solve complex problems in such a way that the problem can actually
be forgotten about, and they never find that something can't be done
because of the decisions they made earlier. I would rather have one of
these guys with on a project than three regular Joes, and the wise
project manager scours the organization for them and collects them all
in a fiercely guarded hoard. What vast innate aptitude they must have!
And yet I notice that these experts are, coincidentally, also the same
people who use a spell-checker, who ask what terms mean before trying to
use them, who write down what they're going to do before they do it, who
understand what the business context of the work they're doing is, and
who understand the imperfect realities of the workplace. In other words,
they're not natural computer geniuses; they're people who bother to learn
how to do stuff right.
An image of the naturally talented 'geek' or 'nerd' has grown up in the
last 20 years, especially outside of the IT community. These
individuals, the story goes, can be awkward and eccentric in the more
'people' aspects of life but are gifted with tremendous focus and
ability to understand complexity in technical areas. Often seen
watching Star Trek and blowing things up in their back yards, they are
the highly specialized new breed on which the information revolution
depends.
The fact is, the above is half-right. 'Geeks' do exist -- but there
is absolutely no correlation between geek-hood and technical ability.
Quite the reverse, in fact; technical ability is acquired by learning
from others, and you can't learn from others if you don't communicate.
The basement-dwelling machine-code-writing ubergeek of the 80's really
existed, but only due to social factors; had he left his basement and
gotten a girlfreind, he would have become more productive, not less.
This is pretty well recognised in business now; nobody hires the
basement-dweller if they can hire the rugby-player, which is rather bad
luck for the basement-dweller but sound thinking on the part of the
business.
And yet the image persists in popular culture, so much so that people
who learn that I work with computers still occasionally expect me to be
into a whole nerd culture of comics, DIY demolitions, and so forth.
Sure, some people are bigger or stronger or smarter than others to some
degree; but how remarkably seductive this idea that certain people just
naturally fall into certain slots, where they are good and bad at
specific predetermined things, is! And how very different from reality
it is.
Except for mathematicians, mind you. Those guys are born not made, I'm sure of it.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
And you're not that driven either.
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A recent conversation I had mentioned the following details:
...
They explained that the difference between experts and amateurs who pour in thousands of hours but don't achieve the same results in that experts were able to do incredibly concentrated "focused effort" while the amateurs minds wandered.
"Isn't that another way of saying "talent"?"
Mmmmmm, I don't think so.... It's another way of saying, interest, discipline, and an efficient learning path.
But there is such a thing as talent.
Of course there are many factors that go into this. Many of which explain many elements of the issue, but ultimately do not explain talent (the musical genius born of poor and definitely non musical parents, etc)
Sometimes you get oddities, like that kid who navigates by echo location. Obviously, no one taught him this. He figured it out, it seems, while he was in preschool, maybe getting the original idea from sesame street or something.
I am reminded of the story of Leonard Bernstein working out the basics of music, such as chords, without lessons, while a young child at his parents piano. Obviously, the obsessive interest of a young child came in handy. [I have a young nephew who has been into Monster trucks and dinosaurs for years, and who can tell you everything about them.]
Factors in talent and ability include (off the top of my head):
One's own interest, proper educational gradient, accuracy/ applicability of education, bullshit detection, blindspot detection, practical skill, willingness to follow through, observation skill, curiosity, and what can be called "interconnection observation" (I.E.-how this thing goes with that thing)
The article seems to be more in the line discovering the value of a correct/efficient education gradient.
For me, talent seems to tie in with this thing I quickly called "interconnection observation", seeing how things go together. This is very much tied into curiosity. The depth of familiarity of subject matter that goes hand in hand with talent is greatly underestimated. Constant curiosity in the subject matter helps alot.
It's the difference between mechanically using (in music) a flat II7 chord for a V7 chord going to a I chord, and knowing why it works, and knowing which chord progression works best for the emotion one is evoking, even if none of the above.
Of course there is also a certain sense of freedom and play that goes into it as well.
There are also other interesting speculations, alot along the line of what would happen if Einstein had been born an aboriginal? would he had made it? and what kind of a whacky relativistic boomarang would he have designed?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
On another note, I have 2 teachers for parents. I was doing simple mental arithmetic (+-*/) in the back of the car at age 4. Algebra in my fourth year of primary school. Did I learn it? absolutely. But I wanted to. I enjoyed it, and I found it easy.
Now I'm the parent. My son is 3. He can't be bothered talking properly, no matter how much we try to encourage him. He lets his sister do all the talking. Recently we've started teaching him to read and write (er type) instead. He loves it, and is constantly typing the words he knows, on keyboards, or shop window signs.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
The summary of this article doesn't really convey the content - it's not really about nature vs nurture or how long it takes to train to become an expert...
The real article content is that the expert mind works differently (i.e. uses different brain functions to achieve a better result) from the novice one. Chess is used as an example because it's easy via ratings to objectively measure expertise in this area.
In a nutshell, a novice in a field has to use general (new) problem solving skills to figure out what to do, but the expert, from years of focused experience, instead uses memory recall (not problem solving) of domain-specific chunked memories to determine the best course of action.
This result is proven for chess by brain scans of novice and expert chess players in action showing which areas of the brain are active, as well as by showing that experts perfrom better at memorizing real rather than random chess positions, while novices perform muich the same (poorly) in either case; the inference of the memorization task is that experts are able to chunk real positions into pre-learnt patterns, and therefore have less to remember, but for random positions (which therefore don't occur in their learnt patterns) they have to resort to piece-by-piece memorization like the novice.
The article quotes Casablanca being questioned on how many moves he plans ahead, and answering "one - the right one!". This isn't bragging, but rather reflects the reality of seeing (via automatic memory recall) the right position rather than having to work it out via a computer-like game alogorithm.
The version I have seen of this theory states that it takes about 10K hours of training/study to become a real expert. At this point you've become as good as you're ever going to be.
There are still differences between such people though, and that has to come down to 'innate ability'/genetics/IQ/whatever.
I.e. for every intelligent person who immersed herself in programming from an early age, there's still only going to be a very few real gurus.
An example:
A guy like Mike Abrash is pretty well recognized as one of the best PC graphics programmers ever, and he even managed to speedup John Carmack's original Quake C rendering code by a factor of 3 when writing the asm version.
According to Mike, John Carmack had the ability to grok many (5+ ?) different subjects at this level, at the same time!
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
To argue that there is no genetic disposition towards intelligence is silly and defies even the simplest of logic. Savants, autistic, and mental retards are all born different. All of them have varied levels of "intelligence" with strengths and weaknesses. A savant for instance might be able to crunch numbers in a way that only a computer can match, yet refers to himself as "you" because he can't make the conceptual link that "you" is not a name and who "you" refers to depends upon the speaker. A savant might be utterly incapable of reading human emotions no matter how visibly they are displayed. On the other hand, someone born with Down syndrome can grasp basic grammar in a way that a savant might easily recognize when a person is sad or angry, but be unable to perform other mental functions that most of us find trivial, like basic math.
This is the old nature Vs nurture debate. Declaring that everything is nurture makes us feel warm and fuzzy because it exercises the ghosts of the vile eugenic "science" that led to the death of millions of people during World War II and it assures us that everything has a social answer. Advancements in neuroscience though have shown us that while nurture certainly matters, so does nature. Some people truly are born predisposed to varied levels of performance and dispositions on the basis of genetics alone. As the physiologist joke goes, "What is the best indicator that someone a man will develop schizophrenia? He has a schizophrenic twin."
