the jsomers.net blog.

I have just finished reading a famous paper by Ericsson, Krample, and Tesch-Romer called "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" (1993, Psychological Review).

The paper's key claim is that performance—be it in chess, or swimming, or violin—is a monotonic function of accumulated deliberate practice. More deliberate practice equals better performance.

So what is "deliberate" practice, and how is it different from the regular kind?

The most cited condition concerns the subjects' motivation to attend to the task and exert effort to improve their performance. In addition, the design of the task should take into account the preexisting knowledge of the learners so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction. The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance. The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.

So there should be an "active search for methods to improve performance," immediate informative feedback, structure, supervision from an expert, and "close attention to every detail of performance 'each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit.'" Deliberate practice is demanding and can be quickly exhausting. It's usually not enjoyable in its own right.

Here's an example from chess:

In informal interviews, chess masters report spending around 4 hr a day analyzing published chess games of master-level players. Selecting the next moves in such games provides an informative learning situation in which players compare their own moves against those selected in an actual game. A failure to select the move made by the chess masters forces the chess players to analyze the chess position more carefully to uncover the reasons for that move selection. There exists also a large body of chess literature in which world-class chess players explicitly comment on their games and encyclopedias documenting the accumulated wisdom on various types of chess openings and middle-game tactics and strategies. An examination of biographies of world-class chess players... shows, contrary to the common belief that chess players have developed their chess skills independently, that these elite players have worked closely with individuals... who explicitly taught them about chess and introduced them to the literature.

Now that youngsters have access to cheap and super-powerful chess software, in which every position can be meticulously analyzed and moves can be compared across vast historical databases, it's no wonder that grandmasters are getting better faster. Structured deliberate practice is now easier to come by.

(As it is in poker. All these kids playing online can not only play many orders of magnitude more hands than their veteran predecessors, but they also—like chess players—have continuous access to analytics and hand histories which make perfect fodder for intense study. They can play at a dozen tables simultaneously and work hard on various techniques, situations, and methods, all the while collecting data and keeping track of metrics like percentage of limp-ins, % of hands played off the small blind, % flops seen, etc., for themselves and everyone else at the table.)

Anyway, that 4-hour figure cited above is actually quite common. In fact, the profile of top performers in every field the paper surveyed is remarkably consistent:

• They start practicing seriously at around 8 years old (sometimes younger), usually after showing unusual "promise" or interest.
• They seek out and work individually with a handful of mentors or teachers.

  ...it is generally recognized that individualized supervision by a teacher is superior. Research in education reviewed by Bloom (1984) shows that when students are randomly assigned to instruction by a tutor or to conventional teaching, tutoring yields better performance by two standard deviations.

• In addition to coaches / trainers / tutors, they regularly compete on a local or regional level. Doing well in these competitions validates their and their parents' expense (of time, money for transportation / travel, etc.). So intense practice continues.
• The duration and frequency of practice sessions gradually increases. (If you immediately started training at an expert's pace, you'd burn out.) Top performers practice about 4 hours per day in 80-120 minute sessions. There are decreasing marginal returns after the first hour and a half of a session.
• Athletes work most intensely in the mid-afternoon. Scientists and novelists almost uniformly prefer the morning. These choices make sense from a biophysical perspective.
• Experts are totally immersed. In addition to practice, they spend 50-60 hours per week on domain-related activities, like lessons, competitions, study, group practice / performance, individual play / performance, etc.
• Before producing their best work, they need to have completed about 10 years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

It's hard to overstate the importance of an early start. It's simply not possible for late bloomers to catch up, since they won't even be able to practice as much as the elites who started early:

...it is impossible for an individual with less accumulated practice at some age to catch up with the best individuals, who have started earlier and maintain maximal levels of deliberate practice not leading to exhaustion. As noted earlier, the amount of possible practice appears to slowly increase with accumulated practice and skill. Hence, individuals intent on catching up may suddently increase the amount of deliberate practice... Within months these individuals are likely to encounter overuse injuries and exhaustion... Furthermore, the difference in accumulated deliberate practice in late adolescence for the good and best violinists [the two groups in one study, the latter of whom started earlier] is remarkably large and to eliminate this difference the good violinists would have to practice an additional 5 h per week beyond their current optimal level of weekly practice for more than 8 full years.

