The Parable of Talents - or "not 10,000 hours" dammit

[drwex]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/

Some time ago I was arguing with Weegoddess about the 10,000 hours idea. This theory says that all that separates people who are experts from those who are just able is the practice they put in. I think that's wrong, and a dangerous idea to promote.

In the link above (which I admit is quite long but I promise is wholly worth your time) Scott Alexander at Slatestarcodex examines the question of what makes someone good - really good - at something, in the context of our society's insistence on tying self-worth to intellectual attainment. But it bears on the 10,000 hours idea as well because Alexander argues (and I believe) that it's not just a matter of practice or dedication or hard work.

As Alexander notes, you can't tell a depressed person just to "get over it" or "cheer up" and if they work really hard at it then they'll get better. It (depression) doesn't work that way as I keep reminding myself while I fight through this season. What it comes down to is a combination of factors, not least of which is that some people have innate talents. Some people are good at math; some are good at art. Some people are good at medicine and some people are good at raising healthy children. To say that what separates someone who's a math whiz from someone who never really did understand calculus is just their level of practice and dedication - 10,000 hours is all - is wrong and dangerous. It hurts people, and it hurts society.

If you can make it through Alexander's blog entry there's actually a follow-up that I'll link to if you want but really you should just add SSC to your blogroll because holy wow can that man write.

Comments

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Yep, he's been on my LJ feed for a while now. Great stuff.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

To me, the ten thousand hours thing means that talent is necessary but not sufficient. There has to be innate talent to be able to draw well or play a musical instrument well or play chess at the grandmaster level. But talent, by itself, is not enough, and talented people sometimes get impatient with a focus on their talent because it can feel as if it minimizes or denies all the work they've put in. One must have talent to be able to play in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but JUST talent won't do it; one also has to put in a huge number of hours of practice.

I could practice for ten thousand YEARS and never be able to draw like weegoddess does, because I have exactly zero talent in drawing. Talent is necessary. But if weegoddess hadn't worked very hard, she wouldn't be able to draw the way she does now.

You're right that work, by itself, isn't enough. I think the Ten Thousand Hour Rule came along because people were so focused on talent that they didn't quite realize that huge amounts of work were also necessary.

When I was making mods for The Witcher, people told me that I could make the Witcher toolset do anything, and wow, I must really be gifted. They wished that they could pick up the toolset and make it do anything. I told them that I could make the Witcher toolset do anything because I'd used the damned thing for two thousand hours and had painstakingly reverse-engineered a lot of the stuff in the main game, so I'd figured out how it worked. People said, "Two thousand hours! Never mind, I don't want it that much."

Talent. Necessary but not sufficient. ;-)

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

See comment to Wex below. You and I are totally in agreement, from how I read your comment. And thanks for your kind words. ;)

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's how I see it too. People tell me I'm "gifted" at things but it also takes hard work. Talent is only one component. 10,000 hours won't make someone a cellist worthy of Symphony Hall, but it could make them as good as that "gifted" person who only picks up their cello a few times a year because, hey, they're gifted, why work at it?

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of practice claim at best only applies to musicians and athletes, and as Scot Alexander illustrates by comparing his own musical ability with his brother's, we can further narrow Gladwell's claim to people who are musically or athletically gifted in the first place. What that leaves us with is the rather obvious conclusion that among people with high musical or athletic aptitude those who practice will likely outperform those who don't.

I've not read as much of Alexander's writing as you have, but on the evidence of this one blog post I'm not impressed by his writing as writing. His core insight is found in the following paragraph:

People say we should stop talking about ability differences so that stupid people don’t feel bad. I say that there’s more than enough room for everybody to feel bad, smart and stupid alike, and not talking about it won’t help. What will help is fundamentally uncoupling perception of intelligence from perception of self-worth.

Concision (i.e. editing out some of the digressions) would make the rest of the post stronger and more eloquent.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I haven't read the article that you link to. I will at some point, but I don't have the time to give it careful consideration and it deserves such.

But going on what you and I discussed before, I must respectfully ask that you stop with the all-or-nothing thinking. To my recollection, I never said that 10,000 hours, even of focused (as opposed to mechanical) practice would make anyone an expert and that innate skills have nothing to do with it, which is what I'm reading you as saying I've said. Obviously, someone who has an innate skill is going to achieve higher than someone who doesn't. And perhaps someone with an innate skill will achieve in 2,000 hours (to pick a number) than someone without said skill might need 10,000 hours to accomplish. Or never. But to expect to be good at something without putting in the work, talent or not, is just unrealistic. And to just give up simply because one doesn't think that they have the talent and so will never hope to be any good is also self-defeating. It's a cop-out.

I will reiterate: I am not, in any fashion, saying that we should expect people to become experts simply because they practice. I also have no patience for self-fulfilling prophecies. If a person believes that they will never get good at something so why bother, I agree with them. Why bother?

I submit a scan of a drawing that my mother sent me:



This was my 'talent' at age 9.


Here is a drawing from a few years later, not sure when as this one isn't dated but likely from my mid-teens:



What was the difference? Practice. Years of focused practice. One will also note the texture of the paper - that's from a lot of erasing. I drew and erased and drew and erased until I got it right. There's focused practice, right there.

I suspect that someone will jump up and down and scream that since I never went to school for this and had no instruction from outside of myself, that means I was oh so talented and maybe the talent had to 'wake up'. Maybe. And I will maintain that without the focused practice, I would still be drawing on that age 9 level.

It has been suggested to me that part of innate 'talent' is the drive to want to do something for 10,000 hours; that the willingness to put in the time for that particular skill is just innate and just as necessary to achieve expert levels. And I agree, but it's not enough. I personally have no patience for accounting. Does that mean that I could never be a good accountant? Probably. Whether I have the aptitude for it or not it is moot since I have no desire to put in the time. I also have no patience for pro football. Does that mean that if I suddenly changed my mind, I could put in enough time to become a pro-football player? That's absurd. No matter how much I practiced, I'd never make quarterback.