Genes are probabilistic. Genetically identical twins, even ones separated at birth and raised in radically different environments, show shocking mental similarities. They are certainly two different people, but they have very strongly similar tendencies. Genes load the dice for sure, but we are still talking about dice. Further, there is an undeniable nurture component that strongly effects who we become. Despite this, we can't close our eyes to the fact that our minds are the products of evolution and variation because it makes us feel uncomfortable. There is likely no social cure for schizophrenia, autism, and some forms of depression, but there might very well genetic components that can point to a physical cure. We can't be afraid to look for genetic clues to our nature because we don't like the implications that some people are born with genetic leg up.
I was pissed off when I read this article. I have Asperger's Syndrome, I and people like me develop narrow intense interests as part of our AS. In our case it is obvious, that we are born to be made experts, in our field of interest.
My interest is Mineralogy. I just finished a PhD in geology. As a child and adolescent, more so then now, I was obsessed with Mineralogy and collecting minerals. I would study about minerals practically all day every day, week after week, month after month for years. I had the knowledge of mineralogy that surpassed a typical university graduate by the age of 14! I can identify my entire collection behind my back by touch and I can identify ~750 different minerals without needing a text book.
If you made an average child adhered to my self directed mineralogy education program, you would possibly have been done for child cruelty, but I enjoyed it, would not have change a thing.
If I was into Chess I would have been a damn good Chess player. If I had been into Mathematics, I would have been a damn good mathematician. I was into Physics, I would have been a damn good Physicist.
Asperger's Syndrome demonstrates than a predilection to develop narrow intellectual interests and to set up your own personal Suzuki School, is for some, innate.
Bobby Fisher, Mozart, Einstein, Newton and others. People who are obsessive, single minded, often self-thought and are socially isolated/eccentric, have all been speculated to have had AS (or Tourettes Syndrome in the case of Mozart).
I'm sorry, but I'd have to disagree with the practice is everything idea.
I'm 18 years old now. When I was 17, I could take a piece of charcoal and paper and create something that was compared once to a black and white photograph. Now, before I was 17, I never used charcoal. I had only been using it for a month when I did the piece that was compared to a photo by a guy that worked as a graphic designer for Disney.
I know there will be people who don't believe that, but I really don't care. It's the truth, I know it happened, and because of it I think this "theory" is a load of bovine manure. No one, in their right mind, could say that I was good with charcoal because of practice, and surely not years of practice.
"In a world that exists without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?"
I can tell you that I never worked as hard as friends on many subjects. Sure when I found something interesting I put substantially more work and thought into it, but for most school subjects I'd pull A test grades just from memorizing a few lectures and good test taking skills (many tests until you reach college level math are written in a way that allows a taker with good logic skills to have a decent chance of deducing the correct answer simply by reading the whole test).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Asperger's Syndrome demonstrates than a predilection to develop narrow intellectual interests and to set up your own personal Suzuki School, is for some, innate. I was pissed off when I read this article. I have mild Asperger's Syndrome. I and people like me develop narrow intense interests as part of our AS. In our case it is obvious. We are born to become experts, in our field of interest. My interest is Mineralogy. I just finished a PhD in geology. As a child and adolescent, more so then now, I was happily obsessed with Mineralogy and collecting minerals. I can now identify my entire collection behind my back, by touch, and I can identify ~750 different minerals without needing a text book. If you made an average child adhered to my self directed mineralogy education program, you would possibly have been done for child cruelty, but I enjoyed it and would not have change a thing. If I was into Chess I would have been a damn good Chess player. If I had been into Mathematics, I would have been a damn good mathematician. I was into Physics, I would have been a damn good Physicist etc. Bobby Fisher, Mozart, Einstein, Newton and others. People who are obsessive, single minded, often self-thought and are socially isolated/eccentric. They have all been speculated to have had AS (or Tourettes Syndrome in the case of Mozart).
extremely hard work. Extremely hard work without talent may lead to a pleasing and/or competent-to-the-layman result, but will NEVER be as good as the talented, hard working professional. I am a scientist because I played musical instrumnets for 20 years but was never able to acheive what I considered an acceptable level of competence, even though I was a much better "technician" on the instrumnet than most people because I worked hard at it. I could play higher, lower, faster than most people, but could never really make music... you need talent for that. Of course it could be stated that you need talent to recognuze talent and to the untalented your performance may seem "expert". That is why there are so many "Geek Squad" types working on computers.
"I was taught it this way, I'm good at it, so that's the right way of teaching it." Really, what "it" is doesn't matter. This belief is held by language teachers, sports coaches, music teachers and many more. This belief is then supported with examples of pupils/students who are also good at their particular "it".
Over the last hundred years, many many teachers have studied teaching or their disciplines in new ways which have disproved this commonly-believed falsehood.
The first example I'm aware of is described in Harold Taylor's book The Pianist's Talent. In it, he examines the work of a turn-of-the-19th/20th-century Parisian piano teacher by the name of Raymond Thiberge. Thiberge was vexed by the vastly differing -- even contradictory -- advice coming from the various piano conservatories in Paris, so he went to all the individual conservatories for further study. In one, he would be told that there should be tension in the front of the forearm; in the next, tension in the back of the forearm. Thiberge was blind, so to study another's technique he had to touch them. When he lay his hands on any of the teachers, he found that they all had one technique: no tension anywhere.
The teachers were not successful because they followed their professed technique, but because they didn't. Worse, their pupils who they used as proof of the efficacy of their techniques also used a completely different technique than that which they were taught. Worse still, teachers were dismissing their failures as not the teacher's fault -- they were simply untalented -- while the reason they failed was because they were doing what they were told. To quote shlmco, another \.er: Too many people think practice makes perfect, when in reality, most people who do so simply perfect their mistakes. In another example, over the last few decades, top-level swimming coaching has changed dramatically, leading to athletes capable of such incredible feats as the Thorpedo's alleged ability to cross a swimming pool in two strokes. The trigger for this was the invention of the underwater tracking camera now so commonly used in major competitive events. Traditional teaching of front-crawl stroke said that the arms should travel in an "S-stroke" and that the fingers should be closed against each other. Coaches who were former gold-medal winners professed this technique as the technique that had won them their fame, but when the cameras started rolling, suddenly people could see that their hands were travelling in an almost straight line, and that their fingers were slightly apart. It became noticed that coaches were ignoring their star students' "non-standard" technique because they were doing so well, but were constantly "correcting" the technique of their other students, hindering their progress.
I was discussing all this with a Scottish country dance teacher recently, trying to demonstrate that another commonly-held notion -- the idea that there are different teaching techniques suited to different people -- was at best an overstatement, at worst a complete falacy, and in any case a result of bad teaching practice. At this point he tied it in to his own personal experience -- one tricky dance-step, the "pas-de-bas", which his student's could never get, although he taught it as all the top teachers do. He eventually came to the conclusion that it was a teaching problem, not a learning problem, so he stopped to study it. At every possible opportunity, he watched the feet of the top dancers until he saw what they were doing and realised that it was not what he was teaching, but it is what he was doing. It is now a point of frustration to him that the teaching fraternity continues to teach it incorrectly when it is perfectly possible to teach it correctly.
Effort will always fail to bear fruit if misdirected. Concientious hard work will make matters worse if the teaching is wrong. In fact, as the Inner Game philosophy is now trying to popularise,
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I have read one essayist suggesting that the Romantic Age spoiled us in this. You aren't cool if you make it look like work so exceptionally creative people downplay the fact that they've been practicing their talent since they were 3. Outside of this article, how many artists are you aware of who have been "overnight sensations" after a decade or more of showing/touring/circulating their rejected work? It's a cliche. How many black singers cut their chops as kids in the church choir? Oddly enough, even an haute artiste like Britney Spears qualifies after child labor in the Disney trenches, right?
