Something I feel that I can add to this is that kids are able to put in time (practice) without it feeling like it’s work. Their brains are very malleable. I think adults excel more at concepts, which requires deeper, more focused, thinking.

“The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance.”

In poker you receive immediate feedback (win/lose the hand), but it’s not necessarily informative. Just because you won a hand or your opponent folded their hand does not mean you played your hand CORRECTLY — I’ve won plenty of hands that I played incorrectly. The lack of complete information (not knowing what someone had when they folded), in addition to the variability of outcomes (you can win with the worst hand sometimes) makes it hard to determine if you played a hand correctly.

“The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.”

It’s extremely rare that you will play a hand the exact same way in poker. When you take into account the variability of the cards, your position on the table and the players you’re playing against, the number of different situations is insanely high. Contrast playing poker to something like playing a piece of sheet music over and over again until you master it. With music, it’s very easy to repeatedly perform the same task over and over again.

The tricky thing with poker is you need to abstract these unique, individual situations into more general situations. But if you abstract incorrectly, you’ll end up misapplying logic to the wrong situations and losing. This, in my opinion, is what makes improving your skill at poker so challenging.

They don’t entirely oppose the idea that innate talent is what initially attracts people to an activity. But their point is that the amount of accumulated deliberate practice is so good at explaining differing abilities—on its own—that differences in initial ability are quickly overtaken by differences in practice quality, frequency, etc.

So one of their predictions—and this you could test—is that a parent need only pretend that their kid is coming along well as a violinist (or whatever), regardless of his actual ability, and as long as this encouragement causes the kid to practice deliberately and with a coach, etc., he might as well have been genuinely promising.

The trouble with a lot of the historical examples of such behavior is that in most cases, the parents who sort of blindly encourage their kids to go into discipline X were themselves great Xers, so it’s hard to tease out the genetic factor. But anecdotally, I think exposure to good coaches/tutors, lots of easily available reading materials, and an early habit of deliberate practice account for most of the “father’s son” type of career paths. Example: what’s more likely, that there is a “lawyer gene,” or that a judge’s son becomes a good lawyer because he is groomed as one?

And finally, they do make a big point of the fact that domain-specific abilities really boil down to one general ability, that is, the ability to endure lots of deliberate practice. This they are willing to accept as innate.

It’s like what Paul Graham says about entrepreneurs: the best predictor of success is determination. Smarts, ideas, hacking ability, etc., take a backseat to grit. He has lots of evidence to substantiate that claim. Which makes sense in the deliberate practice framework, especially since “entrepreneurship” is such an obviously acquired ability (unlike, say, piano playing, which seems like it might depend more on genetic factors—though again, the authors handily dismiss a lot of this genetic talk).

That’s enough for now.

I love that your comments section knows to treat my enumerations as numbered lists. That is

(a) Awesome. (b) Useful. (c) Aesthetically pleasing.

The question is whether or not it recognizes different enumeration styles.

I haven’t read the paper and perhaps I should. But I wanted to voice a similar point to Jimmy’s about innate ability not being worth much. I am wondering how they corrected for the self-selection and other selection mechanisms that would come about in this paper?

To be more explicit about these selection mechanisms:

1. How do we know that the youngsters who began to play violin at a young age simply weren’t the most talented to begin with?

2. How do we know that those youngsters who practice deliberately are not precisely the ones who are the best naturally? Couldn’t we assume that those youngsters who never saw measured improvement from deliberate practice would have simply quit? I think there comes a point where most of us see our limits and so choose to quit trying to do something we never can.

3. Preemptively: It seems like the way they broke apart #1 + #2 was by asking talented individuals to perform tests for skills that were related to their craft, but were not the craft itself. E.g., pianists were asked to perform tests of reaction time and they fared no better than normal individuals. This seems fair but I’m wondering how they defend the use of this against the counter claim that a battery of tests for parts of an action is not the same as testing that action.

E.g., perhaps our pianist does not have faster reaction time when hitting a button, and perhaps he doesn’t have a better feel for rhythm than any other music aficionado, and finally perhaps an IQ test reveals that his mean analytical abilities are no higher than anyone else’s. BUT, perhaps when he needs to do some weird balance of these things, he does them better. And perhaps he did them better at age 7, before his father bought him a piano. And perhaps by age 9 he was still doing better than the other boys, and as they dropped out of piano school only him and fellow precocious 9 year olds were playing. And so by 10 years of age it’s just a bunch of super gifted pianist

Selection biases like these are a staple in the social sciences, so I’m sure they were dealt with. I guess I’m asking you to enlighten us so I don’t have to read an entire paper to find something that is probably mentioned casually as a caveat somewhere in the Methodology Section.

~Sharon