Chunking, chess, and fighting Thread
As we speak, my daughter has decided to solve the 4 year old Dragonriders of Pern adventure game on the Dreamcast. It’s the first true adventure game she has ever played, and she’s rushing up to me every fifteen minutes to report her progress. And what it reminds me most powerfully of the expertise I once had: of being able to instantly pair any given dragon name with any given rider from any of the books, no matter how minor a character — the product of obsessive reading.
A great article on learning from Scientific American resonates strongly with A Theory of Fun, and uses chess as its central lens of analysis for examining learning.
The main points here are that expertise comes about from serious application to learning: on average, ten years’ worth. That many people settle for a level of knowledge rather than pushing themselves to continue learning. That “talent” is likely an illusion: either just a predisposition to learn certain things, or precocity in learning the subject.
This latter one, the article claims, is bolstered by the fact that there is no significant experimental evidence to demonstrate the existence of talent. People who start out untalented in something seem to be perfectly able to achieve extreme mastery of a subject, should they just choose to invest the time.
And yet, the article also cites this example from the world of soccer:
A 1999 study of professional soccer players from several countries showed that they were much more likely than the general population to have been born at a time of year that would have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages older than the average. In their early years, these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates. Because the larger, more agile children would get more opportunities to handle the ball, they would score more often, and their success at the game would motivate them to become even better.
In other words, there was a natural advantage conferred on these kids that made things easier for them, thus creating a feedback cycle that encouraged them to continue. One might speculate that this natural advantage includes predispositions towards certain types of activities (such as Gardner’s types of intelligences). Feedback, as we know, is a huge driver for people to continue down a path of learning. So as the article says, “experts are made, not born,” but people with the tendency to become experts in one field versus another may well be born, not made.
An interesting illustration of all this can be seen in this unrelated story about a teen who is topping the American Idol Underground charts with his technically virtuosic guitar playing.
Baamonde’s first instrument was the cello, which he took up in third grade. But he never much liked classical music.
Even his parents thought he could use a change, so they supported his interest in the guitar and got him lessons.
“He was such a quiet kid that my wife and I thought we should do something to cool him up,” said his father, who manages a telecommuting center in Reston.
When Baamonde left cello for guitar, though, he took with him its brutally difficult fingerings and a fine vibrato — the quivering wrist and finger motions that make the tone of the instrument flutter like a human voice.
When he started Oakton High School, he wanted to be an architect. Then he took a music and technology course at Fairfax High School through the county’s “academy class” program in his junior year, and everything changed. Only music mattered.
After graduating in 2005, Baamonde attended George Mason University and started working at the Guitar Center. This fall, he plans to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Surely by the time he got to high school and took that music and technology class, he had become sufficiently attuned to “chunking” the aspects of music that he felt comfortable with to keep moving down that path.
In watching my own kids, who have yet to show any startlingly advanced aptitude for anything except perhaps Pokemon, I wonder what “talents” we are building up in them from an early age. One thing that research on chess has taught us is that ability in chess translates poorly to other areas of life. In playing all of these games, which ones are teaching something more broadly relevant, and which ones are teaching the equivalent of memorizing hundreds of dragon names?
If anything, it’s good that my daughter is tackling more varied types of games, because at some point, she may stumble across the sort where she excels so dramatically that it shapes her future learning path. Just as she should read varied books, watch varied movies, study varied subjects, and so on.
Either way, the path towards excelling is going to be finding the thing that excites you enough to tackle the long hard slog towards actual expertise.
22 Responses to “Chunking, chess, and fighting Thread”
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Raph wrote:
Right. Ten or so years ago, I learned guitar by playing songs from Blink-182, Goo Goo Dolls, Matchbox 20, Third Eye Blind, Smashing Pumpkins, etc. A year or two passed and I had progress from the alternative and punk genres to hard rock from Godsmack, Korn, and even rap-metal from Limp Bizkit. Eventually, I progressed to the nu-metal and death metal genres, then to blues and classic rock. I played those many genres because I think that’s what people wanted to hear. You weren’t a "cool" guitarist unless you could play something popular. Today, I still play blues, but I’ve settled on Celtic music because there is purpose and meaning to playing music in honor of my heritage as a fifth-generation Scottish American. Ironically, people love my music and they finally do not request that I play anything less than what I love.
