Shun offensive things: always, never, sometimes?

Kaj Sotala: Expertise researcher Anders Ericsson on why the popular "ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert" rule mischaracterizes his research:

> No, the ten-thousand-hour rule isn't really a rule

> Ralf Krampe, Clemens Tesch-Römer, and I published the results from our study of the Berlin violin students in 1993. These findings would go on to become a major part of the scientific literature on expert performers, and over the years a great many other researchers have referred to them. But it was actually not until 2008, with the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, that our results attracted much attention from outside the scientific community. In his discussion of what it takes to become a top performer in a given field, Gladwell offered a catchy phrase: “the ten-thousand-hour rule.” According to this rule, it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master in most fields. We had indeed mentioned this figure in our report as the average number of hours that the best violinists had spent on solitary practice by the time they were twenty. Gladwell himself estimated that the Beatles had put in about ten thousand hours of practice while playing in Hamburg in the early 1960s and that Bill Gates put in roughly ten thousand hours of programming to develop his skills to a degree that allowed him to found and develop Microsoft. In general, Gladwell suggested, the same thing is true in essentially every field of human endeavor— people don’t become expert at something until they’ve put in about ten thousand hours of practice.

> The rule is irresistibly appealing. It’s easy to remember, for one thing. It would’ve been far less effective if those violinists had put in, say, eleven thousand hours of practice by the time they were twenty. And it satisfies the human desire to discover a simple cause-and-effect relationship: just put in ten thousand hours of practice at anything, and you will become a master.

> Unfortunately, this rule— which is the only thing that many people today know about the effects of practice— is wrong in several ways. (It is also correct in one important way, which I will get to shortly.) First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practiced by the time they were eighteen— approximately seventy-four hundred hours— but he chose to refer to the total practice time they had accumulated by the time they were twenty, because it was a nice round number. And, either way, at eighteen or twenty, these students were nowhere near masters of the violin. They were very good, promising students who were likely headed to the top of their field, but they still had a long way to go when I studied them. Pianists who win international piano competitions tend to do so when they’re around thirty years old, and thus they’ve probably put in about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand hours of practice by then; ten thousand hours is only halfway down that path.

> And the number varies from field to field. Steve Faloon became the very best person in the world at memorizing strings of digits after only about two hundred hours of practice. I don’t know exactly how many hours of practice the best digit memorizers put in today before they get to the top, but it is likely well under ten thousand.

> Second, the number of ten thousand hours at age twenty for the best violinists was only an average. Half of the ten violinists in that group hadn’t actually accumulated ten thousand hours at that age. Gladwell misunderstood this fact and incorrectly claimed that all the violinists in that group had accumulated over ten thousand hours.

> Third, Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that might be labeled “practice.” For example, one of his key examples of the ten-thousand-hour rule was the Beatles’ exhausting schedule of performances in Hamburg between 1960 and 1964. According to Gladwell, they played some twelve hundred times, each performance lasting as much as eight hours, which would have summed up to nearly ten thousand hours. Tune In, an exhaustive 2013 biography of the Beatles by Mark Lewisohn, calls this estimate into question and, after an extensive analysis, suggests that a more accurate total number is about eleven hundred hours of playing. So the Beatles became worldwide successes with far less than ten thousand hours of practice. More importantly, however, performing isn’t the same thing as practice. Yes, the Beatles almost certainly improved as a band after their many hours of playing in Hamburg, particularly because they tended to play the same songs night after night, which gave them the opportunity to get feedback— both from the crowd and themselves— on their performance and find ways to improve it. But an hour of playing in front of a crowd, where the focus is on delivering the best possible performance at the time, is not the same as an hour of focused, goal-driven practice that is designed to address certain weaknesses and make certain improvements— the sort of practice that was the key factor in explaining the abilities of the Berlin student violinists.

> A closely related issue is that, as Lewisohn argues, the success of the Beatles was not due to how well they performed other people’s music but rather to their songwriting and creation of their own new music. Thus, if we are to explain the Beatles’ success in terms of practice, we need to identify the activities that allowed John Lennon and Paul McCartney— the group’s two primary songwriters— to develop and improve their skill at writing songs. All of the hours that the Beatles spent playing concerts in Hamburg would have done little, if anything, to help Lennon and McCartney become better songwriters, so we need to look elsewhere to explain the Beatles’ success.

> This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or the ballet dancers. Generally speaking, deliberate practice and related types of practice that are designed to achieve a certain goal consist of individualized training activities— usually done alone— that are devised specifically to improve particular aspects of performance.

> The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn’t say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But nothing in my study implied this. To show a result like this, I would have needed to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that our study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.

