Outliers
I think you may be missing most interesting point of article which is about the cognitive limits of enhancing skill through deliberate practice. There was an academic paper a few years back "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" ( a nice summary here - http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the...). The paper breaks down 3 types of activity: work, play and deliberate practice. Work is exercising skills you already know; Play is creativity, fun, exploration; Deliberate practice is building a skill - where expertise is achieved through…
Seems like I should clarify... It may be that Asians are just better at math — “inherently” as you say. Ok, maybe. It also seems possible that there are certain aspects of language and culture that support math achievement. Gladwell, in _Outliers_ is after this category of explanation. Personally, I tend to like cultural explanations more than raw talent explanations because I like to think that everyone is capable of everything (eventually, if they work hard enough). I certainly like to act like everyone is capable of everything and it helps to have supporting theories. Gladwell’s…
The other caveat is that you have to be concentrating and paying attention to your performance for those 10,000 hours. Very few people, if any, have the metacognition and executive function abilities to pay attention and steadily improve for 8 hours a day. The experts in Outliers and the research it's based upon would typically practice for only 4-5 hours/day and then rest, or do fun stuff like playing through pieces or doing a few flips or easy jumps. A bunch of anecdotal evidence from myself and my friends in Ph.D programs or professional jobs, plus RescueTime's survey of YC founders,…
Gladwell says himself, in his own books, that he writes not to change the minds of his readers, but to make his readers think. The stories he presents alongside the ideas he presents are just illustrations. Every situation, whether it's Bill Gates' success, the problem of choosing NFL Quarterbacks, or the rise of Hush Puppies has an incredible amount of variables that can never be fully grasped. The common theme of Gladwell bashers seems to be that they take every idea presented as if he were presenting it as unilateral truth. I mean, just take a look at this Quora page:…
The article is biased and full of negative stereotypes and a thinly veiled attack at not the Universities but the practice of Affirmative Action and dare I say, racial, ethnic and sexual minorities themselves. First of all, SAT scores or grades are hardly any measure of the 'smartness' of academic credibility of the student. For example, as a commenter above pointed out, in computer science, a person who has average grades but more research work and open source experience is probably more motivated to learn than a student with just good grades. Secondly, the data[1] proves even that though…
>The author uses SAT scores because they are the best objective measure we have of academic quality. I wouldn't agree with this point. Though this claim has traditionally been accepted by academia but plenty of literature exists to make a claim otherwise too. I never took the SATs but did take the GREs and my anecdotal experience would say that standardized test are only a good measure of test-taking abilities. >This isn't the main thesis of the article; the author is just giving you his perspective on where the situation originated. The author tries to paint an idyllic picture of…
> If, as a society, everyone is a "Value Creator", will we still require a government? If everyone created value by Rand's standards, were highly rational and reasonable, did not destroy value, and were otherwise law-abiding (or simply moral) citizens, then you might not need government, or at least a very minimal one. We're incredibly far off from such a world, however (assuming it's even possible), so we at least need military protection, law enforcement, adjudication, etc. A great deal of people, even if law-abiding, aren't living up to their potential for a variety of reasons (many…
Sorry if my 6-sentence post failed to provide encyclopedic coverage of the issue. (Snarky start aside...) I'm a bit confused by the prevalence of the "so how do they cook it?" question in such discussions when I point out that one can live sustainably, if not well, on very little. It's as though many have never gone camping and cooked over a fire. Gas/electric stoves and metal cookware are recent developments which humans got by without for a long time - and many still do. For starters, shish-kabobs come to mind for cooking veggies on a stick. In a cramped/austerity situation, little…
There's a popular viewpoint I think from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers[0] that could possibly be summarised as "any non-trivial skill takes at least 10,000 hours of practice to approach mastery." I think this applies especially to programming[1]. I can still vaguely remember a time, many years ago now where I just couldn't get my head around a garden variety "for" loop. Now I wonder what was so hard to understand about it. Many times over the years since those early "for" loops I have often felt that I wasn't really making any progress at all in grokking this programming thing. I look back now…
This issue is where it gets the most complicated for me. I absolutely agree with you that everyone is not of equal aptitude. There are smart kids and less-than-smart kids; athletic kids and those with two left feet. I get that, and agree with it; anyone who doesn't is fooling themselves. Where I believe we differ in opinion is that kids should be treated differently--especially at a young age--because of this inequality. Different skills develop over time, and although certainly we should have Advanced Placement programs for those in high school, when talking about grade-schoolers, I think…