(2019-03-19) Chin Peak

Cedric Chin: Peak. Professor K. Anders Ericsson has had a very accomplished career studying the forms and origins of expertise. Early in his life he worked under renowned polymath Herbert Simon.

As a result of his work, we now have a body of research dedicated to the understanding of ‘deliberate practice’ — the type of practice best shown to lead to expert performance.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise is a 2016 book that summarises three decades of research into the nature and development of expertise. Ericsson wrote the book partially as a response to the often-quoted ‘10,000-hour rule’ (Ten K Hours), which was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers (the ‘rule’, per Gladwell, was that you needed a minimum of 10,000 hours to get good at any skill). This was a misrepresentation of Ericsson’s work; he later published an excerpt from Peak on salon.com to rebut the claims from Outlier.

I am hesitant to recommend Peak to the layman, except as a first step to the world of deliberate practice. It’s true that we should attempt to read books that are written by authorities

But Peak side-steps some of the more interesting developments in the deliberate practice world

Peak opens with a description of the other forms of practice: that is, naive practice and purposeful practice. Ericsson argues that both forms of practice pale in comparison to deliberate practice

Naive practice is the act of doing something repeatedly, with the belief that mere repetition would improve one’s performance. This is, of course, misguided: as programming instructor Kathy Sierra puts it: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.”

Purposeful practice, on the other hand, is a form of practice that begins to approach deliberate practice in effectiveness. Ericsson started his career studying forms of purposeful practice

If you’re like me, you’re probably looking at this list of properties and thinking to yourself: “Man, this certainly looks like it should work. So why is it worse than deliberate practice? What are the problems?”

Ericsson argues that the core problem with purposeful practice is that of knowledge. Or, to put it concretely: purposeful practice is self-directed (by definition), and unable to benefit from a long history of skill+pedagogical development.

you may notice that this description is conceptually equivalent to the whole ‘mental model’ shebang. The purpose of practice, then, is to build better mental representations of the specific skill in question

Ericsson thus argues that the most effective form of practice — deliberate practice — can only exist in fields with developed mental representations and relatively sophisticated pedagogical techniques

pianists, violinists, swimmers, golfers, ballet dancers, and chess players, all of whom benefit from decades of skill development, handed down from generations of coaches and players. (tutor, Bloom's 2-Sigma Problem)

The implication here is that if you aren’t in a field with developed methods, you’re fresh out of luck. To his credit, Ericsson pauses and says that you may still ‘apply the principles of deliberate practice’ in fields without such developed methods.

Of course, this comes with several caveats. The most important one is that you should be in a field where expertise is possible. As I’ve covered in Part 4 of my Framework for Putting Mental Models to Practice, there are fields where good expert performance is possible, and fields where it isn’t; the fields that are bad are maliciously structured to thwart development of expertise: (static stimuli vs dynamic stimuli, and other contrasts)

If we turn those to examples, we find the following list of professions in which expert performance is possible on the left, and where it isn’t on the right: (test pilot vs psychiatrist, etc)

You’ll do better to read Kahneman and Klein in their 2009 paper on the conditions for expertise — if expertise is possible in your field, turn to deliberate practice.

Stories of Deliberate Practice

One of the more interesting things about Peak are the stories of actual deliberate practice training programs in action.

I’m aware that my summary of Peak is tinted with my frustrations of the deliberate practice tradition

as a practitioner, I have had great difficulties putting deliberate practice to practice, and I wish there existed a book that tackled the challenges of this head on

the principles of deliberate practice are easy to state, but the methods of applying them to a training program demand a level of creativity that require sustained effort to achieve. (I’ve written about some of these challenges in my previous essay on DP).