Malcolm Gladwell: COMPLEXITY AND THE TEN-THOUSAND-HOUR RULE

Forty years ago, in a paper in American Scientist, Herbert Simon and William Chase drew one of the most famous conclusions in the study of expertise:

There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade's intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…

In the years that followed, an entire field within psychology grew up devoted to elaborating on Simon and Chase’s observation—and researchers, time and again, reached the same conclusion: it takes a lot of practice to be good at complex tasks. After Simon and Chase’s paper, for example, the psychologist John Hayes looked at seventy-six famous classical composers and found that, in almost every case, those composers did not create their greatest work until they had been composing for at least ten years. (The sole exceptions: Shostakovich and Paganini, who took nine years, and Erik Satie, who took eight.)

This is the scholarly tradition I was referring to in my book “Outliers,” when I wrote about the “ten-thousand-hour rule.” No one succeeds at a high level without innate talent, I wrote: “achievement is talent plus preparation.” But the ten-thousand-hour research reminds us that "the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play." In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room, straight out of a surgical rotation, and does world-class neurosurgery. And second—and more crucially for the theme of Outliers—the amount of practice necessary for exceptional performance is so extensive that people who end up on top need help. They invariably have access to lucky breaks or privileges or conditions that make all those years of practice possible. As examples, I focussed on the countless hours the Beatles spent playing strip clubs in Hamburg and the privileged, early access Bill Gates and Bill Joy got to computers in the nineteen-seventies. “He has talent by the truckload,” I wrote of Joy. “But that’s not the only consideration. It never is.”

Recently, there has been some confusion about this argument. Some of the critiques are just bewildering. Here, for example, is a passage from an article in Time a few months ago, which makes me think that there is another Malcolm Gladwell out there, with far more eccentric views than mine, who put on a Halloween wig and somehow conned his way into the Time Life Building:

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I think that it is also a mistake to assume that the ten-thousand-hour idea applies to every domain. For instance, Epstein uses as his main counterexample the high jumper Donald Thomas, who reached world-class level after no more than a few months of the most rudimentary practice. He then quotes academic papers making similar observations about other sports—like one that showed that people could make the Australian winter Olympic team in skeleton after no more than a few hundred practice runs. Skeleton, in case you are curious, is a sport in which a person pushes a sled as fast as she can along a track, jumps on, and then steers the sled down a hill. Some of the other domains that Epstein says do not fit the ten-thousand-hour model are darts, wrestling, and sprinting. “We’ve tested over ten thousand boys,” Epstein quotes one South African researcher as saying, “and I’ve never seen a boy who was slow become fast.”

As it happens, I have been a runner and a serious track-and-field fan my entire life, and I have never seen a boy who was slow become fast either. For that matter, I’ve never met someone who thinks a boy who was slow can become fast. Epstein has written a wonderful book. But I wonder if, in his zeal to stake out a provocative claim on this one matter, he has built himself a straw man. The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively complex activities take many years to master because they require that a very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be experienced and processed. There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us “The White Album” when they were teen-agers. And if the surgeon who wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated residency, you should probably tell him no. It does not invalidate the ten-thousand-hour principle, however, to point out that in instances where there are not a long list of situations and scenarios and possibilities to master—like jumping really high, running as fast as you can in a straight line, or directing a sharp object at a large, round piece of cork—expertise can be attained a whole lot more quickly. What Simon and Chase wrote forty years ago remains true today. In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals.

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Related books:

Outliers: The Story of Success

The Sports Gene

Related previous posts:

What it takes to be great

Malcolm Gladwell at the 92nd Street Y

Whitman, Diz on risk

From the book Modern Security Analysis: Understanding Wall Street Fundamentals:

Risk is a word that should not be used without an adjective in front of it. Just because a common stock might have a lot of market risk (i.e., a plunge in OPMI [Outside Passive Minority Investor] market price) and a company might have a lot of investment risk (i.e., the business is unlikely to survive as a going concern) does not mean that adequately secured lenders to the corporation are taking any credit risk at all. Creditors can be confident that the loan will remain a performing loan or that in a reorganization, they will receive a value of principal amount plus interest and interest on interest. General risk really does not exist.

Bill Ackman's Q2 2013 Letter

Found via ValueWalk.

Link to: Bill Ackman's Q2 2013 Letter

The Antifragile Organization: Embracing Failure to Improve Resilience and Maximize Availability

Found via @nntaleb.

Failure is inevitable. Disks fail. Software bugs lie dormant waiting for just the right conditions to bite. People make mistakes. Data centers are built on farms of unreliable commodity hardware. If you’re running in a cloud environment, then many of these factors are outside of your control. To compound the problem, failure is not predictable and doesn’t occur with uniform probability and frequency. The lack of a uniform frequency increases uncertainty and risk in the system. In the face of such inevitable and unpredictable failure, how can you build a reliable service that provides the high level of availability your users can depend on?