One might look at Before the Gates of Excellence: The Determinants of Creative Genius, Cambridge, 1990. She discusses various research on nature and nurture and stresses in Chapter 8, "The Developmental Pattern", that one factor in recognized genius is indeed starting practice of one's talent at an early age. Not a 2006 idea although she is far less emphatic in the cases of excellence that the mix IS nurture and NOT nature.
here: http://www.sciam.com/podcast/podcast.mp3?e_id=000E 5E86-9BA2-14CF-9BA283414B7F0000&ref=p_house
In May 1949, six-year-old Fischer learned how to play chess from instructions found in a chess set that his sister bought at a candy store below their Brooklyn apartment. He saw his first chess book a month later. For over a year he played chess on his own. At age 7, he joined the Brooklyn Chess Club and was taught by the club's president, Carmine Nigro. When Fischer was 13, his mother asked John W. Collins to be his chess teacher. Collins had taught several top players, including Robert Byrne and William Lombardy. Fischer spent much time at Collins' house, and some have described Collins as a father figure for Fischer. Fischer attended Erasmus Hall High School together with Barbra Streisand[4], though he later dropped out. Many teachers remembered him as difficult. According to school records, he has an I.Q. of 180 and an incredibly retentive memory.
I don't know how accurate the wiki is, because in every book I've ever read on Fischer he didn't start playing until 9. That said, even if the wiki is right, 6 is significantly less than 10. Fischer was not made into a prodigy, Fischer was a prodigy.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Teachers in sports, music, and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity.
I think Malcolm Gladwell makes an assault on this part of your argument. While it is probably true that drive is as important as ability in the development of star-whatevers, Gladwell discusses how it is proven that experts in a field are sub-cognitively able to precess overall performance metrics on a level that allows them to be able to legitimately forcast success and ability of students into the future.
I feel there's the makings of a major logic clash in here somewhere.
Andy Soltis of Chess Life remarked on something like the 8-year limit whereupon nearly infinite amounts of continued work produce *no* further gains. This presumably relates to where natural talent leaves off.
I have also done "offhand" experiments by giving five people $20 to learn something, and clearly one of the 5 proved "more talented" than the rest.
I feel the researchers are missing the correct item to correlate. For chess, it would be not memory, but perhaps "capacity for structure" or something. It's not enough to know that "Black plays Queen to c7 here somewhere", but that it's only good on moves 7, 9, and 12 and it drops a piece on move 11.
When you are calculating a position, you are building a logic exclusion tree. "Well, that Bishop is needed to block a check on b5 and guard a piece on c6, and those are both on the same diagonal, so that's okay, but I can't trust a Rook on c8 because d7-c8 is a different direction from d7-c6-b5". That's beyond memory. 50% of the mistakes I see myself and others making in chess are related to failure to follow a conclusion to all of the results.
They should test for a correlate a Murder Crime Logic puzzle from a pulp fun-digest with chess. "Oh yea, Mrs. J. had to be at the billiards hall, and the guy with the sweater was not married to anyone who played billiards.."
--TaoPhoenix
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
While talent is certainly required to become one of the top few in a field, I don't think that level of achievement could have been achieved without someone, or some community, that played the role of the coach or teacher. This would be true also for the self taught.
I do not believe in talent; I believe in potential. We are all born with innate potential but no one is just "talented" at something. Some people are able to pick up nuisances faster than others; for instance I'm dsylexic. It causes me to be slower at picking up foundational material than other people. There is a flip side to it though, my whole life I've had to work a bit harder and be more adaptive to learning new material in order to not fall too far behind. It instilled in me a work ethic that is second to none; at 25 people look at me and think that I'm "incredibly talented". I worked my fucking ass, learned how to "learn" better than anyone I know and approach new topics without ego.
For ancedotal evidence to support this one need only look at the realm of professional sports. Yes these men and women have a genetic predisposition that gives them the basics ability to compete at the highest level and most people do not have that but what made Michael Jordan the greatest basketball player to walk this planet was not his genetic predisposition nor his "innate talent". He worked harder than any other guy out there...I remember being told a story at basketball camp when I was a wee lad; the point guard for UCLA at the time thought that he'd sneak on to the Warner Brothers set to play some ball in the fancy gym set up for Jordan while filming Space Jam (in the evenings they'd play pick up games with Jordan at this facility). He figured that no one would be using the facility and apparently it was quite good. Finally gets in there and whose shooting jumpers? None other than Michael Jordan.
We like to use talent as our scape-goat. It explains why someone else is better at something than we are; reality is it's just an excuse.
At least in the old non-medical literature there was a somewhat tolerant attitude towards "bright, eccentrics". Now modern medicine has seized upon some remarks by Dr. Asperger in the 1940's to medically penalize a class of attributes.
... and I dislike social situations.
... working on his (narrow) expertise.
I have been tagged with Aspergers. It's relevant in a discussion about expertise, because expertise is about the top X percent in a field, and all the *non-social* hard work to do that. I breezed through B-plusses in all courses with a modest amount of work except Art and Calculus, (which I have "no talent for"),
There's a logic flaw in both admiring the expert from afar, while chiding him for the (lack of talent?) (lack of experience?) socializing because he was too busy
--TaoPhoenix
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
As strongly as I believe in "One Learns By Doing", I do not fully believe it and thus I do not fully believe the premise of this story.
Though I am a software developer now, I was, at one time, a music student studying voice. One of the classes that all music students were forced to take for several years was called "ear training". It focused on "training" several different "skills". They were:
1. The instructor would play a series of chords (generally six to eight) on the piano in four-part harmony. These chords would follow resolution patterns which we were presently learning in our music theory classes, which happened concurrently. The students were obligated to write down the bass (lowest) and melody (highest) voices.
2. The student was required to sing a series of chord patterns. I-IV-V7-I would thus be C-E-G-E-C, F-A-C-A-F, G-B-D-F-D-B-G, C-E-G-E-C (in the key of C major).
3. The student was required to clap out rhythms.
4. Other tests, such as hearing a pitch and being required to generate (with one's voice) the note above it which created the interval of a perfect fourth.
Most of the time was spent in task #1. In the three years that I was in ear training, here is what I noticed.
1. I was able to hear all four voices (not just the bass and melody) by the second pass. I would then get so bored by waiting for the other students to catch up that I would write lyrics to the chords. In the three years, I never improved, and neither did any of the other students. Even worse, my "success" at this task had no effect on the other students' ability. They simply couldn't do it, no matter how much they practiced. It didn't "click" with them like it did with me.
2. On the other hand, I had a very hard time with the rhythms. I jokingly blamed this on my being white, of course.
So, having gone through this experience, I decided that my ability to "hear" the voices for "ear training" was pure talent and has nothing to do with training or practice.
Now, training my VOICE on the other hand (which was my instrument, as all music students have one major instrument), took lots and lots and lots and lots of practice. Then again, even that totally depended on whether or not you had a "set of good pipes". Meaning, Jessye Norman as a singler is much like Nolan Ryan as a baseball pitcher: their bodies were practically built for it. And, on top of that, they might have had some innate mental talent as well.
I've known a piano accompanist (the guy who plays piano while the singer plays) who was able to transpose Faure and Debussy on the fly. In other words, the romantic and modulating piano piece in front of his eyes was in E-flat minor but what comes out of his playing is C-sharp minor, and he was making sure to take cues from the singer while he was playing! I honestly don't know what kind of practice one can do in order to be able to accomplish that. That, in my opinion, is sell-your-soul kind of magic ability.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Give me a break! You're saying you could be like Mozart if you really worked at it (even from a young age)? That is absurd.
Don't get me wrong I'm not suggesting the hard work, discipline, etc don't make a difference. They make a massive difference. But to say that the only reason my name isn't on everyone's lips as the latest musical sensation is because I didn't work at it enough is just wrong.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
Concerning Mozart, I'm relating this from the memory of something I read over 15 years ago, so I may not have it exact.