There are some exceptions. Scientists in particular don't start intense research until their late teens or early twenties, which is why they often produce their best work in their mid-thirties. The key for them is to write:

In support of the importance of writing as an activity, Simonton (1988) found that eminent scientists produce a much larger number of publications than other scientists. It is clear from biographies of famous scientists that the time the individual spends thinking, mostly in the context of writing papers and books, appears to be the most relevant as well as demanding activity. Biographies report that famous scientists [like Darwin, Pavlov, and Skinner] adhered to a rigid daily schedule where the first major activity of each morning involved writing for a couple of hours.

Why is writing so useful? Writing is hard, structured, and it clarifies thinking. It's also one of the most effective ways for scientists to get feedback. This is part of the reason why consistent academic blogging can be so effective, especially if the blogger has a decently large audience. (And it makes one yearn for the writerly equivalent of chess or poker software, like a program that spat out a quality metric for each of your sentences as you typed.)

Anyway, the overall picture that emerges from this (quite long) paper is that innate talent counts for very little—even things like lung capacity, heart size, capillary density, dexterity, etc., that we might take to be genetically endowed, turn out to change considerably with years of deliberate practice. Or to take another example, excellent pianists don't have faster reaction times than amateurs; they only outperform the amateurs on tests specifically related to training on the piano. Nor is there a clean relationship between chess ability and IQ. And so on.

Which is why the authors are right to instruct us to think of "expert performers not simply as domain-specific experts but as experts in maintaining high levels of practice and improving performance." These are people who have what Sir Francis Galton called "an adequate power of doing a great deal of very laborious work."

So you want to become good at something? Use the Archimedean method:

Archimedes taught us that a small quantity added to itself often enough becomes a large quantity (or, in proverbial terms, every little bit helps). When it comes to accomplishing the bulk of the world's work, and, in particular, when it comes to writing a book, I believe that the converse of Archimedes' teaching is also true: the only way to write a large book is to keep writing a small bit of it, steadily every day, with no exception, with no holiday.

- Paul R. Halmos, I Want to Be a Mathematician

You can sort of let a novel run through you: the language is loose enough that you don't need to chew on sentences—you can swallow them whole, steadily one by one, and still have a perfectly clear picture of who everyone is and what's going on.

Mathematics textbooks are different. If you churned through even an introductory text at anything close to a novel-y clip, you probably wouldn't be able to solve the most basic exercises. If given an exam on the subject, you'd fail.

I think that's roughly what Paul Halmos had in mind when he penned this excellent advice:

Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?

That's how you work through a math text—with lots of chewing, and brooding, and musing. You have to play with the stuff in the same way that a programmer might play with another person's code: not by reading it straight through, but rather, by running it on his own machine—exploring each function with a range of inputs, tracing stepwise through the algorithms, exposing data structures with print statements or a debugger, etc., until he becomes so well-versed in the code's architecture and purpose that he could rewrite it himself in a different way.

I have a hunch that this approach generalizes beyond math, that every thing you read—be it a blog post, or a paper, or even a novel—presents you with the option to "fight it," to "run it on your own machine" instead of merely reading. The trouble is in breaking the habit to be passive and, more critically, figuring out what sorts of questions to ask. (Because obviously you won't get very far with "How does the proof use the hypothesis?" in non-mathematical contexts.)

I've thought a lot about this recently. I read a fair amount, but I'm afraid that too little of it sticks. Even if you asked me to describe an article just after I've read it, there are too many times where I'd hand-wave and stammer my way through a patchy explanation. And part of the problem, I've surmised, is that I take too much on face—I don't engage, or wrestle with, 90% of the sentences that I encounter. Occasionally I'll look up words or Wikipedia entries, sure, but I don't attack most texts in the way I would if I were actually trying to understand them, like if I were preparing to answer hard questions on the subject.