[The only times when people request that I play another artist’s music is when they are learning guitar. I think they request these songs because they want to hear what these songs sound like when played by somebody other than the artist and themselves. Unlike in the past, these requests are for learning purposes, not entertainment, but I still decline playing music created by other artists.]
Well, my 11-month-old will undoubtedly be an expert in remote controls. Or, at least in trying to eat them.
I worry, though, that we’re living in a time (and society/culture) that won’t allow our kids to focus (or learn to focus) on anything long enough to become expert at it. Our world is so full of delightful distractions that we’re going to be producing nothing but Jacks-of-some-trades and masters of none.
Certainly, parents have some control over that, but only some. There’s too much development that takes place in school and with peers, and you can’t count on those peers being focused or disciplined. And that’s especially more difficult as the children get older.
I agree with some of the premises, and I certainly feel that schools could do much more to focus children on learning, I don’t think the information warrents a total dismissal of innate talent.
The information about the professional soccer players, for instance, is far from convincing. The number of professional soccer players is relatively tiny; there’s no reason to expect that all innately talented players will go pro. The timing may give an advantage relative to other innately talented players.
The story of the sociologist who raised chess masters is interesting, but still far from convincing (to me). He didn’t set out to create chess prodigies per se, just some kind of prodigy. The girls selected chess as toddlers by showing interest. I have no doubt the intensive training played a role in their skill, but it’s an open question whether they would have become just as skillful had they been trained in, say, music.
Ability and interest form a feedback cycle. People, especially children, are more likely to be interested in something if they understand it as beginners, which may suggest native talent. I have unusual (but not extraordinary, by any means) mathematical ability. I credit some of it to a regular babysitter I had in elementary school, who would have me and my friends play math games. I displayed greater interest in those games than friends who, now, are not as mathematically gifted as I. I also consistantly beat those friends. Was I good at because I liked the game, or did I like the game because I was good at it?
Luckily, we have traditional education to crush any desire for learning or improvement.
Very interesting article but I too question some of the conclusions. I wish it had more data and less anecdotes. A lot of this depends on how one defines “talent”. Cats, for example, learn in very different ways than dogs. They can’t be taught through peer pressure or rewards really. They have to be taught through molding and other techniques. Many people think that cats aren’t as intelligent as dogs, because of this. However cats can learn some pretty amazing things like how to open complex doors, to go to the bathroom in the toilet, etc. I suppose it makes sense to think of dogs as just having a “precocity” for certain types of learning like learning to fetch slippers but I also think it makes sense to say that dogs have different talents than cats.
My adopted sister received no mathematical training before age 12. As such, she really cannot learn complex mathematics. She doesn’t have cranial infrastructure for that and having watched my parents support her and try to teach her for years it’s pretty clear that she isn’t going to learn that ever. Even if she spent 10 years (she’s spent at least 6 with essentially no headway). Ok, had she spent the time earlier in life, then she would have been able to do math. Absolutely. But this points out that not all time-investments are equal. And a lot of the most important time include time in the womb, time as an infant, etc. Furthermore, there are lots of biological things that can create just the same effect.
Basically it comes down the notion that there are no absolutes in genetics or in behavior. Only tendencies. We can’t say that your genetics will MAKE you tall, smart, strong bipolor, etc., but we can say that they may give you a tendency towards some of those things. And all of those things will end up having great effects on how easy it is to climb certain hills like learning to be a strong chess player or learning to be a good musician. Starting soccer late in the cycle is just another thing that can lead to a tendency towards something. If enough things line up then we’ll end up saying that you have a talent for something or other.
I’d like to see more results on strictly physical skills. The soccer thing is very interesting but it really doesn’t do anything to convince us that talent exists. It only says that there are other factors as well.
Hmm, if there is no talent, then what of people who never learned a particular craft/art and then can replicate with precision masterpieces? What of Autistic skills or odd things like intuition or psychic talent.
In terms of definition, I think predisposition or precocity qualifies as “talent”, or in other words natural ability. On youtube or other talent shows, more and more “talent” are being discovered.
Of course, a better learning environment could be a factor, and so would be a positive feedback loop.
In the area of leadership or other areas of “art”, it is often said that leaders are not born but made. It is often said that while anyone can train to be a master, great masters also have extraordinary “talent”.
Philosophically, I want to believe that (1) everyone have the same potential upon birth and that (2) inherent and external factors constrained our potential and that (3) we learn and train to reach that constrained potential.