Mozart grew up in a musical house. His father claimed that as a toddler (2 or 3 years old), young Mozart used to sit at the piano and pick out intervals using two fingers. He was absolutely facinated by this, and even his musician father thought this remarkable. Obviously, he demonstrated some kind of interest and motivation that is rarely seen.
Later in life, as an adult, Mozart, in a letter, recounted how he felt misunderstood by the people that lauded him for his spectacular abilities. The passage, near as I can remember, went as follows.
"No one has worked harder than I have. There is not a major piece of music, nor a minor piece of music from a major composer, which I have not studied thoroughly and with which I am not intimately acquainted."
I don't know how to give a comprehensive explanation as to why little Mozart was so interested in music. Maybe there was some physical attribute he possessed making the actual sounds physically appealing to him. I don't think we have even scratched the surface concerning what "talent" is. But, I don't believe that Mozart, had he been given intensive training in writing, could have become a great writer (though his letters are certainly articulate and entertaining) -- unless, for what we would at this time have to call "some inexplicable reason," he, from an early age, had a passion for the written word.
So, if I understand your post correctly, I believe we're in agreement. What made the fundamental difference, at the start, was his "genuine love" (as you say) of music. Only because of that was the training and the resources available to him able to allow him to develop into what he was to become.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
"Andy Soltis of Chess Life remarked on something like the 8-year limit whereupon nearly infinite amounts of continued work produce *no* further gains. This presumably relates to where natural talent leaves off."
Or where it's increasingly difficult to find the information necessary to progress. example...
Starting at 0% of the subject, 100% is available.
50% knowledge, 50% is available to learn.
90% knowledge learned only 10% is available to learn.
99% knowledge, only 1% is available to be learned.
As you progress it becomes harder and harder to find the information nesessary to progress so progress plateus. Extraordinary drive and motivation is necessary to search out those extra 0.5% and 0.1% bits of skill/knowledge because you have to search/train constantly for little reward.
Deleted
That people have a natural bent towards some ability, and if they are lucky enough to discover this talent early on, they can become an expert quickly. Part of this is because once they discover they're good, they keep doing it for fun. I mean, have you ever met an expert in a field who HATED the thing he was an expert at (yes, I realize that is not a real scientific argument). And when you enjoy something you're doing, your brain releases certain chemicals. I wonder if these chemicals might be more effective at building the "skill" part of the brain versus chemicals released when you're doing something you don't enjoy.
So, there, please poke holes in this. If you have thoughts on this I'd rather have your comments than mod points.
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AOL.
Maybe it was not a "born" talent, but the result of skills he picked up because of exposure to music at a young age? My father has never been formally trained in music, but he can nearly instantly recognise most ragas, sometimes even quicker than a professional musician. He ascribes it to having listened to a lot of music as a child (others at home learning it, and so on).
The problem with most of the anecdotes that seem to support the "innate" (nature) theory is that they can also be equally well applied to support the "trained" (nurture) idea. For instance, if the daughter of a chess player is a good chess player herself, is it because she inherited her father's "chess genes", or is it because she had a good chess teacher at home?
One thing is certain — children learn quicker, and are better at grasping ideas, than adults (consider learning foreign languages, etc.) By extrapolation, I believe that the earliest years have the most effect on the person. If someone cannot become a good musician despite slogging hard during high school, is it because he has no "innate talent", or is it because he didn't pick up the requisite skills when he was a child? Is musical ability innate, or does everyone have the first (say) five years of one's life to obtain it?
On the other hand, there are several indications of purely genetic predispositions — there have been some studies of identical twins with surprising results.
There is a fair amount about these things on Wikipedia, scattered among several articles. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this.
It reminds of me of another interesting observation about the eight (or was it seven?) Bernoullis, described in the chapter titled "Nature or Nurture?" in E. T. Bell's Men of Mathematics, many of whom started out in other fields, but eventually made contributions in mathematics (or physics, or "natural philosophy", or whatever it was called at that time).
Huh? News? Doesn't the word expert comes from experience? How could anybody be born with experience?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Law and medicine are professions where gifted minds advance the profession.
Acting is a profession where "naturals" stand out from others with guidance.
The sales profession is rife with born-salesmen who can grow to new levels.
Sports professionals have measurable attributes well outside their expertise.
It's all about what you start with, and then what you can make out of it.
If you've studied comedy, you've run across a couple of truisms. One is that it takes 10 minutes of killer material to make a superstar. If you have a routine 10 minutes long in which every single bit is strongly laugh-inducing (given your delivery), then you should expect to have your own sitcom and endless fame and money in short order. Very, very few people *ever* put together 10 minutes of true, killer material.
Another truism is that your core routine, your truly great material, grows in direct relation to how much time you spend working on it, performing, and writing. If you treat it like a full-time job, write every day, and perform every chance you get, then you'll add about 1 minute of core material to your routine for every year you practice your craft.
In comedy, then, the theory holds. It takes 10 years to become an expert.
On a related note, while talent can reach its potential in a decade, I'm of the opinion that a total lack of talent can never be overcome. Some people can't tell a joke. Ron Jeremy (a name that should be familiar to most Slashdot denizens) used to desperately want to be a standup. (I don't know if he still feels that way.) I've seen his act many times over a number of years. He has no timing and even though the material is pretty good, he just can't tell a joke. He gets some laughs. He may even be just good enough to make a living at it (as a novelty act) if he wanted to. But I'm convinced that he proves that a LACK of talent can never be overcome no matter how hard you work.
Are all people equally talented? We all have different genes -- why should they all express themselves as equal talent in all fields?
I love the card game bridge. I believed the "ten year" theory and worked hard at it. I got pretty good. But there are some people who have memory skills/talents/aptitudes/whatever that I'll never have, and for those people (whom I've met), a few months of casual playing and they're already way better than I'll ever be. That's not effort. It's talent.
To be a true expert you have to work your butt off and have talent. Just one is not enough. Just ask any Chimpanzee, who can study sign language for ten years and be no expert. You've got to have the talent too.
It isn't true to say that other languages cannot be learned later in life either,
But that's not the issue with the critical period of learning for language. The problem is that if you don't learn *ANY* language during the critical period (before 7 I believe) you will *NEVER* be able to learn a language.
Even if you only learn a single language during the critical period (sign language counts) you will then be able to learn multiple languages as an adult by bootstrapping off of your first one.
The article has a very simple logical flaw. In college classes from a few decades ago, All cardinals are birds but not all birds are cardinals. All experts take 10 years to create, it's not the case that after 10 years anyone can become an expert.
Reductio ad absurdum (Latin for "reduction to the absurd") Take a person with Downs syndrome and make them into an expert.
Take 10 years and train someone who is tone deaf to have perfect pitch. Even professional musicians who train their entire lives can't develop perfect pitch if they are not born with it.
Sorry, it's a case of Political Correctness gone awry. We are all created with equal rights, we are not all created equally.
Apparently, the researchers have never heard of this. While it is true that latent talent needs to be exhaustively developed in order for someone to be an expert, without that talent all the training in the world is useless. Or, as Lazarus Long would say, "Don't try to teach a pig to sing. You waste your time and annoy the pig."
Similar to the upcoming US election results
They need to look at this thing from exactly the opposite direction. Arguing about whether someone is good because of innate talent or hard work doesn't really help. The real point is that there are people out there who will never be good in a particular field no matter how much work they put into it!
... when I first took a class in it, everything was obvious.
I have taught some Computer Programming classes, and I have encountered students who simply could not learn to program! Their brains were just missing something that was needed for that particular skill. I personally have always found programming easy
On the other hand, look at music. I like music, I listen to it all the time, but I have no musical talent! I can't carry a tune in a bucket. As far as perfect pitch, mine is "perfectly awful." Had I started music lessons back in grade school (50-odd years ago), I would still not be qualified to sing or play an instrument professionally. My brain is just missing something in that particular area.
