Michael Kruse wrote about Dan McLaughlin's attempt to put in 10K hours of practice at golf to become world-class.
Steve Sailer mocked the attempt, and mastery theory in general.
However, neither Kruse nor Sailer is even addressing the right question.
Mastery theory says roughly that practice dominates ability, given meaningful differences on both. When 2 different golfers have 10K hours of practice, but one is DJ Qualls and the other is Magic Johnson...it's pretty clear who wins.
The question we should be asking is whether Dan McLaughlin's 10K hours will make him a better golfer than an average ex-NFL quarterback with insane strength and coordination, and <1000 hours of effective practice. I think this is a relatively obvious slam-dunk for the 10K hours guy.
One more time...Aretae theory of learning:
First filter is motivation you do it more if you like it...not if you don't. Even Amy Chua was unable to convince her youngest to continue with the violin. Confound: If you're good to start, you like it more.
Second filter is practice...folks who practice the most get better. Folks who practice less don't. Folks who stop practicing start getting worse.
If everyone has similar amounts of enjoyment, and everyone has similar amounts of practice...then we can talk about ability as being the third filter...but it's only very useful as a determinant after you've seriously filtered on motivation and practice.
I'll wager some of my meager salary publicly that at the end of his 10,000 hours (provided he finishes), that Dan M. will be able to beat any other player someone wants to pick (at 72 holes), with the qualifier that the other player must have logged less than 1000 hours of golf at the time of the contest regardless their physical abilities.
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Lots of team sport athletes put in 10,000 hours of practice at golf after retiring from their teams. John Brodie of the San Francisco 49ers won a Senior Tour tournament once. Lots of guys who get rich in business retire in their 30s and put in huge numbers of hours at golf.
Almost none of them, however, make it on the Champions Tour for over 50s. Sometimes you see senior winners who weren't famous on the PGA tour. They usually turn out to have been local golf pros or golf hustlers who tried but failed to make it on tour when they were younger.
I think there's a window that starts rapidly closing down during the late teenage years for learning golf to the major champion level. For example, Michael Jordan learned golf at U. of North Carolina from Davis Love III, whose father was a famous teaching pro. Jordan will turn 50 soon, but I doubt he'll ever win on the Champions tour.
The major champion I can remember who was oldest when he first took up golf was Larry Nelson at 21 who gave golf a try when he got back from Vietnam. It took 5 or 6 years after that to make the PGA tour and he won the first of his 3 major championships 12 years after taking up golf.
Steve,
Well said. But the question is deliberate practice. What Tiger Woods' dad did is somewhat different than what Jordan did after BBall.
Another aspect in learning (that you bring up) is the question of brain plasticity. Montessori introduced the idea that learning to see is important. She noticed that slum children at some ages had never learned the concept of volume, or of length, or of number.
We know there's some brain-hardening in the 8-10 range, after which it becomes MUCH harder to learn to hear sounds that you're not exposed to (when kids are no longer able to pick up languages in an accent-less fashion).
I've suggested elsewhere that this is a cutoff elsewhere as well. Learning to see is huge in nearly any field. As a hardcore math geek, I could believe that fluency with numbers is something your brain hardens into or out of before 20....on the other hand, I've seen guys who were Jock-y guys who just did Algebra in HS go on to finish a BS in Math at a state college. Hmm...
On the other hand, as a programming instructor, I haven't seen the brain-closure effect in teaching, or doing programming. While my best students ever were hackers young...others of my best students never programmed a computer at all before 35.
My observation is that a sigma of ability is about equal to a doubling of practice/experience---at least within the region of +0 to +4 sigmas, beyond which I've got no real experience either personal or as an instructor. So under my theory, if this guy is 0 sigma in actual ability (and I seriously doubt that, I'd wager he's at least +1), having 10K hours of real experience/practice vs 1K hours would let him compete with someone who's a bit more than 3 sigma more intrinsically talented. I'm not sure how well the particular raw attributes of, say, an NFL QB map to golf, but I'd say a decent QB without a lot of brain trauma would probably still be at least 2 or 3 sigma over the mean in raw ability to learn to do golf.