If it is believe that children’s optimal learning and formative age is between 0 to 6 years of age, the proper exposure to wide and deep thinking processes minimize the external constraints to their potential.
So essentially what I’m saying is that to achieve excellent, we’ll need as much advantage as possible. Talent or natural ability is one of them. Proper exposure for neural pathway development is another.
Frank
There is plenty of data on this sort of stuff, but it tends to lead to conclusions that many people don’t like. At least, that many people in modern liberal societies don’t like. And when I say “modern liberal” it’s not a sneer — just a description. Read “Western” if you’re hung up on either “modern” or “liberal” in that sentence, although that’s less accurate.
I’ll give two examples.
Sport: to excel in sport reqiures a genetic predisposition to the physical activity that typifies that sport. You can make a case that tall and whippy should be as good as short and explosive for badminton, but the Chinese beat the Norwegians every time…
Maths: to excel in maths seems to require what we can only candidly describe as borderline mental illness, if not actual mental illness. So, again, a genetic lottery.
We would like to believe that all people need to achieve “expertise” is passion and hard work. But it’s becoming clearer that this simply isn’t the case — at least for high values of the word “expertise.”
For an interesting anecdotal example of parents raising children “for effect” in a particular area of expertise is outlined in Chaim Potok’s brilliant book The Chosen, where a Hasidic rebbe raises his son to be a Torah scholar by only allowing his son to communicate with him through Torah study.
Of course, boys want to communicate with their fathers, so this strategy is breathtakingly effective, if emotionally brutal.
We see many examples of a similar kind of thing every night on the news. In the musical world, Michael Jackson was raised by his father to be very expert. Well, it worked. But he is clearly that to the exclusion of all else.
But certainly for low values of “expertise” you can get by with excitement…
This all reminds me of Peter Norvig’s Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.
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Personally, I believe in talent, or at least in “predisposition towards understanding certain types of patterns” or whatever the cognitive equivalent is. Whether it’s something inculcated at an extremely early age or involves genetics, I don’t feel qualified to judge (but I’d note that certain talents definitely seem to run in families, even when there are breaks in the line; so genetics seems likely to me to be involved somehow).
Neither am I qualified to judge (at all), but to me there’s undoubtedly some heretical nature to talent; certainly I’ve seen it in the families of friends and those I’ve known a long time. Music happens to “run” in my family, for instance — to varying degrees in individuals, of course, but there is definitely an aptitude for music from my dad’s side.
Maybe the “genetic tie” (if it _is_ that) is something even more basic — a simpler ingredient perhaps. Might explain why there seems to be a tendency for mathematically talented people (not me) to also be good at music and/or foreign languages, and vice versa versa 🙂
“heretical”?? what an idiot — i meant hereditary
I recently read this about external incentives overriding and replacing internal incentives. I’m not sure it’s related, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it while reading the comments.
Was I good at because I liked the game, or did I like the game because I was good at it?
To put it more classically, which came first, the chicken or the egg? =)
I’ve always found the chicken/egg question to be one of definition. Is a chicken egg one that hatches a chicken, or is it one that is laid by a chicken?
The god-chicken came first. I swear!
I’ve always found the chicken/egg question to be one of definition. Is a chicken egg one that hatches a chicken, or is it one that is laid by a chicken?
Doesn’t seem to get you any closer to an actual answer. =P
There are significant studies on both sides of the fence really. As far as innate talent v. exposure.
As someone mentioned above these outcomes are not acceptable to modern liberal society. However geneticists and companies tend to continue thier work despite societies dated value structures. The outcomes are many times not pleasant to certain sectors of society.
Example: Currently there is a company that produces a gene chip, they have about 90% of the patents on gene chip technology. Every 6 months or so they exponentially increase the amount of genetic tests they can run off of 1 tumbnail sized chip. In every test they run they produce about 1 terabyte of genetic data. At this time they are concentrating on identifying diseases, and “Predispositions” toward diseases. Many of thier investors are insurance companies, most of you can figure out why….
So now we see that genetic “predispositions” can be used both ways. However the work of geneticists does not stop here, they are moving forward not only in the area of identifying disease processes, but identifying genetic markers for “propensity’s” for certain talents. These talents being mentioned above:
Mathmatics
Music (really mathmatical constructs)
Visual Arts
etc.