I think it is pretty obvious that if you can have untalented people in a given field who no amount of work is going to help, you are also going to have the opposite end of the spectrum -- talented people who are going to be good with no (or at least minimal) work.
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Look up the theory of "Multiple Intelligences" and post again, please. Thank you.
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
TFA is very similar to an article in the New York Times by Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame. In his article he cites the work of Anders Ericsson. If you follow the links provided you can find his paper. What he points out is that humans are very plastic both physically and mentally. Given the motivation to practice in a certain manner, almost anyone can become an expert at anything. There are some physical limits of course. If you're five feet zero, you're not making it as a professional basketball player.
If the work cited by Levitt is true, and I believe it is, this has tremendous implications for public policy.
If we think that people's ability to learn is genetically determined, then we will think that poor people became that way because their ability is limited. In that case, there is no point in spending a lot of money educating them. On the other hand, if we believe that almost anyone can excel with the right amount of work then it is worthwhile to make the effort to try to educate them. We see the problem as one of motivation and not ability. So, there's the problem. Are inner city kids defective or is it worthwhile to provide them with the programs and education to raise them into mainstream society. There is very strong evidence that we should spend the money and insist on a better education for them.
http://www.freakonomics.com/times0507.html
For more on this, see Rawl's Theory of Justice.
Bullshit.
This study falsely assumes that all people's minds, intelligence, abilities, etc. are equal which is not true whatsoever. Nobody is completely equal. There is a very clear and distinct difference between people whose minds are naturally brilliant in a particular subject matter and people whose have only been highly trained in a particular subject matter.
For those who are naturally brilliant in a subject matter, knowledge only facilitates their ability to achieve. Training alone does not make them brilliant, it is only a tool to help them to reach their maximum potential, their natural born talent is what truly makes them great. Truly brilliant people think and use knowledge in a way completely different than those who are not like them.
For those who are higly trained, they can use the knowledge, and can occasionally think outside of the knowledge given but they are not truly brilliant thinkers in the subject matter beyond their training.
For a good example, my mind and one of my best friend's mind work completely differently. I am a naturally talented Mathematician. I have always loved Mathematics and science. My friend is a naturally talented musician. While I daydream about Mathematics and various areas of science all of the time, jotting down thoughts and looking up information on subjects I think about throughout the day, I have a very hard time playing the guitar and making up music. I have trained myself to play the guitar, and I can play music I have learned quite well, but making up completely new music is very difficult for me. Now, when my friend picks up my guitar (or any instrument), it is truly incredible how he just starts plucking away at the strings, and incredible music just starts flowing through his fingers. When I ask him how he does it, he says he doesn't even think about it, he simply plays what he feels. Although, when he's not playing music, and works on a hard science subject he has a terrible time comprehending various Mathematical and scientific concepts and ideas. Sure, he passes his Mathematics exams, but his mind is not truly talented in that kind of thought process. Which is exactly the opposite of my mind, where I am brilliant Mathematically, yet struggle to play musical instruments. This a great example that shows that training doesn't mean anything without the born brilliance and talent of the mind that is using the knowledge.
I should have doccumented it, officially, but - at the time - it was just a matter of curiosity.
I was working as a Calculus tutor, at university, and I ran across an IQ test, online, and it got me to thinking. I talked some of my students into trying out an experiment: everyone took an IQ test at the beginning of the semester, and then - as a follow-up, at the end.
Regardless of how they scored on the initial test, everyone scored above 135 after finishing Calc II. I put this down to the fact that they had learned new modes of thinking (e.g. pattern recognition, infinite series, &c.) as part of the course.
While I daydream about Mathematics and various areas of science all of the time, jotting down thoughts and looking up information on subjects I think about throughout the day...
As you yourself admit, you spend a lot of your time looking up math/science subjects, solving problems, and thinking about them. Now, suppose your friend did the same. Do you think he would be stuggling with Science concepts? Now, suppose that your friend thinks about Music all of the time, jotting down songs and listening to how music around him works. Is his success in music because he has more talent than you, or because he thinks about Music while you think about math? If you thought about music as much as you think about mathematics, don't you think that you would be better at music?
I don't mean to completely destroy your point- some people do have more natural talent than others. Like you, I am good with math but not music. My brother is the opposite- he has musical talent but math and science have no interest for him. The reason that I am better at math than music, though, is because math was more interesting to me, and because it was more interesting, I did more with it, as I did more with it, I got better, and as I got better I became more interested. I do think that I had some small amount of mathematical talent to start with that got me interested in the first place- but without training, it wouldn't matter.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Some doctors would argue that people are tasting too much life these days, given our problems of obesity in the US.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
A lot of people are pointing out that natural ability vs. training isn't a boolean, so the article oversimplifies. But a lot of people are also saying "Natural ability is necessary, I know because I spent 10 years doing [whatever]" or "I saw people who spent 10 years working on [whatever] and they still aren't the best."
That's making very unwarranted assumptions: no one is saying that it's enough to work for 10 years at something, no matter how you work at it. People who drive every day for 10 years still aren't typically world-class drivers, because they aren't spending that daily driving time doing anything that would lead to real improvement. Even people who work hard to improve at something, for years, can still make little or no progress because of how they are working or being taught, completely independent of any innate ability they may have.
I believe in innate ability, and I think it would be very difficult to honestly argue it doesn't exist at all. But I think it can be overstated -- as one of the other commenters noted, in some disciplines the experts don't do things the way they tell their students to (and as a budding mathematician who is appalled with the state of mathematical exposition today, I think the same is true in that field -- it would be very easy for someone with a lot of ability in math to nevertheless become discouraged by the way higher math is presented). Apparent "innate ability" in such cases may just mean that someone happened upon the correct approach to something despite, or at least independently of, their "official" training. If that's true, it doesn't mean natural talent doesn't exist, but it does suggest that there are many more "naturally talented" people than we are aware of because of our limited understanding and education.
I am the man with no sig!
After a long discussion, study of large samples of human beings with wide ranges of ability, talent, and work ethic, we will conclude exactly what we expected; The elite not only show the best ability but they also have the best possible predisposition and have furthermore used hard work to train whatever it is this hypothetical elite person strives at. Furthermore, the people who exhibit the absolute lowest ability within an area of study are not only apathetic to this area but also lack the predisposition. People somewhere in between have varying values of talent and work ethic.
Ability, talent and work ethic are all real values, that is, there not only exist infinatly many values to describe a person's ability, but there are also an infinite number of levels of ability between any two people.
IQ is not genetic
So a dog has the same IQ as a human, Women are as good at parking as men and men are as good at socilising as women?
IQ tests aren't the best measure of intelegence because a lot of the time they rely on learned skills, but at the same time the ability to learn and understand is a key part of intelegence. A better measure of intelegence would be to measure someones knowlage at the beginig, teach them as much as possible and the measure it at the end. I bet that even after everyone had finished Calc II there were some people who were way ahead of the others.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
All men are born equal is not about equality of ability, but equality of rights, with rights per the Natural Rights doctrine.
Capitalism is not about rights, but about lack of government controls, instead relying upon greed (note: this does not mean that greed is good or bad, merely that it exists and is a core part of a true free market). Freedom/Rights loving individuals lean toward capitalism because the government limits rights - any controls that the government creates limit the rights of the governend.
