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

the same thing

[macadamia_harold]

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?

Missed the queue for the expert mind?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind, the slashdot hive mind is ready and waiting for you!

Mod points at the ready .....

Partial credit

[PresidentEnder]

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.

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).

Re:Partial credit

[ResidntGeek]

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.

Chess isn't a good measure either. A COMPUTER can play chess. The rules and strategies are almost all worked out, so it takes only practice to learn them. A better field for this discussion is music - four lifetimes would not suffice to learn all of music theory.

Re:Partial credit

[kripkenstein]

Chess isn't a good measure either. A COMPUTER can play chess. The rules and strategies are almost all worked out, so it takes only practice to learn them.

Software chessplayers can beat human ones, but they play completely differently. For example, human chessplayers see only a few moves ahead, while software chessplayers rely more on brute-force search to find good moves.

Computers beat humans at chess not because we understand chess, but because we found a way to make computers do it well, which is different.

Re:Partial credit

[kfg]

. . .four lifetimes would not suffice to learn all of music theory.

But this is also equally true for everyone; and the one who works at it the most will learn the most.

Of course learning properly also helps. Did you learn theory from a book at the piano/guitar; or did you sit down with a koto (or better yet a gu zheng, more strings) and meter stick and actually try to tune it by physical measurement and by ear?

You'll learn more about temperament that way in a couple of weeks than the average music student learns in a decade by modern methods. It might even disabuse you of the notion that there are "right" and "wrong" notes, merely consonant and dissonant intervals; and even some of those are a matter of cultural training.

KFG

Re:Partial credit

[misleb]

When it comes to music, I think it makes a big difference what kind of music it is. If we're talking about just playing written music with accuracy and precision, I'm sure most people could do it by learning the "rules" and practicing a lot. Starting young also helps. But there is a more subjective aspect to music that goes beyond simply being able to manipulate the instrument. Can a musician improvise? Does the musician have innate rhythm? How about "soul?"

It has nothing to do with how long it takes to learn music theory. Give an instrument to two people and teach them how ot play it. Give them, say, a year to learn the basics. They'll probably both be able to play some songs with similar skill. Now, take away their sheet music. Tell them to play something original.. improvise. I guarantee you you'll separate the naturals from the "robots" in no time. THAT is what innate ability is about.

I like your computer comparison. A computer can be programmed to play just about any music you tell it to play. I have yet to hear a computer compose (good) original music, improvise, and adapt to the playing of others in real time. Question is, how does one quantify this so it can be studied?

-matthew

Re:Partial credit

[cp.tar]

Oh, my bad. But vision is something even older and more fundamental than language, so I guess my point remains.

As for the Chomsky quote, and the whole innateness theory, sorry, but I remain unconvinced. The capability of learning, understanding and speaking a language is obviously innate just as much as our senses are, but Chomskian views on that matter I find rather... lacking.

Then again, I'm a convinced cognitivist, so this is no wonder.

The 'critical period' aspect of language is probably because of its innateness, and not its complexity.

Whyever do you seem to think that innateness and complexity have nothing in common?

Take a look at the current optical recognition software, from OCR to robotic sight. How far have we gone in developing those technologies?
Compare that to the state of NLP. Especially for morphologically rich languages, which have made Chomsky alter his theories time and again.

Sight, hearing, language... all these require extensive training at a certain point in life. At a certain early point in life. And the reason for this is, I'd guess, because of their complexity. I've read of jungle tribes whose members can only visually comprehend distances up to 10 m or so; they never get to see anything farther away than that. In our world, they'd be maladjusted; in theirs, we would be.
These perceptive and cognitive functions are way too complex to be fully innate; instead, capabilities for development of those functions are innate, and the functions develop according to the surroundings.

That explains my innate talent

[davidwr]

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.

Uhh, sorta.

[bm_luethke]

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.

Re:Uhh, sorta.

[Clovert Agent]

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.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but it's hard to tell where background stops and talent starts. For example, perhaps your talented student simply had exposure to a range of activities as a child which meant s/he developed better hand/eye coordination - a head start, in other words, which just looks like innate ability.

I imagine "talent" to a degree depends on prediliction. I'm not at all musical, and gave up piano lessons as a child because I just didn't find it fun. Kids who /do/ enjoy it and spend hours and hours practising because it's fun, are obviously getting much more training than those who endure a weekly lesson and do a minimum of practice.

And, of course, what you like probably depends largely on your home environment. So an inclination to develop talent, perhaps, can be instilled from infancy.

None of which precludes the possibility of innate talent, of course, like you described. Some kids really do just pick up a golf club and show a frightening ability to get it right first time. Seems obvious, really: if talent="physiognomy and mental state being just right to start with", then perhaps everyone's got a statistical chance of being naturally good at any given skill.

The Genius' Expression

[Rie Beam]

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.

Ability to accept training

[syousef]

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.

Arg

[hyfe]

In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity

ARG!

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.

Nature vs. nurture redux

[yusing]

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.

Re:Nature vs. nurture redux

[shmlco]

"Nor will a privileged imbecile be able to govern a nation."

We're doing the case study on that right now...

Re:Interesting, but a little one sided

[kfg]

I guess spending lots of time playing counts as training. . .

Yes, there's even a word for "lots of time playing." The word is:

"Practice."

You might have heard an aphorism using that word.

I'll bet he wasn't very good at the subjects he ignored at Columbia. There just might be a relationship.

KFG

Formal study vs. Hard Work

[illuminatedwax]

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.