So I've tried to develop a modest set of techniques to overcome my own readerly inadequacy. Think of them as the basic tenets of what I'll call "the art of knowledge-fighting" or, more succinctly, kenjitsu, from ken = "one's range of knowledge" and jitsu = "fighting art":

1. Try to become like the kind of pestering student who slows down classes. Incessantly ask questions and restate what the "teacher" says in your own words. Read at the speed of understanding—don't disengage from the hard stuff just to finish an article. When you start to glaze, or skim, or you feel like you're just sort of scanning over the forms of words, reboot.
2. Read with a pen. I've perused the books and notebooks of my smart friends, and one thing these people have in common is that (a) they pack their reading with margin-notes and (b) these notes seem to harass the author. They're highly critical, in that they go past just trying to figure out what the author means and ask, "What would that imply? What other theories fit these facts? Isn't this a kind of wishful thinking?..." So every time you highlight a passage or circle a word, think about why you found it important. Rather than writing "yes" or "interesting," think about what led you to agree or how it's interesting. Be contentful, specific, and concrete—all the time.
3. Think like Feynman:

   We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home, and even when I was a small boy, he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And we would read, say, about dinosaurs. And maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something [. . .] or the tyrannosaurus rex. And he would say something like "this thing is twenty-five feet high, and the head is six feet across"

   So he’d stop always, and say, "Now let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be high enough to put his head through the window… But not quite, because the head is a little bit too wide — it would break the window as it came by."

   Everything we’d read would be translated (as best we could) into some reality… And I learned to do that — everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying.

   Imagine actively. Use the phrase "that would mean..." to force yourself to think on your own terms with your own vivid images. It's easier said than done, but I'm convinced that this little trick is what made Feynman such a great explainer. Because everything he ended up teaching to someone else he had already taught himself, that first time he encountered it and tried to translate it into his own words and pictures.
4. One thing that good philosophers and lawyers are good at is generating counterexamples. For each of your assertions, they seem to be able to conceive of a simple scenario where your thesis doesn't hold. Or if you present a thought experiment, they somehow know which knobs to turn—i.e., which parameters to change—so that it no longer serves your point. I'm not sure how exactly they do this, or what sort of practice one needs to develop the skill, but it can't hurt to constantly throw caveats at the general claims you might encounter in a day's reading.
5. Be adversarial. For every position you run into—and nearly every blog post, article, paper, or magazine feature takes a side—put yourself in the shoes of someone arguing the opposite. What would their objections be? Would they feel that their position is being represented fairly by the other guy? What in the argument would they be forced to concede, and what would they be inclined to push back on?
6. Explain stuff. There is no easier way to expose the holes in your own understanding than to try teaching someone else. Or if you really want to go nuts, try writing up the ideas that make you uncomfortable—the process, while painful, will clarify your thinking. The point is to never let ideas cross your mind without being engaged, or debated, or somehow extruded through discourse. When in doubt, hash it out.

I've been trying to articulate why I would want to study the law, in part to prepare a "statement of purpose" for applications, but also as a way of selling the subject to people who might be cold to it, or who don't understand its appeal. [1]

This is what I've come up with:

The law is a kind of intellectual cathedral -- a massive structure filled with loosely related thought-artifacts, each carefully wrought and later refined, whose total impact easily exceeds the sum of its parts.

In that sense it's not much different from any other discipline: we could say the same thing about economics, say, or philosophy.

But law has a few features which in my view set it apart:

1. It is mostly non-mathematical, i.e., the predominant idea-vehicle is English prose. So there is jargon but very few nonstandard symbols. For me this is critical simply because I don't have as much patience for highly technical mathematical symbology as I do for highly technical prose; I just wouldn't want my days to be filled deciphering that stuff. [2]

But the point is deeper than that: like many branches of contemporary philosophy, the law is at its core a kind of "language-game" in the Wittgensteinian sense -- "doing law" amounts in large part to playing with words and tracing the boundaries between them: Does Martha's grief constitute "severe emotional distress"? What sort of legislation is precluded by the "necessary and proper" clause? Is a tricycle a "vehicle"? Can an e-mail act as a "written agreement"?

I am attracted to a discipline whose most common form of puzzle-solving involves words. It's familiar territory.

2. Maybe for this reason, lawyers tend to write exceptionally well. This may be surprising given that the subject is notorious for spewing "legalese," but it's important to realize that that type of tediously precise language is not what lawyers use to communicate among themselves. Law review articles do not read like contracts.

Instead, they are remarkably crisp. Which makes sense given that convincing arguments are the basic currency of the profession. [3]

3. I know very little of the law. So the raw information gain of a three-year J.D. program would probably edge out other options for me, especially if I'm excluding the hard sciences.

