I want to add two more thoughts to the competitive deliberate practice bit:
Another analogy for the scale of humanity point:
If you try to get better at something but don’t have the measuring sticks of competitive games, you end up not really knowing how good you objectively are. But most people don’t even try to get better at things. So you can easily find yourself feeling like whatever local optimum you’ve ended up in is better than it is.
I don’t know anything about martial arts, but suppose you wanted to get really good at fighting people. Then an analogy here is that you discover that, at leasts for everyone you’ve tried fighting, you can win pretty easily just by sucker punching them really hard. You might conclude that to get better at fighting, you should just practice sucker punching really well. One day you go to an MMA gym and get your ass kicked.
I suspect this happens in tons of places, except there’s not always an MMA gym to keep you honest. For example, my model of lots of researchers is that they learn a few tools really well (their sucker punches) and then just publish a bunch of research that they can successfully “sucker punch”. But this is a kind of streetlight effect and tons of critical research might not be susceptible to sucker punching. Nonetheless, there is no gym of competitive researchers that show you just how much better you could be.
Identifying cruxiness:
I don’t have a counterfactual George who hasn’t messed around in competitive games, but I strongly suspect that there is some tacit knowledge around figuring out the cruxiness of different moving parts of a system or of a situation that I picked up from these games.
For example, most games have core fundamentals, and picking up a variety of games means you learn what it generally feels like for something to be fundamental to an activity (e.g. usually just doing the fundamentals better than the other player is enough to win; like in Starcraft it doesn’t really matter how good you are at microing your units if you get wildly out-macroed and steamrolled). But sometimes it’s also not the fundamentals that matter, because you occasionally get into idiosyncratic situations where some weird / specific thing decides the game instead. Sometimes a game is decided by whoever figures that out first.
This feels related to skills of playing to your outs or finding the surest paths to victory? This doesn’t feel like something that’s easy to practice outside of some crisply defined system with sharp feedback loops, but it does feel transferrable.
I like the point about the need for some type of external competitive measure but as you say, they might not be a MMA gym where you need one.
Shifting the metaphor, I think your observation of the sucker punch fits well with the insight that for those with only a hammer, all problems look like nails. The gym would be someone with a screwdriver or riveter as well as the hammer. But even lacking the external check, we should always ask ourselves “Is this really a nail?” I might only have a hammer but if this isn’t a nail while the results might be better than nothing (maybe?) I’m not likely to achieve the best that could be done some other way. And,of course, watching just what happens went the other hammer-only people solve the problem and compare results to those when we know the problem is a nail we might learn something from their mistakes.
I want to add two more thoughts to the competitive deliberate practice bit:
Another analogy for the scale of humanity point:
If you try to get better at something but don’t have the measuring sticks of competitive games, you end up not really knowing how good you objectively are. But most people don’t even try to get better at things. So you can easily find yourself feeling like whatever local optimum you’ve ended up in is better than it is.
I don’t know anything about martial arts, but suppose you wanted to get really good at fighting people. Then an analogy here is that you discover that, at leasts for everyone you’ve tried fighting, you can win pretty easily just by sucker punching them really hard. You might conclude that to get better at fighting, you should just practice sucker punching really well. One day you go to an MMA gym and get your ass kicked.
I suspect this happens in tons of places, except there’s not always an MMA gym to keep you honest. For example, my model of lots of researchers is that they learn a few tools really well (their sucker punches) and then just publish a bunch of research that they can successfully “sucker punch”. But this is a kind of streetlight effect and tons of critical research might not be susceptible to sucker punching. Nonetheless, there is no gym of competitive researchers that show you just how much better you could be.
Identifying cruxiness:
I don’t have a counterfactual George who hasn’t messed around in competitive games, but I strongly suspect that there is some tacit knowledge around figuring out the cruxiness of different moving parts of a system or of a situation that I picked up from these games.
For example, most games have core fundamentals, and picking up a variety of games means you learn what it generally feels like for something to be fundamental to an activity (e.g. usually just doing the fundamentals better than the other player is enough to win; like in Starcraft it doesn’t really matter how good you are at microing your units if you get wildly out-macroed and steamrolled). But sometimes it’s also not the fundamentals that matter, because you occasionally get into idiosyncratic situations where some weird / specific thing decides the game instead. Sometimes a game is decided by whoever figures that out first.
This feels related to skills of playing to your outs or finding the surest paths to victory? This doesn’t feel like something that’s easy to practice outside of some crisply defined system with sharp feedback loops, but it does feel transferrable.
(FYI this is George from the essay, in case people were confused)
I like the point about the need for some type of external competitive measure but as you say, they might not be a MMA gym where you need one.
Shifting the metaphor, I think your observation of the sucker punch fits well with the insight that for those with only a hammer, all problems look like nails. The gym would be someone with a screwdriver or riveter as well as the hammer. But even lacking the external check, we should always ask ourselves “Is this really a nail?” I might only have a hammer but if this isn’t a nail while the results might be better than nothing (maybe?) I’m not likely to achieve the best that could be done some other way. And,of course, watching just what happens went the other hammer-only people solve the problem and compare results to those when we know the problem is a nail we might learn something from their mistakes.