> The question of whether anyone can become an expert performer in a given field by taking part in enough designed practice is still open, and I will offer some thoughts on this issue in the next chapter. But there was nothing in the original study to suggest that it was so.

> Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it’s crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.

> We have seen this in chess and the violin, but research has shown something similar in field after field. Authors and poets have usually been writing for more than a decade before they produce their best work, and it is generally a decade or more between a scientist’s first publication and his or her most important publication— and this is in addition to the years of study before that first published research. A study of musical composers by the psychologist John R. Hayes found that it takes an average of twenty years from the time a person starts studying music until he or she composes a truly excellent piece of music, and it is generally never less than ten years. Gladwell’s ten-thousand-hour rule captures this fundamental truth— that in many areas of human endeavor it takes many, many years of practice to become one of the best in the world— in a forceful, memorable way, and that’s a good thing.

> On the other hand, emphasizing what it takes to become one of the best in the world in such competitive fields as music, chess, or academic research leads us to overlook what I believe to be the more important lesson from our study of the violin students. When we say that it takes ten thousand— or however many— hours to become really good at something, we put the focus on the daunting nature of the task. While some may take this as a challenge— as if to say, “All I have to do is spend ten thousand hours working on this, and I’ll be one of the best in the world!”— many will see it as a stop sign: “Why should I even try if it’s going to take me ten thousand hours to get really good?” As Dogbert observed in one Dilbert comic strip, “I would think a willingness to practice the same thing for ten thousand hours is a mental disorder.”

> But I see the core message as something else altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement— think of what two hundred hours of practice brought Steve Faloon— but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.

> This puts the ten-thousand-hour rule in a completely different light: The reason that you must put in ten thousand or more hours of practice to become one of the world’s best violinists or chess players or golfers is that the people you are being compared to or competing with have themselves put in ten thousand or more hours of practice. There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement. So, yes, if you wish to become one of the best in the world in one of these highly competitive fields, you will need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work just to have a chance of equaling all of those others who have chosen to put in the same sort of work.

> One way to think about this is simply as a reflection of the fact that, to date, we have found no limitations to the improvements that can be made with particular types of practice. As training techniques are improved and new heights of achievement are discovered, people in every area of human endeavor are constantly finding ways to get better, to raise the bar on what was thought to be possible, and there is no sign that this will stop. The horizons of human potential are expanding with each new generation.

-- Ericsson, Anders; Pool, Robert. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (p. 109-114). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

Kaj Sotala: > Jordan has a complex relationship to freedom of speech. He wants to effectively silence those left-wing professors by keeping students away from their courses because the students may one day become “anarchical social revolutionaries” who may bring upon us disruption and violence. At the same time he was advocating cutting funds to universities that did not protect free speech on their campuses. He defended the rights of “alt right” voices to speak at universities even though their presence has given rise to disruption and violence. For Jordan, it appears, not all speech is equal, and not all disruption and violence are equal, either.

> If Jordan is not a true free speech warrior, then what is he? The email sent through his wife’s account described Bill 28, the parenting bill, as part of the “transgender agenda” and claimed it was “misleadingly” called “All Families are Equal.” Misleading? What same-sex families and transgender people have in common is their upset of the social order. In Maps of Meaning, Jordan’s first book, he is exercised by the breakdown of the social order and the chaos that he believes would result. Jordan is fighting to maintain the status quo to keep chaos at bay, or so he believes. He is not a free speech warrior. He is a social order warrior. [...]

> [In a phone call, Peterson said] “You don’t understand. I am willing to lose everything, my home, my job etc., because I believe in this.” And then he said, with the intensity he is now famous for, “Bernie. Tammy had a dream, and sometimes her dreams are prophetic. She dreamed that it was five minutes to midnight.”

> That was our last conversation. He was playing out the ideas that appeared in his first book. The social order is coming apart. We are on the edge of chaos. He is the prophet, and he would be the martyr. Jordan would be our saviour. I think he believes that.

> He may be driven by a great and genuine fear of our impending doom, and a passionate conviction that he can save us from it. He may believe that his ends justify his questionable means, and he may not be aware that he mimics those figures from whom he wants to protect us. But his conviction makes him no less problematic. On the contrary.
I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous | The Star

Kaj Sotala: > As more people began to spend more of each day arguing about serious issues with strangers online, it became necessary to sort out which opinions could be summarily dismissed. So the devil’s advocate is pictured as a highhanded nerd popping up to play logic games in the face of pressing issues. Concern trolls are disingenuous drags on the conversation. There’s hand-wringing, derailing, distraction, tone policing, silencing, gaslighting, “sea lioning” — a label for every depressing rhetorical habit that could possibly present itself, each term a tool for narrowing down the number of ideas waiting in line for your consideration. Taken as a whole, this taxonomy feels both totally rational and slightly desperate — a way of insisting, against abundant evidence to the contrary, that a productive conversation remains possible.