4. Philosophy seems like it would be an excellent rival: it, too, is essentially "about" language; its practitioners are extraordinary writers and thinkers; its students are trained to become argument-jedis; and it even makes heavy use of hypotheticals. Etc.

The difference, I think, is that the concept-taxonomy developed by philosophers -- the particular way they have arranged the subject's ideas and vocabulary into a loose hierarchy -- is easily less instrumental than the law's. By that I mean that if you rearranged some nodes in the "org. chart" of philosophy, your only real impact would be on the way philosophers talk and think; in that sense philosophy is wrapped up in itself in a way that the law is not.

Real people pay real damages when legal reasoning goes one way instead of another, and whether a person lives inside or outside of a cage in prison can depend on how exactly the facts of his case figure into a broad juridical narrative. Which is to say that it matters how you decide to cut up the conceptual space.

5. Like physicists, lawyers can in some sense "see the man behind the curtain," i.e., they have a privileged, detailed understanding of forces that drive the everyday world we non-physicist non-lawyers take for granted.

A physicist, for example, can explain why a mirror seems to reverse left-and-right but not up-and-down, or how trains stay on the tracks, or why planes can fly upside down. Likewise a lawyer can explain whether you're liable if you unwittingly let a thief into your building, or what you're allowed to do if someone sucker-punches you at a bar, or what rights you have as a tenant.

Both types of knowledge play well at cocktail parties, and both are powerful, because they each expose the mechanics of complicated things: nature, for physics, and society for law.

6. The most common kind of law school exam question, I'm told ([4]), is what's called an "issue-spotter," in which you're presented with a detailed hypothetical and are expected to discuss the operative ambiguities, i.e., the "issues" on which a legal judgment of the situation might turn.

Example:

Brandishing a large hunting knife, Melissa entered Gary's elegant Coconut Grove mansion and threatened to stab him. Elliott, a free-lance director, was in Gary's living room at the time shooting a commercial for Bedford Falls University, and he captured the moment on videotape. A week later, Suzanna, Gary's fiancee, played a copy of Elliott's tape on Gary's VCR, mistakenly thinking that it was the couple's favorite episode of *thirtysomething*. Upon viewing the tape, Suzanna suffered severe emotional distress, but no bodily injury. Can Suzanna prevail in a lawsuit against Melissa in a jurisdiction that treats §46 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts as highly persuasive? Why or why not? [4, pp. 289-290]

To answer these capably you need to know the relevant law so well that the mapping from key features of the situation:

A. Suzanna wasn't in the room at the time of the incident;
B. Melissa knew she was being taped;
C. Gary and Suzanna weren't married, just engaged

to the lines drawn by statutes or cases:

A. "...who is present at the time..."
B. "...intentionally or recklessly causes severe emotional distress..."
C. "...to a member of such person's immediate family..."

occurs to you almost naturally. Hence the heavy books, and hence my confidence that if nothing else law students acquire a huge volume of information.

Of course, once you map the territory and get good at identifying these "forks," [4] or potential turning points, you still have the problem of weighing competing interpretations of each. Indeed that seems like the crux of the enterprise: since questions are designed to be tricky, odds are that every argument will come with qualifications. Which encourages a careful kind of adversarial thinking/writing -- developing each claim in light of the fact that another lawyer, on whichever side you're not, will play the devil's advocate.

It adds up to excellent intellectual training, a gauntlet which actually sounds like fun, especially if you see it from the other side: the problem of generating good hypotheticals, those that awkwardly slice the law or stretch it in uncomfortable ways. [5]

I'm encouraged that such questions figure so centrally in the curriculum.

7. Lastly, a law student is asked a lot of "should" questions: Should Marcus have prevailed in yesterday's case? Should universities consider race in their admissions decisions? How should the federal government compensate the owners of land taken under eminent domain?

In a way, you have to earn the right to be asked these questions, since absent exhaustive training you'd likely struggle to give the mere beginnings of an answer.

But for the prepared, this type of policy analysis -- where you're asked to consider a particular ruling or piece of legislation in its broader context, perhaps as the leading indicator of an important change -- would become a battleground for the big ideas -- Ethics, Equity, Justice -- and an opportunity to articulate your picture of a more perfect world.