Nassim Taleb quotes

From Antifragile:

Those recommending the nutritional policies fail to understand that “steadily” getting your calories and nutrients throughout the day, with “balanced” composition and metronomic regularity, does not necessarily have the same effect as consuming them unevenly or randomly, say by having a lot of proteins one day, fasting completely another, feasting the third, etc. 

This is a denial of hormesis, the slight stressor of episodic deprivation. For a long time, nobody even bothered to try to figure out whether variability in distribution—the second-order effect—mattered as much as long-term composition. Now research is starting to catch up to such a very, very simple point. It turns out that the effect of variability in food sources and the nonlinearity in the physiological response is central to biological systems. Consuming no protein at all on Monday and catching up on Wednesday seemingly causes a different—better—physiological response, possibly because the deprivation, as a stressor, activates some pathways that facilitate the subsequent absorption of the nutrients (or something similar). And, until a few recent (and disconnected) empirical studies, this convexity effect has been totally missed by science—though not by religions, ancestral heuristics, and traditions. And if scientists get some convexity effects (as we said about domain dependence, doctors, just like weight lifters, understand here and there nonlinearities in dose response), the notion of convexity effects itself appears to be completely missing from their language and methods. 

Health benefits are convex to speed (up to a point, of course).

The Canadian Model: Invented in South Dakota?

Found via Abnormal Returns. It looks like the South Dakota Annual Report is also available HERE.

What public pension system in the US of A is the best? Seriously, take a second and jot down the retirement system or investment council you think generates the highest investment returns. Got it?

Anybody pick the South Dakota Retirement System or its Investment Council? I didn't think so. But the SDIC just clocked 19.5 percent for the fiscal year ending June 30, which is truly remarkable.

Here's how the Chairman of the SDIC explained the performance in a recent legislative session: "The staff for the last four years have hit home runs every year. This year, they hit a grand slam walk-off home run."

No kidding. The Chairman went on to say that he expects this performance will place the SDIC as the single best performing pension fund in the nation. And I bet he’s right. You know why? Because the SDIC is almost always among the best funds in the nation.

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So, you may be wondering, how does the SDIC do it? Let’s just say that the “Canadian Model” may have been invented in South Dakota. Indeed, the SDIC manages most of its assets internally:

“The Investment Council manages most assets internally to save money and to try to earn higher returns. Internal management is cheaper than external managers, especially for expensive areas such as global equity, high yield, and arbitrage. Index funds are another low cost alternative, but would preclude any opportunity to add value above index returns. The Council believes the superior performance that has historically come from its internal management relates to a greater focus on long-term value and increased conviction from performing in-house research.”

Gene Breakthroughs Spark a Revolution in Cancer Treatment

Kellie Carey's doctor finally stopped dodging questions about how long she had to live six weeks after he diagnosed her lung cancer.

"Maybe three months," he told her in his office one sunny May morning in 2010, she recalls.

Yet she is still alive, a testament to the most extraordinary decade of progress ever in the long scientific struggle against lung cancer.

Tests found Ms. Carey's lung cancer to be of a rare type that researchers had found just three years earlier by deciphering its genetic code. The 45-year-old businesswoman in 2010 went on a drug Pfizer Inc. was testing for that type. By pinpointing her cancer, the drug probably helped give her years more to live than chemotherapy would have, her doctors say.

That is remarkable because lung cancer for decades defied efforts to find drugs that could extend an average patient's life by even a few weeks.

But an explosion in knowledge about the genetic mutations that cause tumors is just now offering the first real promise of drugs that can control what is the most-common and most-deadly cancer.

Warren Buffett thanks BofA CEO Moynihan for $5.3 billion profit

Link

The Most Successful People Practice Better, Not More

Thanks to Barry for passing this along.

How long does it take to become elite at your craft? And what do the people who master their goals do differently than the rest of us?

That’s what John Hayes, a cognitive psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wanted to know.

For decades, Hayes has been investigating the role of effort, practice, and knowledge in top performers. He has studied the most talented creators in history — people like Mozart and Picasso — to determine how long it took them to become world class at their craft. Furthermore, he has investigated the choices and experiences that have led to their success.

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Related previous post: What it takes to be great

Get 1GB Free Space By Linking Mailbox App With Dropbox

Via ValueWalk. I just did this and it only took a couple of minutes. Well worth the effort for an extra 1GB of free storage.

As we know, Dropbox has acquired Mailbox, an email client for iPhone and iPad that works only with Gmail or Google Apps account. You can add up to five Gmail or Google Apps to get a unified, simple and less cluttered experience. While we’ve previously never seen any evidence of the two companies working together, this time, we’re in for a treat.

Mailbox now supports attachments from Dropbox, and if you link your Dropbox account to Mailbox, then you can get a sweet 1GB of free storage space on the cloud. Wouldn’t it be great to get an extra gig on Dropbox? Yes, it would!