In the early 1990s Anders Ericsson of Florida State University went to a music school in Berlin to test an idea about deliberate practice. The music school had high standards. Ericsson suspected practice separated the best of the best from the average. He asked the eighteen year old violin students to think back on how much practicing they did since they took up the instrument. Then he had the music professors to divide them into three groups - great, good and average. Those in the great group averaged about 10,000 hours of practice. The good, about 8,000 and the average practiced around 5,000 hours. It seemed like a neat result - practice more and you do better. He published a paper that wasn't exactly rigorous - it lacked statistical measures like ranges and standard deviations and was more of a discussion than a formal paper.
Prof. Ericsson didn't push the result was a bit to the side of his core work and he didn't heavily promote the result. But others saw a compelling story around that lovely round hour and a work ethic. One was Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is a great storyteller, but he often oversimplifies and gets things wrong. The 10,000 hour result has been disproven by more careful studies over and over, but his books and TED talks are enormously popular and have made the idea something of a cultural meme.
Recently I was thinking about something else he said that was misleading. Great storytelling, but misleading. The more I thought about it, the more damaging it seemed. It's partly linked to the 10,000 hour story and some unhealthy forms of training.
In Outliers Gladwell talks about a relative age effect. He uses sports, but it can apply to academics and other areas. Say the calendar allowing kids to participate in a sport begins on January 1. Kids born in the first quarter would be January → March birthdays. He noticed that ice hockey players born in the first quarter are over-represented and forth quarter kids are under-represented. The pattern appeared in several other sports so he set about writing a compelling sounding story.
What happens is when kids are allowed to try out for a sport - say nine or ten years old - many of the first quarter kids are significantly more developed than forth quarter kids. Most coaches can't tell the difference between maturity and ability and tend to select the kids who perform the task better. The rate of change at that age is so great that the majority selected will be the older kids.
A problem is the better players get moved to the better coaches and facilities. The talented ones in the chosen pack progress riding a premium training infrastructure. There may be very talented kids who are later born who miss the advantages of this training and infrastructure who are lost to the system as they miss a chance to develop and are soon left far behind.
Combine this with the 10,000 target (as an exercise figure out how many hours a day you need between the age of nine and seventeen to become expert) and you realize specialization needs come early for the better athletes. I'll admit to oversimplification here - this is a fascinating area that has become something of an arms race as, at least in the US, the goal of a college scholarships can force specialization before a kid becomes a teenager.
The funny thing is when you look at more carefully you see sixty to seventy percent of the college age players in many sports are first quarter births, but for professional athletes in the same sports the relative age effect almost goes away. Almost as at the very elite level there's a slight over abundance of third and forth quarter athletes. What appears to be going on is there's a great weeding of talent from college to pro. In many sports late bloomers - kids who got their growth spurt late for example - finally reached parity, but the fact that they had to work harder and learn the sport better ultimately made them better athletes.
There are other complexities I won't go into other than mentioning playing a variety of sports rather than concentrating tends to make better elite athletes. We have a bias when we hear about prodigies like Tiger Woods and tend to assume they're the norm, but it's not. We also tend to forget about the prodigies that never make it. One estimate is that only about one percent of sports prodigies identified by the media (written up in a magazine) by the time they're teenagers ever make it into the pros.
So the American and some other systems do manage to train a number of elite athletes in many sports and show it internationally in the Olympics. What about the potentially elite athletes that were never trained? It turns out some systems cast a much wider net. The Nordics, notably Norway, push universal recreation and sport for kids as a healthy way to provide fun and lower healthcare costs. Early specialization is discouraged and good facilities are made available to all. It appears to work very well.
I'm far from athletic and am not recommending changing any system (although I think Norway's goal of a healthy population is excellent). This is an illustration. Similar issues of pipelining kids exist in music, art and academics. Broadly speaking STEM education is an example of exclusion and producing a population that isn't as literate as it could be.
Back to the storytellers and oversimplification. If something isn't important and you just want to get a tough idea across, it might be appropriate, but anything of importance needs an appropriate level of depth. That places serious demands on the author, teacher - anyone trying to communicate. It's something I struggle with a lot.
This is a complex topic. If there is a thread I am seeing it is that the US is in love with first order optimization. Whether that is quarterly calls or the overriding focus on getting an entire generation to go to college. As if Harvard or the NFL is the all or nothing outcome in life. Public investments in state university systems and vocational schools suffer as it doesn't fit the individualists dream. Norwegian values diverge strongly on this point as you well know.
As for Gladwell he has cornered a certain market among the (wannabe?) intellectual lay-public. They wish to be absolved of complex moral issues* through a Horatio Alger can-do "it's all up to the individual" spirit. These values are under a lot of stress post-2000 in America, but among a large class of moderates there is a wish to return to a simpler past.
*a kind of first order optimization.
Posted by: David | 09/07/2019 at 04:25 AM