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."

Comments

Re:Partial credit

[kripkenstein]

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.

So, to argue that intellectual experts are partially born, you compare them to a field where we know that being an expert is mostly born (bodybuilding)?

There are no studies showing a trainer taking a few average joes and getting them into the world championships of bodybuilding. But there are such examples in chess, as TFA states.

I remember learning about the "10-year theory" of genius in a graduate course in psychology (that it takes around 10 years of practice to make an expert, not innate talent). It was portrayed as a 'radical' theory in that it flew in the face of the common belief of innateness. But the evidence does support it.

The one area where the theory wasn't completely fleshed out in TFA, however, was the issue of age. While it is possible that nearly any child can be turned into a chess master with appropriate training and time, it isn't at all clear that the same is true for adults. Whether this is because adults have less time (or motivation), or because they are missing some biological advantage that children have, we don't know. But compare this to language: we know that children learn languages very fast during a 'critical period' of childhood. Children who don't learn a language at that age cannot learn one later in life. So perhaps there is a 'critical period' for being trained to be an expert at chess. We just don't know that yet (or didn't when I was taking the class 4 years ago).

A persistant delusion

[kahei]

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.