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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."
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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.
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).
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
"Nor will a privileged imbecile be able to govern a nation."
We're doing the case study on that right now...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.
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.
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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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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.
"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'