This is a bad thing if you believe in certain outcomes like this however identifying propensities toward certain talents will be required for future generations going forward participating in a global economy in specific job
categories as Reich points out in “The Work of Nations” specifically his treatment of “Symbolic Analysts”
which in fact is a classicafation that includes everyone from stock brokers, to programmers, to artists.
However, these are only “propensities” a term that encompasses not only what someones tendancies toward exceling in a certain area are but what is fundamentally what Raph posted above (and what I’ve attempted to do with my daughter as well) which is encouraging exposure to different modalities of learning. In this way a child can find thier potentiality, and yes, develop the feedback loop and deepen thier neural pathways. But this should not be at the expense of identifying other areas of thought/excellence, because people are dynamic and full of potential and are usually good in many areas. Menaing people do not have one neural pathway but many (a neural network!)
What does this mean? Broad liberal educations that allow for a person to naturally select thier preffered area of specialty are still superior to rigid systems of learn by rote.
So the question going forward: Do we use our knowledge of bio-chemistry and genetics to reinforce rigid societal views of how and who should be rewarded? Or do we use this knowledge to maxamize our future potentialities as a species?
The answer lies in what/who holds and uses this information and your access to it….
Oh, well, if a chicken egg is an egg that comes from a chicken, then the chicken came first. If a chicken egg is one that hatches a chicken, then the egg comes first. Just fluff and nonsense, I know.
Talent is innate. Skill is learned. That’s a bit of wisdom I share with aspiring creatives and musicians.
Welcome to “Nature vs. Nurture”, 21st century edition. One thing that we *do* know about the effect of genetics on behaviour is that genetics seems to contribute no more than 50% of any behavioural effect (even in cases as extreme as schizophrenia in identical twins).
People pursue rewards. If a given activity doesn’t yield rewards, they find it unenjoyable and stop engaging in that activity. Those rewards may be internal rather than external, but they have to be present at some level. So those that are on the upper bounds of physical ability for their age cohort (either through genetics or simple chance of birthdate) will find athletic activities enjoyable, because they get the lion share of the rewards. Then the Matthew Effect kicks in, and they learn the skills and develop the musculature to perform at the upper level.
But genetics can still trump chance. There are a few known physical mutations that can make you perform *much* better than anyone else at certain kinds of physical activity. For example, some people have a mutant form of hemoglobin that gives them fantastic endurance for long-distance running and cycling events (Lance Armstrong is probably one of them). Others have a mutant protein that leads to increased musculature (many of the olympic-grade weight-lifters have this). There are several mutations in blood chemistry and muscle-cell proportions associated with high-speed sprinting.
All of these come with side-effects that in the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation) made them not such clear-cut advantages. The high-endurance hemoglobin requires much larger iron intake, and if those with the mutation don’t get it they are prone to extreme anemia. The heavy-muscle protein leads to a metabolism requiring 5000 calories a day, and lots of protein. And the high-speed sprinters often cannot accumulate body fat, not a useful attribute if you need to subsist through the winter (or other short-term famines) on stored reserves.
But in a modern, industrialized society, shortages of nutrients is rarely an issue, so these mutations lose their downside and those with them can become world-class athletes. But if you don’t have those mutations, and you’re competing with someone who does…you probably feel like everyone in the Tour de France who isn’t Lance Armstrong.
There are probably some very subtle and effective variations in brain activity with genetic roots that have equivalent effects. My father was a journalist and writer known for his ability to turn a memorable phrase, and although he certainly never tried to teach me how or had many opportunities to show me through example, I seem to have picked it up. My family leans towards the upper end of the IQ spectrum.
But environment still comes into play. I have a sister who is the “dummy” of the family, her IQ was “only” 127. Although this is well into the gifted range, she grew up without confidence in her intellect and didn’t pursue intellectual challenges, because she was comparing her success rate at them to the rest of the family and coming up short.
So, in the end, when you’re asking “Nature or Nurture?”, the answer is “both”, because you’re asking the wrong question.
–Dave
Lance Armstong actually has rare physical mutation that resulted in an inordinately large heart (on the order of x2 normal for his size if I remember correctly) from what I understand, allowing him more oxegenation into his bloodstream. I think I saw this on PBS or something…
Lance Armstong actually has rare physical mutation that resulted in an inordinately large heart
A quick Google search confirms that you’re not the only person who thinks so. =P
Nature versus Nurture
I read about something called an epigenome a while back. I’m far too ignorant of even the term to say more…, except to say it looked intriguing.