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.
making obsolete tech sing and beyond
Over the past few weeks I've been playing around trying to repurpose old hardware. Mostly CD and DVD drives and they're chock full of useful parts - lasers, motors, lenses and so on... That and a bit of Arduino prototyping to come come up with a bag of junk that could be sent to undergrads next year. Motivation came from the COVID-19 teaching experience. At least in physics online classes proved difficult and labs unworkable. Some folks at Caltech suggested a different lab experience where the student assembles or even invents a piece of experimental apparatus to use to make some measurements. The fact that most students have smartphones - basically computers with a number of interesting sensors and a network connection - makes this even more appealing. It probably isn't appropriate for 101 non-major courses, but it may make a better lab experience for more advanced physics and engineering students. The potential for real learning rather mechanically following directions is great - assuming you have good instruction to go along with it. There's also the possibility of creating inexpensive lab kits for high schools. High school lab experiments are ridiculously expensive and inflexible. There are a number of interesting directions. It's been fun and several of us are in exploration mode.
I need to add I'm a privileged white male with the ability to take a bit of time and focus on this kind of craziness during an epidemic. Too many people aren't in that position.
The project reminded me of some attempts to help my mother when she was dealing with dementia. She became forgetful, so we'd make lists. Then she lost the ability to read so picturegrams. All along the way glasses, remote controls, almost anything that wasn't nailed down managed to get misplaced. And then there was medication. She went into a managed care facility. Life was less stressful, but she was constantly misplacing things and forgetting how to operate the style telephone and TV remote. I started building gadgets to help out, but by the time one sort of worked, she had lost more capability.
I've thought about it a fair amount since. The facilities are expensive - at least $80,000 a year and usually more. What could you change to allow someone stay at home a few years longer? Even if it cost ten or twenty thousand dollars, it could save a lot of money and be better psychologically. (Greg Vesonder has done thinking along these lines)
Om and I were talking about where the local and personal application of "intelligence" is a big thing, perhaps the biggest thing, for Apple going forward. With their sensors and local connectivity outside of the cloud, the iPhone and Apple watch have great senior citizen potential. The iPhone has machine learning hardware. Combine this with ultrawideband location and a dozen applications immediately leap to mind.1 Fertile ground indeed.
Of course the trick is to stay healthy and sharp as you get older. It turns out there's a wonder drug which, taken regularly, doesn't have negative side effects. The AMA now considers physical exercise a powerful drug - often with superior results than conventional drugs. It has been shown effective in lowering the probability of several types of cancer, heart diseases, many forms of dementia, and is even associated with "happiness". You don't need a lot. Walking enough counts and you get it for free if you use a bicycle. But you have to do it.
Many people use smartphones , watches or dedicated fitbit type devices for motivation.It turns devices aren't universally motivating over time, but if they work for you it's money well-spent. The sensors and processing can be useful for athletes training at the amateur level, but not at the elite level. That's a separate and fascinating story at the frontier of sports science these days.
Finally it's becoming clar that certain types of mental stimulation help push back the onset of dementia. Forget the memory games marketed for the purpose - they've been shown to be ineffective. What you want is something that challenges you - something you've never done that you have really work at. Anecdotally creatives who constantly push boundaries are in good shape. I suspect it doesn't matter how creative you are - just the fact that you're forcing a lot of new neural connections. The brain stays plastic for a long time.
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1 Current generation iPhones have the U1 ultrawideband chip. They haven't done much with it, but it makes a lot of sense for augmented reality, ID verification and object location. I wrote a bit on UWB a few months ago.
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