> This is not a result of some sea change in human psychology. It’s an issue of infrastructure. The types of arguments we once venerated — the kinds of critical-thinking dialectics that educators tell us hone the brains of students — make sense in orderly, deliberative settings, places like classrooms and courtrooms and Platonic dialogues. But that is not where online speech takes place anymore. Social-media platforms knocked out the walls of an infinite series of salons, turning them into one gigantic city square teeming with protests and counterprotests, each faction equipped with slogans and banners, each trying to command space and crowd out the opposition. They turned all speech into public pronouncements, and thus all conversation into a strange form of activism, part of a zero-sum battle over which ideas will find a foothold in our collective attention. In the midst of an information war, to express any opinion, sincerely or not, is seen as giving it space and therefore material support. Nobody stands in the middle of a march holding a sign that says, “What if One of Our Demands Is Unwise?”
Why Have We Soured on the ‘Devil’s Advocate’? - The New York Times

Kaj Sotala: > ... modern fantasy depends on the logic of a rational, scientific worldview to operate. We expect magic to have defined properties and rules, to be systematized; we expect there will be no incomprehensible deus ex machinas, but that inasmuch as the plot is developed by supernatural elements, they will follow from the logic of the story and the description of the world as it’s laid out. This is one reason I get annoyed when people describe magical realism as a subset of fantasy, or say it is only distinct because of literary prejudices–in fact, magical realism doesn’t follow many of the conventions of fantasy, and one of the reasons it appeals to me is that, while the supernatural in such narratives is often emotionally satisfying, it’s never treated as anything other than totally inexplicable. Fantasy is, despite the name, often little more than a different kind of science fiction. Which is OK; it’s hard, in a world where we understand how to slot phenomena we don’t understand into a basically rational worldview, to tell stories about worlds suffused with magic, especially as an everyday phenomenon, where magic occupies the role it might have in, say, classical antiquity. I’d be interested in fantasy where magic is treated more like that–where the phenomena really do defy explanation or even analysis–but I can’t recall ever reading a fantasy novel like that. [...]

> I think lumping Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez together with George RR Martin and Robert Jordan would be extremely misleading for everyone involved, in a way grouping “literary” SF like Never Let Me Go and Under the Skin with Zelazny or CJ Cherryh would not. The only commonality the two groups have is “things happen which are not possible in real life,” but the underlying logic of why those things happen, and how they happen, is radically different –even more different than between two very different works like Lord of the Rings and Firefall (which are very different books!).

> Tolkien’s causal magic is on the same continuum as any systematized magic; Tolkien just (wisely) has a light touch in some areas as a worldbuilder to preserve a sense of mystery. Yet his sense of mystery, with magic as with the cats of Queen Beruthiel, is not the sense that the thing is unknowable, just that it happens presently to be unknown. He explicitly describes the “magic” in his books as a rational Art, not incomprehensible mysticism. It’s just that none of the Artists who are responsible for things like the Rings or the Palantiri are available to explain how they work. That’s very different from a girl who floats off into the sky one day for no reason, the rain that pours down over Macondo for four years, eleven months, and two days, or the trail of blood that seeks a specific person out through the streets flowing at right angles. There, there is no sense of an underlying but unglimpsed order or orderer; rather, the sense is that the world sometimes simply operates according to principles always and forever inaccessible to either the reader or the novel’s inhabitants. There is arguably a little of that around the edges in things like Arthur Machen or HP Lovecraft’s work–but only arguable. I still put Lovecraft and Machen in the same category as Tolkien, although of course there are other features of their work that more closely ally them to fantasy than to magical realism.

> Fantasy and magical realism are both subsets of the realist novel, but since “realism” as a set of stylistic conventions has swallowed almost everything in literature in the last three hundred years, this is a less useful distinction at present than it would have been in preceding centuries.
Maybe-Mathematical Musings — tanadrin: jadagul: tanadrin: jadagul: ...

Kaj Sotala: So, we have an explanation for how the Uber self-driving car's LIDAR could fail to see an obvious pedestrian+bike: the LIDAR saw her just fine, but Uber deliberately disabled the standard Volvo emergency braking safeties, deliberately disabled the self-driving software's own emergency braking so it couldn't brake even though it foresaw the collision and wanted to (because the software was so erratic its braking would be dangerous on its own), and the self-driving software includes no mechanism to alert the human driver of an emergency! And Uber thought it was a good idea to take this off tracks and start live-testing this on human roads.

I don't say this lightly but I think there need to be manslaughter charges filed over this. These choices amount to depraved indifference to human life.

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prelim.pdf
www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prelim.pdf