Notes

[1] I should say that there are plenty of reasons I'd be after a J.D. that have nothing to do with its appeal as an intellectual object. Example: the law quad at the U of M was its architectural sine qua non -- inspiring on a purely aesthetic level. Also, because of how LSAT scores are weighted in the admissions process, I could plausibly attend a top 20 law school in spite of my low GPA, whereas if I wanted a philosophy Ph.D., say, I'd likely end up in a no-name program.

[2] This is somewhat strange given that I get along fine with computer code. Mind you I actually make regular use of math, and am happy to read symbol-laden papers -- I'm just not willing to make a life of it. I'm far more comfortable with words.

[3] It may seem like a minor point, but a discipline's writerly aesthetic becomes insanely important once you realize that you'll be reading hundreds of thousands of pages of the stuff.

[4] Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams, by Richard Michael Fischl and Jeremy Paul (1999).

[5] This kind of thought-experimenting is a crucial cognitive skill, though it's rarely emphasized outside of philosophy ("Yeah, but what if Mary had never seen a raven?") or math ("Suppose G is a non-abelian group of order..."). I like that law school encourages you to constantly invent edge cases.

Alarm bells should go off any time you open your web browser, poke around for a few minutes, and close it feeling roughly like you had turned on the television and found that "there's nothing on." Because if that happens, it means either that the Internet has somehow become less dynamic and informationally rich than is commonly thought or, more likely, that you're now using it like the library patron who, having fallen in love with the periodicals section, has forgotten all about the books.

It's surprisingly easy to let this happen. All you have to do is curate a collection of channels -- blogs, magazines, newspapers, social news sites, twitter users, etc. -- sufficiently abundant and interesting that you can afford to stop looking. At that point, information-satisfaction is merely a matter of consuming your feed. The wider web might as well not exist.

Think again of the library. Imagine if all you did there was peruse the latest editions of your favorite periodicals. Certainly you could keep yourself busy this way, but there would be times, no doubt, when there's just nothing new. And if it doesn't occur to you to wander the stacks, you'll probably just leave.

So it goes with the web. Which leads us to the obvious question: what's the Internet equivalent of a book?

If I had my way the answer might well be "books," but until those become openly available we'll have to settle for something else. Here are a few candidates:

• Professors' home pages. Find the X department at a good university, where X is some subject you're interested in, and odds are there will be at least one professor there with a gigantic, ugly web page full of links to top-notch papers, blogs, essays, books, and other, even bigger pages of links. Examples: Cosma Shalizi, John Lawler, John Baez, Timothy Gowers, Tyler Cowen, etc.
• Along the same lines, I have recently discovered that grad students at many universities, especially if they're in small-ish departments, will collectively run a group blog. See for example Go Grue, run by philosophy grad students at the University of Michigan.
• If you chase around the blogrolls of good blogs, you'll not only get a feel for the online territory staked out by some discipline, but you'll also start to notice that a few really strong blogs show up in nearly everyone's list.
• Surf Wikipedia, of course, but follow the footnotes. Most Wikipedia articles draw heavily on one or two much more comprehensive sources. For example, many philosophy articles either point to or are in some sense abridged versions of pages at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I'm not sure but I would imagine other fields would have a few of their own go-to resources.
• Classic short fiction and nonfiction is very easy to find on the web. Google "[famous author name] essays" and you'll likely find a page like this (for Montaigne) or this (for Orwell).
• Pay attention to people who are themselves voracious readers, and ask them what they read.
• Many law reviews post the full text of each issue online. See Harvard's, for instance. The "articles" and "essays" are mostly by professors, but the "notes" are written by students and are generally more accessible.
• Find "classic" academic papers, especially in fields with which you're unfamiliar. Most classics are so called because they are especially readable, on top of being major contributions to the state of the art. One way to find them is through profs' pages, as above, or by googling "classic papers in X". In some fields, like cognitive science, people have made lists for just this purpose. Or you can look at the syllabi of introductory grad school courses, citation counts at Google Scholar, etc.

So if ever you catch yourself closing your browser after an unsatisfying short session -- and you still have time to consume, rather than create -- realize that you're probably turning your back on the stacks. The wonderful, wanderable stacks.

See jsomers.net/110. Won't take all of five minutes but I think it's neat.