Somebody I follow once tweeted something like "What practice in your field is the equivalent of practicing free throws in basketball or scales/etudes in music?" Can anyone point me to this tweet so I can credit the author?
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I think the post you're thinking of was from Tyler, though I may have ranted to you about it prior. This q was in my 05/19 Emergent Ventures application, but I didn't write about it publicly; wrote on it in 07/19 (I think independently, tho maybe via convo with TC?)
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I confess I've not learned nearly as much about this question as I would like! I've found almost all the answers people have given quite unsatisfying. And yet I'm unsatisfied by Ericsson's conclusions around the intractability of deliberate practice in knowledge work!
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Andy, have you read anything from on this?
3 key points (for me):
1) DB only works for special case w/ rich established pedagogy
2) Tacit knowledge acquisition works for general case
3) Naturalistic Decision-Making lit works on optimizing (2)
commoncog.com/blog/tacit-kno
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I have! I'm not convinced of Ericsson's conclusions from his analysis—yes, there are problems with DP in many domains, but I'm not persuaded they can't be solved in principle. Ideas in tacit knowledge (including NDM) do seem promising along these lines.
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I wonder if the disagreement is smaller than we think: my read from Cedric's summary is that DP generally works (i.e., no particular domain is a priori off limits), but requires preconditions that are not always present. Is that close to your view, or is it something different?
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Yep, that's my view. If there's a difference, it may just be that I'm happy to think about precondition requirements as a design problem to be solved.
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I think my takeaway from reading up on the literature is that pedagogical development is truly a limiting factor, in many fields.
Fwiw, though, I reached out to the NDM podcast hosts to ask about NDM training methods, and they recommended
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One sentence pitch: it was prepared for the department of defence, and focuses on accelerating trial and error cycles. I haven’t started on it yet, but I got my copy a week or so ago!