Socialism is not about rights, but about "from each what he can do, to each what he needs." In other words, it's about each person producing whatever s/he is able, and getting whatever s/he needs to survive. Nice, in theory, but greed breaks socialism. Someone, somewhere, will not produce everything that s/he can. Or, someone, somewhere, will want more than their "needed" share. Because of this, socialism requires Government oversight to function (for the purpose of this discussion, let's assume an altruistic government). This government oversight, by definition, is government control. Freedom/Rights loving individuals shy away from socialism, as socialism requires government controls, which, by definition, must limit freedoms.
Rapid early progress really doesn't mean much for the total time to become an expert. As someone else pointed out, progress becomes exponentially harder the more you already know: Just picking rather arbitrary numbers it might take, say, 5 of those 10 years to take a single last "step" from "expert" to "master". That is, the difference in progress at the start may not mean that much when you get beyond "beginner" level -- since each stage becomes progressively harder it takes a (more) disproportionate amount of time -- and by that time the differences in progress at the onset will have been smoothed out. Yes, the person who progresses faster at the beginning may become an expert a year earlier than the others, but that still roughly ten years.
Btw, what's with this "exposure to music in utero"? Do have references to any credible papers to back that up? It sounds pretty ludicrous to me.
HAND.
had you two spent a few hours on tone. Being of similar age and experience, I'll bet the both of you would have been able to go a long way toward defining what it is.
Think of it this way. You are trying to understand a difficult subject that a childhood friend understands well. Would you have an easier time of it from a total stranger or from your friend? Chances are, you would have an easier time of it when working with someone you can relate to.
I'm not articulating this well right now dammit!
It's about shared experience and the shortcuts possible when two people have some things in common. These elements can be leveraged to better communicate complex things. It's why really good teachers listen and talk. Having some understading of how the other person thinks really helps to convey the concept in terms they can understand. Kind of like translating between languages, if that helps at all. Our own internal representations are often very different. Trying to convey something to another, without some baseline, is very difficult.
The key to those with talent lies in their internalizations. They might be visual, tactile, whatever... but they model some means, methods or process in a way that allows them to deal with it on a lower level. Thought is motion for an athlete, for example. As a kid, I never groked this. Later as an adult, somebody helped me make this connection and suddenly I was able to become a lot better at some things. I'm not saying that a simple insight can make a clutz a start player, but it can plant the seed for greater success than would otherwise be possible.
Getting back to your friend. Had you two sat down and talked about tone, there is a very good chance that the two of you would have reached some common ground. From there, passing along that thing you call 'it' becomes viable, that's all.
Blogging because I can...
OK, so I spent some time as a professional race car driver, and managed to (against the odds) win a couple of championships.
I know for a fact that I had no special innate talent - at least not for driving. My successes came as a product of a ton of hard work, a dedicated training and practice routine, and no small amount of technical innovation. I consider myself living proof that if you want something bad enough and are willing to work hard enough, it is possible to succeed.
But I know a couple of guys who fit the description of "innate talent". These are guys who are always fast, no matter what they drive, and who are *immediately* fast, and who are *consistantly* fast. I had a lot of peaks and valleys in my performances, where these guys are always consistant.
At first, I cursed the genetic lottery and my lot in it. But after I got to know some of these individuals, I realized that they were no more talented than I was. The difference was that they *never got nervous*.
At any given race, my attitude would be anything between "Faster, pussycat! Kill! Kill! Kill!" and "Christ, why am I here?" Needless to say, when my morale was up and my nerves down, I'd do well. The best couple of runs of my life were done in a state of almost supernatural calm and confidence, when the world seemed to slow down and nothing seemed important. But when morale was down and nerves up - man, I couldn't drive sheep.
But these superhuman talents, they never got nervous, and so they never hit the valleys that us mere mortals did - so their average level of performance was better, which makes them look more talented in comparison.
I'm utterly convinced that when I was having an A day that I was the equal of any other driver in the sport. The problem was that I never learned to be able to go to my A game at will, where these guys could.
Maybe the problem with your underachiever is nerves?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I'm surprised that William James Sidis has not been mentioned in any replies. His father, a psychologist, claimed that "genius" is available to everyone. If you're curious, check out http://www.sidis.net/ for an archive of works by both father and son. It will seem like nonsense to most of you, but some of you will have the requisite experience to make use of it.
Memory is tied to emotion, so having a pleasant mood all of the time is a great benefit. Regular 7.5-8 hours of sleep appears to aid memory retention. Excellent health- the result of regular exercise, nutritious food, and relaxation is essential. Anxiety is a common distraction in peoples' lives- anxiety is overcome with sleep, diet, relaxation, and confrontation. Fear of knowledge is a common inhibitor to learning. Traditional education (largely indoctrination) causes most of us to summarily reject useful knowledge, not based on any sound reason, but because of conditioned associations like "it's ridiculous".
The desire for truth is a key motivator for genius. Critical thinking is the primary tool. Humility is an important facilitor for further acquisition of knowledge by keeping the ego under control. Concern for morality ensures that the aim of the quest for knowledge is to ensure the survival of humanity.
The social system that most of us inhabit maintains itself largely through fear. Truth is permitted in so far as it maintains that system, though falsehood is regularly spread (wittingly and not) via various authorities (pundits, rulers, teachers) to keep significant change from occuring. There are many of us who have known for years the structural weaknesses of our society, but to date we have been unable to effect meaningful change either through incompetence or fear. MLK died trying to change the system.
We can't make the mistake of giving up, but it is also imperative that we learn from the mistakes of the past.
And I just LEFT a nature-vs-nurture debate!
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Its the measurement that determines the level of success. If weight lifting and other physical activities were measured relative to your physical characteristics, then anybody could complete. Many sports are separated by gender to create a relative measure; also, similar things are done for various handicaps.
You can push your body to its limits which are genetically or physically set. You can't change genes yet.
If someone with brain damage can adapt and re-learn to function nearly as well as they once did then surely any brain genetic preponderance is largely inconsequential by comparison.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Uhh, why does this sound like you got five hand jobs from hookers and only came on one of them?
We are still trying to learn mental development from prebirth to 3.
Like a snow flakes, all brains start out differently. It is just a starting point before 3 years of really massive development. Most variations if understood, could be compensated for.
I'm hoping they don't ever figure it out (its bad enough with what they do on adults now.)
I was born deaf and was not able to hear until 3. I was described as "slow" or "highly abstract" which I find silly, since language is an abstraction that I was not exposed to. It took me about 10 years to catch up on English with the other kids.
Kids learn amazing stuff you never expect, especially when babies. Those things create a mind conductive to certain topics-- which people mistake as "natural talent." A big factor, if not the biggest factor -which any good teacher will tell you- is the child's emotions: on the teacher, subject, environment, at home, etc.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
basically leftist thought is dominated by a premise of tablula rasa, the blank slate. this was the preferred and pushed doctrine of socialists, feminists, marxists, fascists, corporatists and more.
in order to have utopia, we must be interchangeable. none of us must be allowed to have or to believe they ahve an advantage. feminism is marxist, and the greater force pushing this side of the equation (other parts are being pushed by others). in order for feminisms premises to be true (which are socialist), we have to be the same. (note that there is no way to tell the productivity of a group of different people splitting the work 50/50 without regard to comparitive advantage, and a group of people that have NO comparative advantage)
Socialists, especially marxists and feminists have a big problem with talent and something called the natural elite. those people that rise up and such without the trainign of the state. you can find them throughout history. edison is a great example. many are born with a drive that others dont have, even if that is the only key to their talents.
so how to eradicate this? well. one way to eradicate comparitive advantage is to make eveyone pitch in and do 50% of the work. this guarantees the mean/average output.
another way to eradicate it is if everyone is actually not different. while theoretically simple, its operationally impossible, and it rests on the premise that we are not different. that everythign about us is different but the mind. the mind is exactly the same between all of us, and our differences are all due to culture, and false beliefs... like talent
both those actions mathematically doom the practitioners to the mean.