ETA: I may be a bit testy about this and I apologise, but chienne_folle might have nailed it when she said that talented people sometimes get impatient with a focus on their talent because it can feel as if it minimizes or denies all the work they've put in. Talented or not, I've worked my ass off and want to keep working at it. And if I ever get really good as to be considered an expert, that will be why.

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

Is it not more accurate to say that the difference in your drawing ability between ages 9 and say, 15, is partly many hours of focused practice and partly the difference between the brain development and manual dexterity of a child and that of an adolescent?

The art critic Robert Hughes once said that visual artists employ three main talents: draftsmanship (drawing), composition, and a sense of color, and that few artists do all three equally well. All three require innate talent, but my guess is that draftsmanship requires the most practice, that composition to some degree can be taught but is mostly innate, and that studying color theory and attempting to apply it through practice is insufficient to make one a good colorist.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

Is it not more accurate to say that the difference in your drawing ability between ages 9 and say, 15, is partly many hours of focused practice and partly the difference between the brain development and manual dexterity of a child and that of an adolescent?


::nod:: That thought has been suggested and you're right; it's a valid one. I also wonder if there was an element of increased prolonged focus, which might fall under the 'brain development' category.

That said, many (adult) people tell me that they can barely draw stick figures. And this is true: when they do try to draw, their work looks very similar to that of a child's, regardless of any higher brain development and increased fine motor skills achieved by their age. I maintain that much of this is due to lack of focused practice. They may have the tools but haven't done anything with them. This is not to say that every adult could draw like an expert if only they practiced. It *is* to say that without practice, they aren't necessarily going to improve merely by virtue of their advancing age.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I am one such person; I really do literally draw at the level of stick figures. People who've watched me play Pictionary have looked on in horror; some have thought that I was drawing badly on purpose for a joke, because surely no one could really be THAT bad. :-) Nope, that's really all I can do. My verbal intelligence and visual-spatial intelligence are sadly mismatched, and my verbal facility often leads people to assume that I can't POSSIBLY be as bad as visual-spatial stuff as I claim. (As an extremely premature child, I probably have some brain damage here and there.)

Your drawing as a NINE-year-old is beyond me. I'm sure brain maturation helped bring more of your talent online, but for those of us whose drawing talent is completely non-existent, brain maturation does nothing whatsoever.


One Pictionary story -- We were given the prompt "New York City." The other team had a guy who could draw, and he began painstakingly reproducing the skyline of New York. I knew I couldn't do any such thing, so I thought fast. I drew a circle with a curved line coming out of the top of it. "Apple," my husband said. Next to that I drew a ginormous circle with a curved line coming out of the top of it. "BIG apple," my husband said, then in the next breath, "New York City!" Sometimes I can compensate for the bad drawing with other skills. But not usually. :-)

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

Heh. Your story is a reminder that innate 'talent' isn't everything. You won at Pictionary because you had scary meta-brainz and got your point across without drawing a single building in the skyline. That's impressive and very cool.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I was apparently a gifted artist as a child but I had no interest in it. I did try to take it up as an adult and I was about where you were at age 9, but I definitely saw some improvement (until I got fed up with it and gave it up again). Practice has a lot to do with it.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

I've fired a horse trainer (for me as much as the horse) for citing the 10,000 hours thing. Way to make someone feel like they'll never get there... I can do the math and the MOST I will ever ride in a year is about 300 hours, not all of that will be "focused practice", and I'm not exactly young, so ....

In the horse world this is one of the places where your average adult amateur gets tripped up -- trainers who have been riding multiple horses per day for years, to the point where a lot of it is just second nature (and I don't think you stay a trainer if you don't have SOME innate talent) ...

[c1.livejournal.com]

I think there's *something* to the 10,000 hours angle, but it's more that "you don't get _anywhere at all_ without practicing." The joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall holds as true as ever. Practice, m'boy, practice.

But I think the missing ingredient isn't talent. It's interest. Mom makes you take piano lessons (or violin, or whatever) and you show up for lessons and you come home from school and practice for an hour every day. And a year later, you're still banging on the keys. Why? Because you're intellectually checked out through the whole ordeal. My mom made me go to figure skating lessons. There's no reason why I couldn't have become a champ -- I had strength and coordination aplenty. I won prizes at local and regional meets. I hated every minute of it, so I got out as soon as I could.

On the other hand, I make art, and I've been doing so since childhood. I taught myself darkroom processing in high school, metal smithing a few years later, and so on. In graduate school, I took on ceramics, and excelled in a few short months. I've been so into making art for the past 40 years that learning a new skill is utterly pedestrian. It's who I am.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

There is another interesting angle on this that I just came across today and thought I'd share with you.

David Epstein wrote in The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance that some athletes don't show they have natural talent until the challenges get hard enough. Some of these people actually start out below average but they are what is called "highly trainable" - that is, they take to hard training more so than others and wind up blowing away the competition. But in the first few weeks or months, you would look at these people and think they were the least talented and least likely to shine. (There was one player in the Super Bowl and damn if I can remember his name, but his high school football coach said, "I never imagined he'd play pro football, he just didn't seem to have that level of talent." Which seems in some ways to be an example of this.)

I think this is another case where the "ten thousand hours" aspect comes in; some people's talent takes hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours to excavate.

Interesting corollary: the two traits that are universal to prodigies are an excellent working memory and their obsessive focus at mastering a specific skill. Ellen Winner at Boston College calls it the "rage to master" and says it is just as important if not more so as their working memory.