Re:Formal study vs. Hard Work

[illuminatedwax]

You've got to be kidding me. Bush looks like a dummy, and his policies might be completely terrible, but he knows his stuff, and he has worked hard to get to where he is. Bush knew his stuff solid at both debates (unless you still subscribe to that "wire" garbage), and he's put in a lot of effort to get to where he is. Winning a presidency is not an easy thing to do, and Bush is good enough that he makes it look like anyone can do it. True, he has Karl Rove, but believe me, you have to devote yourself to the task. In fact, look at places where Bush didn't work hard: failures.

I'm not talking about "success" as defined as "making lots of money" or "being the highest in the corporate ladder" or even "being promoted." I'm talking about "success" as "being the best at what you want to do." But on the other hand, if what you want to do is make lots of money or climb that corporate ladder, then you have to work at it. Guile and craft take a damn lot of work, and if you don't think so, there's a reason you're not crafty or guile...y. Now, of course it's not fair that those who are the best at their craft don't get promotions, but if you are in fact the best in your craft, the fact is you have succeeded. If you shun the "corporate machine" so much, don't complain when you get screwed by it.

Of course hard work will never guarantee success. But there's the rub - success is never guaranteed. But you can be damn sure that probability will drop damn close to zero if you don't work hard.

Re:Formal study vs. Hard Work

[radtea]

Winning a presidency is not an easy thing to do, and Bush is good enough that he makes it look like anyone can do it.

The presidency is not won by a person, but a team. The team with the most money and the fewest ethical constraints generally wins.

Genius vs. Expert

[nacturation]

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

Re:SOCIALIST lies, IQ is genetic!

[oliverthered]

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.

Re:Metatalent?

[poliopteragriseoapte]

I disagree - I believe people can be very different at their talents - the minds of different people can work in very different ways.

No matter how hard I tried, I was always terrible at soccer and at juggling. I just don't have enough control of my body for that. On the other hand, learning mathematics has always been effortless for me, and I can "view" in my head 3 and 4-dimensional functions with ease. Regardless of how hard I try, I am definitely NOT good at picking up the correct accent of foreign languages - even languages that I have been speaking for decades. Other people can sound like native speakers in a couple of years. I spent lots hours trying to learn chess, and just about anybody could defeat me. At Go, in scarcely a few months I became good enough to hold my own with most players in my city.

The belief that "education does all" is the kind of belief you have before you see enough students, and especially, before you have children. After that, you know very well that kids are born with very definite personalities and abilities - you can educate them, but the personality and basic abilities are there from day 1, perhaps not fully expressed, but there.

Education, or training, just feeds the prepared mind or body.

Of course

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:Of course

[YttriumOxide]

I'm not sure I can agree (with you, or the article), and for the exact opposite reason.

I am, as a matter of fact, extraordinarily talented. I'm also extraordinarily lazy. I excel at a variety of fields including a very specialist field that I work in. I refuse to study though and have done ever since school. I cheat my way through every test of rote memorisation that I can, and don't need to study at all to do very well in things that interest me. In no way have I studied anywhere near as much as most comp sci graduates, but I'd give any "non-gifted" graduates a good run for their money in logic, programming and other things that comp sci focuses on.

Now, this entire post may sound like I'm just being egotistical, but the point of the post is that I'm lazy, and yet I'm talented, so I seem to be the classic example of evidence against the points made.

Re:Of course

[i_should_be_working]

You know, for me it's the reverse. I'm much more comfortable thinking 'I could have been great had I put the effort into it', than I would be thinking that I'm just inherently not good enough. I'd rather be lazy than stupid.

I guess I just don't like the idea of someone being 'better' than me. If someone trains, or works harder than me, that doesn't make them better, just a harder worker, which I don't mind.

Re:Of course

[I(rispee_I(reme]

I guess I just don't like the idea of someone being 'better' than me. If someone trains, or works harder than me, that doesn't make them better, just a harder worker, which I don't mind.

Unless, of course, you place value upon a strong work ethic, in which case they're still 'better' than you. :)

Re:Of course

[TheRaven64]

You downplay the importance of laziness. I, too, am incredibly lazy. Given two ways of achieving the same result, I will pick the easier one. When I was nine, I recall my maths teacher saying 'the best mathematicians are the most lazy' (she died less than a year later, which was a sad day for education). Consider someone like Robert Recorde; he invented the sign for equality so he would have to spend less time writing 'is equal to,' which meant he could spend more time working on actually proving things.

When I was an undergraduate, I was amazed at the amount of effort people spent which could have been avoided by taking a moment longer to think about the problem. I am firmly of the opinion that I am not much more talented that the people around me; just much more lazy.

Re:Of course

[QMO]

I disagree.

I would say they both can be fixed, to some extent but:
1. We tend to decide between smart and stupid or between lazy and hardworking as if the scale were discrete, rather than continuous.
2. We tend to only look at one or two facets of intelligence, and think they're the whole thing. Consider someone that can read between Melville's lines, but can't factor a trinomial to save their life. Smart, or stupid?
3. Lazy vs. hardworking is, in the cultures I'm familiar with, an issue relating to character, not ability.

In music at least, talent coutns

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Or it's evidence of better training and motivation

[Colin Smith]

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.

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.

Re:Or it's evidence of better training and motivat

[Diamonddavej]

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).

Read "The Pianist's Talent"

[Half-pint HAL]

There is a commonly-held belief among teachers:

"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,

The supply and demand of knowledge

[Colin Smith]

"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.

An Example

[BenEnglishAtHome]

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.

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.

Anecdote != evidence

[Garse Janacek]

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.