how else can you hide or remove the talented from view? well, you can have group sessions and idea management and stuff. what this does is allow a group of people to co-opt the output of the talented. so rather than joe who is the one who always has the ideas getting credit, the group that has joe gets the credit because the ideas are part of a group synthesis where eveyrone claims to be part of joes ability. group think keeps joe from being unhappy that 15 people live off his work while he lives no better for providing to them (this is why these systems eventually collapse and dont have ideas)
the west is very socialist, fascist, and corporatists. we have pushed the inane equality of outcome over the saner equality of purpose. why are you all suprised that out of this comes the next stage and that will be to kill the conept of talent and such. to remove that a person who is able to do things earlier and such is special at all. that what they do is a trick, and that everyone can do it.
under the brave new world that they are creating einstien, mozart, sun tzu, bhudda, jesus, mohommad, rembrandt, liszt, clauswitz, and others are not special!!!!!!!
if this is the case then we can tear down all the statues of great people. we can remove the differences... of course what we will also remove is the contributions that those people bring the human race.
for the truth is a bit different. most progress of the human race is from the actions of a very small percentage of people that contribute. the talented, skilled and such. those with some natural ability. natural because many of them came up and never had the schooling and such that the article claims they must have. they change the face of the domains they participate in beyond the knowledge within the discipline.
newton... ordinary... just lucky someplace we dont know about einsein... inevitable... just lucky he was first attila the hun.. went to a secret war school... so he wasnt so special
and when they are not so special.. then what about you?
when no individual is an individual, do we have peace, and utopia?
they havent worked out the next steps. the reason is that marxism and socialism are made up constructs that have no real natural basis. as such they have NO predictiv
And yet, people who have a hard time breaking 4:00 or even 5:00 will blame their "genetic predisposition." That's what I don't buy. Does it make a difference at an elite level? Certainly. Does it have a measurable difference at a low level? Probably, but (IMO) its an exponential curve. The closer you get to elite, the more of an effect it will have. If you're 100% slower than the WR, its probably not having much of an effect. 10% slower? Yeah, it probably is.
In high school I was a slow runner but when after going through basic and ait, advanced individual training, in the army my tyme in the 2 mile run was 11:43, almost 6 mintues per mile while the army limits for my age group were 12 minutes for the highest score and 17 minutes was the max tyme allowed. The furthest I ever ran in hs was about 5 miles, I was on the swim and dive team and because the school didn't have a pool after weight training we had an hour to get to a public pool 5 miles away and most of us ran it. When I got out of the army though I ran several miles a day and could run 12 or more. If it weren't for training I never would of been able to do that. While some may have an innate ability to do something training can make them much better.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Almost everything I've done well has come easy to me. Whenever I have worked hard at something, I've never gotten as far as the bastards to whom it comes easy.
This seems to be straightforward, but I read the scientific american article, and the author says something that is easy to miss. He says that, to the "masters," dedicated study doesn't seem like hard work.
Capitalism needs this lie. I understand the original underlying intention of course: everyone gets the same rights. But often capitalism pushes this idea to the fact that everyone through hard work can succeed at things. That way bums are just lazy, middle class workers are just people who work just hard enough to be able to keep their job, etc. etc. The successful, who by far and large are not just one but a combination of hard work, luck, position and influence use it to make it seem as if everyone could be them. The fact of the matter is that some peoples' abilities will never match up to other peoples'. While it's good to try things, and even invest a bit of hard work into these things, the fact of the matter is that some people actually need help (in terms of bums) or don't posess the ability to be Einsteins and Mozarts, and that laziness isn't the real factor.
It's a nice lie we like to tell ourselves in a capitalistic society so that we can justify 1% of the population owning most of everything: they are the harder workers. Please.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
I think everyone can agree that there is no such thing as a natural ability chess AS A GAME - there is nothing in our evolution that would suggest this. However, it is hard to deny that there are certain basic abilities that are used in the game of chess that could have a "nature" component. They try to examine some of these factors - examples: memory - Are the GM's better because they have a better recall of positions? This would bolster the "talent" theory. But apparently the answer is no, based on the experiments. Their ability to recall things is the same.
Another example is processing power. Perhaps the GM's are just smarter (whatever that means), able to process more choices. Again the answer is no. They look ahead the same number of moves.
Yet another example is the profssional handicappers. There is no denying that there must be a mathematical component to what they do. If innate ability was involved, it is likely to do with their mathematical ability. But apparently it is not.
You can identify innate factors that one would think should contribute to these mental expertise games, but all these conitive factors have shown to have no effect or even correlation between experts and non experts. These cognitive factors are the ones that would be affected by innate ability - not the game as a whole.
One of the things about Fischer that people have said that is others are only competent imitators. That Fischer had an understanding that went beyond hard work. This is true with any field.
Of course hard work can never be replaced, but if someone has a natural talent and works as hard as someone that isn't a prodigy for a decade, guess who's going to be far far better. Naturally the one with the natural talent for that field.
I really believe that these authors of the "study" are just trying to even things out in a pathetic attempt to tell people that "You can do anything you want to!" This is of course ridiculous.
I know that I'll never write a best selling novel because I suck with the written word. And even after a decade of study, I'll only be a competent imitator; there's just no substitute for natural talent. But, I can write good code, so there's a chance that I can write a useful piece of software. I'll stay with what I'm good at.
We must all know our limitations. It's BS like this that forwards the delusions of the youth of today that they have no limitations, and are all "the best" and can do *anything*, etc.
In argument against me, I obviously have no talent for closing tags.
KFG
I might also point out (in fact, I will) that perfect pitch isn't even necessarily desirable. In most people it actually limits their musical development, psychologically, because perfect pitches are arbitrary, but they think of tones as being "right" or "wrong."
I teach mostly adults who are already performing professionally. I "tune them up" and take them to the next level, or introduce them to another genre/style of music. This typically takes the form of teaching a classically trained musician a traditional form, many of them so ancient that the theoretical base of them predates even Pythagorean music theory (Irish music, for example, is primarily Pythagorean, with undertones of older systems. This is why the fiddle is so popular in Irish music. It can play any tone. A piano, by it's very nature, cannot properly play Irish music, because it can only play "perfect" notes).
I hate teaching traditional music to people with "perfect" pitch.
They can't even hear the notes they need to play.
I have to teach them how. The process is fairly straightforward, but time consuming; exposure and practice. Just like for anything else.
KFG
The idea of genius stems from the myth of the wizard,
who collects different herbs for his spells,
which are psychoactive in nature. this idea ties into
the origins of religion, where the ancient soma
is recorded in the first religious hindu book. The origin
of the bachelor degree arose from religious schools in
europe, where psychoactives like wine rose the spirits of
the mass. Psychoactives invoke an expansion of awareness,
which moves furthur on the chomsky scale. All geniuses
are autodidacts; aware of the terrain, less the map.
Gauss's genius was purely computational, more of the
map.
"Alcohol depresses the brain generally, but the
sophisticated prefrontal cortex is more affected
than less complex areas, Some studies of meditation
have linked the practice to increased activity in
the left prefrontal cortex, which is associated with
concentration, planning, meta-cognition (thinking
about thinking), and positive affect (good feelings)."
Seperating a genius from his collective is an illusion
of time and space. Even the tallest tree isn't much
taller than any other tree.. the species as a single
consciousness is computing in a higher direction. The
very molucules in our surroundings are conscoius. It
isn't the neurons which think but the electrons parsing
at the very synapses..The universe has much to learn
from itself computing the complete subgraph..Genius is
everywhere you look.
The graphics processor is genius to the eye which is you
the artist yet you are only the eye in an elf which is
running to water..
read bill gate's interview with playboy.
Thanks for the follow up.
