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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Isn’t that a seperate point though? The initial question is more about which apparently minor domain specific knowledge/detail could seperate a good performer from a world class one within that domain? Your point is important but different ie: When is domain knowledge a limiter?
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Yeah but Agustin still makes an important point. If you take a 99th percentile copywriter and compare to a 90th percentile copywriter, the difference in technique will be small.
Which is 👌 if goal is to be the world’s best copywriter, but not if you want to be VP marketing.
Oh definitely v. important point and some good support for it, such as the evidence from forecasting etc and there's at least one mention in the Cambridge handbook on Creativity how knowledge can be a limiter for new approaches etc. But I think your question important as well.
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