Boiled down, here's my guess. If he goes through with it, and gets about 8x the practice of the typical golfer, he'll probably play around the 3-4 sigma range---i.e, he'll be at the 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10000 range. Plenty to impress your coworkers and maybe get a job in the industry, but doubtful that he'll be in the 1st or 2nd tier of golfers on the circuits. Golf (at least men's) is big business, we're not talking something where the bar to success is low like certain obscure sports that make excellent college application fodder.
Jehu,
I'm somewhat less willing than you to buy the 2x factor...I'm thinking closer to 1.5-1.7x. But in essence, I'm awful close to where you stand. Your conclusion for sure.
And that 10K hours thing? That's the ante for the majors...not an actual stake.
Yes, it will prove he didn't practice right. That doesn't mean it is unfalsifiable, because what 'right' means is precisely defined. You can go and check, it is just labour intensive.
"as a programming instructor, I haven't seen the brain-closure effect in teaching, or doing programming."
Learning is also a skill, and like all skills, will rust. Learning skill is also somewhat domain-sensitive.
The fact that some people can learn late and some can't is likely itself due to differences in deliberate practice, though you'd have to go and actually look inside their brains to see if they're practicing or not...which they can do, but you have to rely on their reports.
Like every scientific finding, it must not make my personal life more mysterious or I won't believe it. In this case, the opposite makes my life more mysterious.
1: humour
Ten years from the year I decided to be funny, I got my first genuine laugh out loud.
Now I've also accomplished rolling on the floor laughing a couple times. My friends object when I say I don't think I'm very funny.
2:
Warcraft 3.
I didn't take ten years, so I'm only way, way better than when I started. I deliberately set out to check whether I could get better at RTS - this before I heard of Gladwell. I stopped because ultimately want to play a war simulator and learn about war, not a game. War 3 doesn't have flanking, nor is splitting your forces ever a good idea.
3:
Archery
I practiced, as one is supposed to. (Pre-War3, during humour.) I did not get much better - simply doing it produced no noticeable improvement.
In the end I started suspecting I needed elements of deliberate practice, but I was too bored and frustrated to continue by then - my first shots would generally be good, and then spread = n*3cm, where n is the number of volleys into the practice. Entirely due to boredom.
4:
Philosophy is my best example, but I don't yet know how to effectively communicate the evidence there. Sadly, my thinking skill has vastly outstripped my communication skill...I was teaching myself logic, not marketing.
(~14 by my estimate. The start date wasn't intentional; I didn't even realize I was studying philosophy until about year 9. It just turns out I have a hankering for deliberate practice of philosophy.)
PS.
I deliberately chose humour to check whether I could go from awful to awesome. (I endured a lot of awkward moments to earn that laugh.)
I wanted to know what would happen later in life if I had to go back and brush up on a skill I neglected to realize I needed for something. Answer: if I will still want whatever is a decade hence, then yes I can get it.
This is a distinguished comment thread . . .
Aretae, if you're right then the 10,000 hours argument basically turns into "practice makes perfect," Which seems . . . underwhelming.
In other words, if 10,000 hours applies only with limits applicable to natural ability, it becomes a truism.
"Aretae, if you're right then the 10,000 hours argument basically turns into "practice makes perfect,""
Deliberate practice makes perfect, yes.
Ordinary practice is ordinarily worthless.
Foseti,
It turns out that Sailer and I don't seem to disagree too much. 90-95% of skill is effort. The other 5% is ability. However, I'm not that excited about your phrasing.
If you're looking for who hits the top 10%(1.5 Sigma)...it's ALL folks who work their asses off.
If you're looking for the top 0.01% (4 Sigma) or better...it's all folks who worked their asses off and are naturally gifted.
The relevance of the practice question, and where I might disagree with Sailer, is where the relevant break-points occur. I say 10x quality practice beats +5 Sigma natural ability. Jehu expects that 10x practice beats only +3 Sigma natural ability.
We don't appear to have fabulous data here... as the very top of any profession are folks who have been running 90 hour weeks for years, and who are 4+sigma gifted...as both the talent folks and the practice folks suggest.
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