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1/ Let's talk about accelerating expertise. You want to get good. You want to get good fast. How do you do this? In 2008 and 2009 the US Department of Defence convened two meetings on this very topic. Here's what they found. (Hint: the answer is NOT deliberate practice).

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Surprised to see you emphasize that it is not deliberate practice. AFAIK Anders Ericson used the military's Top Gun program as an example of what deliberate practice, and the design thereof looks like. Feels very similar to this example you describe here.

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One of the open secrets of expertise research is that DP was (for most of Ericsson’s publication history) poorly defined. The authors of AE are kind and are willing to use terms like DP when citing during their book, but they really represent an alternative approach.

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You can actually see this approach at play when you read the Oxford Handbook of Expertise and contrast the ‘style’ to the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise. The former is this ‘skill extraction, let’s not worry about clean feedback’ approach; the latter is DP.

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To address the Top Gun question more directly — I’d agree with Ericsson that Top Gun is DP — it has many of the defined properties below. But many of the exercises in AE do not.

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Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

Aug 15, 2021

6/ Note that again, deliberate practice is a SUPERSET of purposeful practice. DP is everything in purposeful practice and then some. Ericsson is careful to say that purposeful practice ALONE is not as good. See illustration:

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4:48 AM · Dec 16, 2021TweetDeck

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Yeah I agree with this and that referenced thread. There is no established pedagogy for many fields, especially where there is no direct feedback. Didn't look through the rest of your feed for the context. Thanks for clarifying.