4) Which in turn means that as you get better, refining technique can be vastly more boring than the early skill jumps of the novice-intermediate.
Conversation
This set of observations brought to you by my being consistently humbled in the judo dojo.
This competition coach I talk to notices some of the smallest, most trivial things that — when taken seriously — turns out to have a big impact on the technique working.
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Ok fine, an example:
Amandine Buchard specialises in something called kata guruma (or side takedown, depending on who you ask).
The technique requires you to be in an opposite stance situation (right vs left).
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But Buchard is able to do her throw to everyone from the same grip, regardless of their handedness. How?
The answer: she forces same side players into an opposite stance, and in that tiny window when the stance switches, she attacks.
Me: wtf?!
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Competition coach: it’s obvious when you know what to look for.
Me: wtf?
Which makes me wonder what the equivalent thing is in other skill domains like programming or marketing. What tiny tweaks am I missing?
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Replying to
I've come around to the idea that:
Taking insights from bounded domains with known and fixed rules (i.e. games and sports) and transporting them to unbounded domains (real world problems) often gives bad results.
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This feels like one of those times. When the rule set is fixed and known, then improvement consists of finding ever smaller edges optimizations to the convex hull of rule-obeying strategies.
Chess players memorize progressively more elaborate opening books as they improve.
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But the real world ISN'T like this. The difference between a highly successful entrepreneur and someone who's not as good ISN'T that the former has figured out more micro-cases and gotten good at them.
It's a different thing entirely.
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Someday I'll write something up about this.
I think it's an incredibly common and problematic cognitive bias. Taleb talks about the "ludic fallacy", but I think his view (i.e. probabilities in games are fixed) is a special case of a much broader mistake.
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Replying to
Oh yes, this is a good point. Probably not worth applying to marketing, though perhaps still ok to apply to computer programming (?) which is more bounded.
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Actually even within marketing, if it’s a relatively bounded sub-skill, it’s applicable. But these aren’t the highest order bit thing for marketing/career success so your point more broadly still stands.
Probably a mixture right? Usually for real world skills, a large component of the value comes from seeing relationships between skills ("synergies"). But you also unlock value by being a high level practitioner of said skills.
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