I’m aware that popularised the question (link below) but his list of practices are mostly purposeful practice, not deliberate practice.
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu
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This is not mere pedantry. For instance, both purposeful practice and deliberate practice are practice regimes with fairly tight feedback loops.
But there are other kinds of expertise that demand good sensemaking and reflection, due to long feedback loops.
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There’s a theory of expertise that describes such domains of expertise, and explains how folk can become experts WITHOUT deliberate practice. It’s called cognitive transformation theory:
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1/ Let's talk a little about how people learn in the real world.
No, I'm not going to talk about classroom instruction, or pedagogical development, or enrolling in a cohort based course. None of that.
Just a simple question: how do people ACTUALLY learn from doing?
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And there’s a theory that explains how expertise is constructed in more ill-structured domains — and therefore how to accelerate it. (tl;dr, it’s possible to accelerate case based reasoning).
Thread on Cognitive Flexibility Theory below:
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1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise.
Yes, I know how that sounds like.
No, this isn't hype.
There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.
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To sum up, this is my current approach to learning:
1) Is there good pedagogical development in this skill domain? If yes, do DP. DP is still the best.
2) If no, are the feedback loops reasonably short? (e.g. 1-2 days?) If so, try purposeful practice.
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2a) If it’s possible to construct a simplified game approach to enable purposeful practice, then go do that. (But this is hard!) cc who is an expert at this.
3) Do you have access to an expert? If so, try doing an expertise extraction using cognitive task analysis.
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4) Is this an ill-structured domain? If so, switch to searching for context instantiations. (CFT)
5) Finally, if none of the above are true, do trial and error and rely on good reflection best practices (CTT) to gain expertise.
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All of this, naturally, is subject to change as I continue to dig into the expertise research + write up notes from practice.
Follow if you’d like more updates; I’m not entirely sure what I’ll find next.
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Replying to
Where did you learn all this stuff? :o
It's so fascinating and really useful.
I've never seen someone talk about this concepts apart from you.
Any recommendations to continue researching these topics?
Learning how to learn is a subset of metacognition, right? That's my jam.
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Replying to
Oh, I talked about this in my talk at the Naturalistic Decision Making Association open house. The basic story is that I was searching for a better way to train myself and my people, and I eventually realised that NDM had most of the answers.
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There’s a full list of resources in the talk.
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This is amazing!!!!
I watched your talk and I had the same feelings you describe. There is a whole field of study dedicated to these questions!
I'm so excited. I can't thank you enough!!!!!
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Replying to
Is there any chance you know the name of the field that studies action?
Action in itself.
The field that develops methodologies like precommitment devices, the procrastination equation, accountability devices, etc?
Seems tangentially related to NDM :)
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The broad field is psychology, and the closest subfield is likely 'judgment and decision making'. But beware the replication crisis, and also
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