http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/08/talent-training-and-...
Key points:
1. Ericsson only published averages. Nobody else has seen the raw data. He didn't even give standard deviation or error bars.
2. "Talented" people get more positive feedback and so practice more.
3. There are so many observable phenotypal inputs and as yet unobserved phenotypal inputs into sports performance that pinning it to a single variable (hours of deliberate practice) is nuts.
My sport is Olympic weightlifting.
Some people will never be Olympic champions, no matter how hard they train. Factors affecting performance include:
* Height.
* Relative anthropometry: long legs are worse than short legs. Long torsos are better than short torsos. Long arms are better for the snatch, worse for the clean and jerk.
* Fast-twitch fibre / slow-twitch fibre ratios.
* Tendon insertion geometry.
* Muscle-belly / tendon ratio.
* Pelvic geometry.
* Soft tissue robustness.
* Natural hormonal environment: ratios, natural circulating testosterone and DHT, amounts of SBHG.
* Placement and density of testosterone receptors in muscle tissue.
* Myostatin production.
These are basic physiological qualities that cannot be changed by any amount of training. While the statistics show that lifters who start younger out-perform lifters who start later (because it's a high-skill sport and childhood neuroplasticity is much higher), the historically and currently dominant countries in weightlifting have gotten there by simply having much larger pools of candidates to find genetic outliers in.
There are so many factors at play. One important one is environment...e.g. if your parents are chess masters and you've grown up watching them play, that's not being included as part of the 3,000 hours...and it should be, because the one with 10,000 hours might not have such an advantage.
a) Doesn't make the 10,000-hour figure a rule as both Epstein and Repanich would have us believe.
b) Fully concedes that there are myriads of other factors that have an effect on how one reaches "expert status".
I'm also not sure how Epstein can claim that the chess master study is somehow disanalogous with the athlete one. An expert athlete might have some physical advantage over your "average Joe": speed, lean muscle, endurance, height, etc., etc. Similarly, one can say that an expert chess player may have some neurophysiological advantage over the "average Joe": better-formed synaptic pathways, higher attention span, etc., etc. I don't think there's any difference between an expert chess master or an NFL quarterback.
Both might have some genetic advantage; both have trained extensively. The idea behind Gladwell's figure is not that you can practice X for 10,000 hours and then you will instantly be an expert at it, but merely that after 10,000 hours (of deliberate practice plus a number of contingencies) you can expect to be somewhere in the realm of expertness.
There are plenty of other studies that favor this hypothesis; in particular, some very interesting double-blind identical twin studies[1].
Outside of extreme cases (e.g. I am 4'11'' and want to play in the NBA; I have an IQ of 90 and want to be an astronaut), I think Gladwell is right on the money: practice is more important than talent.
[1] http://www.indiana.edu/~jkkteach/P335/shanks_expertise.html
There was a hard upper limit to their performance that no amount of training could surmount. Insofar as "expert" is defined by relative ranking, some people will never become experts. Why? Because they are outranked by the "naturals".
The general problem with the Gladwell/Ericsson hypothesis is that it sorta-kinda suggests that practice is both necessary and sufficient to produce expert-level performance.
Everyone agrees on necessity. It is the question of sufficiency that is demonstrably false. People are different and are better suited to different endeavours; no amount or sort of training or practice can change the boundaries of your phenotypic potential.
You can move a long way from an average baseline in the direction of expertise -- humans are very malleable. But there are hard limits. Elite performers in any field are elite because they were better suited and then did the practice.
My interpretation of Ericsson's work is that natural talent can give certain individuals a head start in the beginning, but once you get into the domain of expertise, this head start at the beginning is very tiny and the effects of practice completely overpower it in comparison. However, I think in areas like sports - genetics do play more of a role. If you are less than 5 feet tall, you probably will not be an NBA point guard, even after 10000 hours of deliberate practice.
One of his papers for further reading:
From The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
"Consider three general types of activities, namely, work, play,and deliberate practice. Work includes public performance, competitions, services rendered for pay, and other activities directly motivated by external rewards. Play includes activities that have no explicit goal and that are inherently enjoyable. Deliberate practice includes activities that have been specially designed to improve the current level of performance."
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...
In some (marginal) cases, you lack a necessary feature of being an expert in X. I don't see how this breaks Gladwell's position.
This generalizes to other activities easily. The best practice I've found comes from complete effort in game/competition like environments.
I played golf at a pretty high level throughout high school and college. I practiced and played golf on most days for 8 straight years. I'm sure I reached 10k hours. Currently, I don't have almost any time to practice and play golf. I haven't practiced or played regularly in at least 6 years. Yet, playing once every 2 months or so I'm still able to shoot at or near par most of the time. I suspect this has more to do with the 10k hours of practice than my natural abilities. Not really any way to prove that, but I suspect a similarly athletic person who hasn't put in that practice wouldn't generally shoot par playing 6 times a year.
Genetic advantages are interesting.
Another way athletes become great though, in all seriousness, is they hack their bodies with PEDs. Seems to me like sports these days are flooded with it.
Some people respond better to it than others. Some people have more testosterone receptors. Some people aromatise more of it into DHT or estrogen than others. Some people have more SHBG, a protein which disables sex hormones.
Variability in response happens for every PED. The introduction of PEDs has not removed selection, it's just changed the selection function.
This.