It's perplexing because there should be no core physical reason why your friend could not get a solid tone. Suppose holding it over a range is another problem not unlike vocal music has.
Must really be a matter of perception. It's the only thing I can think of that would explain it. If these minor elements are not perceived well enough to differentate bad from good, the person never gets the feedback necessary to do the right things.
Hmmph....
Blogging because I can...
Currently there are huge arguments that erupt over the "proper" way to teach the roll (aka the Eskimo roll--the stroke that gets you back upright when you flip over). In my own humble opinion these closely resemble the issues in your post. It seems to be a fight between dogma and actual modern study of how the experts roll their boats upright.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think this study is pushing their own political/philosophical viewpoint.
Hasn't anyone known someone who just seemed to be better at certain things, even without training? You've never had friends as a kid who were able to outperform you with less effort and training? Or on the flipside, haven't you known someone who just can't get to be good at something no matter how hard they try? They might naturally lack coordination for example.
To suggest that there's no difference in talent or IQ is ridiculous. That's just like saying that everyone can run the same speed, it's the ones with the most training who win. Of course in this example, we all know that's ridiculous because you can actually see the results easily. But with mental tasks, it's harder to see but we can still measure the results. But when people don't want to believe the results, they'll never believe them and will continuously find excuses for why reality didn't play out the way they thought it should.
It's obvious that natural talent is a significant limiter.
:).
Chimps reach the limits of their expertise in chess playing pretty soon, way before the magical "10 years" they talk about.
Another thing, assuming they are right and most humans might be able to be trained to play chess very well, far better than the current average chess player.
BUT, only the top 10 or 20 chess players would be rewarded well for that. So it is a waste of resources (society, you, your trainers), you might as well be an expert in some other field (unless you really like chess). Think of it in comparative advantage terms (economics).
So given their argument that you can train people to become an expert in anything (expert being better than average), I suggest that we focus on training children from infancy to reach "expert levels" in being loving, honest, nice, kind and patient, having integrity etc.
Even if they don't end up being the top 10 kindest people in the world, I think society would benefit a lot more from such a project than say an intensive chess/golf/music project.
After all what's the big deal about meeting the #2000 golf player in the world? Whereas the #2000 kindest person in the world would still be kind to you
I'm surprised nobody has qualified alcohol or other addictions as the litmus test for abilitiy vs. practice, talent vs. experience. If this is similar to the nature vs. nurture arguement, which of course it is, then simply by recognising the differnece shows they both exist.....(at least to the extent we use the terms)
take two people that present similar ability/talent (not saying which is responsible, measured with some sort of skills/comprehenshion test), get them drunk/high/happy/sad(out of their norm) and take the measurments that qualified their similarity again!
one will show talent (or whatever word/description you want to limit yourself with)
hang on a sec, lemee go gets me drink.....
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
I've only toyed with a trombone. Enough to fully grok the nature of the partials. To me, it was more of a feeling --like the instrument only allowed specific feed frequencies. Of course they are harmonics and your detail filled in some gaps from long ago.
It's never too late to feed your soul a little. Grab a nice used instrument and go for it. Likely not practical, but most likely worth it.
The music bug either bites deep or does not bite at all. I do vocal stuff. The beauty of it is that I can entertain the art anytime I want.
Cheers!
Blogging because I can...
Socilism seems to work reasonable well on a small scale. Things like communes and kabutz work without government intervention, and families where only one partner works and the other stays at home have been working for a long time.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Jack Nicklaus was 10 when he played his first nine holes of golf. He shot a 51, and by age 13 he broke 70 on 18 holes. Many people play for years and still regularly shoot 51 on nine holes. I started playing at about twelve and it took me several years before I could shoot below 50 on nine holes. Sometimes it really is talent!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Nicklaus
All is Number -Pythagoras.
It seems to me that they're equating expertise with little more than rote memorization, of what amounts to tricks of the trade.
Is that really all that expertise is about, merely memorizing a bunch of facts and being able to recall them? What happens when one is faced with a completely new situation, for which there is no stored facts to suggest a course of action? All the associative memory in the world won't help if the neurons for sustained reasoning are absent. Unless there is advanced reasoning, an ability to extrapolate and interpolate, the new situation could result in failure (or embarrassment or death).
On the other end of the spectrum, which this article seems to have ignored or overlooked completely, are people who have unreliable or highly "selective" memories but also possess abnormal reasoning abilities. You might call them "Pretenders": they can quickly analyze and discover needed facts on the fly, rather than remembering and merely recalling. It's quite possible such people develop that reasoning ability as a compensation for poor memory, in much the same way that a person who loses one sense often develops more acute responses from the remaining ones.
There once was a term for these alternative types of "experts": jacks of all trades. Rather than being expert specialists, they're expert generalists. Personally, I think it's a shortsighted mistake to value one so disproportionately to the other... the species needs both.
Innate ability is the wrong word to describe the phenomenon. Posture. For physical activities the greatest in all fields have proper posture, i.e., they use the least amount of effort to achieve the desired result. Take golf or juggling as an example. Basically you're manipulating an external object and it's relationship to gravity. The more of an intuitive understanding you have of gravity, i.e, the more you are capable of balancing yourself, the better you can affect another objects relationship with gravity. With mental tasks it's the same. Genius' are those that understand how the mind works, and can achieve the desired result with minimum of effort.
I used to have aspergers. My physical control was severely lacking, yet i had such a good understanding of how my mind worked that i was able to teach myself anything. Lately, i've put my understanding of efficient use of energy in mind tasks to physical tasks. My physical body is now more balanced and the result of anything physical i accomplish is directly related to the efficiency of my movement, this applies to juggling, acrobatics, guitar playing, drawing, musical instruments, eyesight, virtually everything. I don't even need to 'practice' something, i improve my control over my body and then use my mind to apply that to correct movement in each field and voila, instant upgrade in ability.
There's a reason why people at the top of their field look and move the same.
It makes me wonder if someone like hawkings could walk if he just applied his mind to learning how to. Sounds unbelievable but hey, i've gotten rid of genetic disorders, restored my eyesight, restored function to my shoulder where the nerve was crushed, gotten rid of my scoliosis, and gotten 'rid' of my aspergers ( i can change my focus on and off, and move it to other areas then my 'innate ability' area).
Mod parent up.
I would learn more and get more done if I weren't married with children but I'm v.happy with my family.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Sounds like a decent life approach.
I struggle with these things sometimes. The need to explore something sometimes outweighs other life priorities. 8bit computing and gaming is one of these things. The bug comes back every few years. So I author something, enjoy myself and move on.
The biggie is having no regrets.
Sounds like you have that covered.
Blogging because I can...
What if both sides are correct?
It may take ten years to get really good at something. But there might be those who are good at something from the beginning. I think there could be a key. You just need to have some core ability or knowledge.
Think about it. I can draw. Many people draw tens of years and get no better. Others are really good from beginning and improve really fast. It is often so that you just find out something that works, some neat trick. "How about if I vary line width? Neat-o!" It takes a long time for some people to catch up, to figure out what exactly makes the difference. Some guys just pick up the important thing from the beginning.
So, this core ability or knowledge could be the key. It might be that it is not well known and that the teachers do not know what it actually is. It might be, as in previous posts here, that they talk about talent so that they know it when they see it even if they can't point out exactly what it is.
This is intriguing because if you can pinpoint the core ability or knowledge, you can improve dramatically and fast. That is, if you can exploit it.
In this Scientific American article they discussed chunking. It's kind of categorization and it improves memory. With these chunks the expert can have at least one level of abstraction more in thinking than the novice. But if this chunking needs ten years to form and the process is more or less random, wouldn't it be nice if you could skip the random part and use it at will?
That would be superhuman talent. Wishful thinking, probably. But nice idea.