Several years on from this post and @Raemon ’s comment, where do we stand? From my own starkly limited ground-level perspective, it looks like pretty much everyone who’s tried to figure out the secrets of training has smashed into the same flavor of mixed-success, shattered, and given up on it as a bad job. This seems sad and desperately misguided, but what do I know? I haven’t exactly tried of my own accord, and I showed up too late to the party for the height of CFAR and the like. I know a few people are still trying to poke at questions like this one from various angles, but everyone I’ve talked to about the topic (5 or so of them?) seem extremely burned out on the whole enterprise, so maybe it’s all for the best that I never went.
What would it look like, to actually try again in these latter days? If the model in this post is correct—and I think that it is, that training is vastly more valuable than selection—then there’s gains to be had. It’d start—I think—by figuring out what went wrong previously and noticing and carefully attending to all the skulls without drowning in despair about them. The next step might be some careful trials—maybe randomized ones, maybe they need to be thoughtfully tailored to the student—and tests after the fact at a few time intervals. Something about the zone of proximal development is tickling the back of my mind here; so is something about crystallization and application of the skill, especially in a way that psychologically accords that you Have The Skill, which probably calls for some ordeal? Hard to say. I only have scattered thoughts about this. If anyone wants to try to elicit more of them from me I welcome the attempt.
I have generally updated in the direction of “training works but takes 10x more investment than it seems like it should”
Probably training could be made much cheaper—e.g. the framing practica and “what are you tracking in your head?” posts had useful directions. But making better training itself takes a huge amount of work.
The fundamental problem here is that there isn’t actually a way to increase human performance by deliberate training very much, absent gene editing, and the basic reasons for this sum up to “lots of ability is much more genetic in nature, and environmental factors are often overestimated heavily in learning, combined with the brain mostly not learning after 25 years old, and while the human brain always learns, it does so at a substantially reduced rate once you reach 25 years old, so most training programs can’t teach them too much, unfortunately.”
At least, this was my half-remembered view of what areas like neuroscience and genetics fields found out about human abilities.
Several years on from this post and @Raemon ’s comment, where do we stand? From my own starkly limited ground-level perspective, it looks like pretty much everyone who’s tried to figure out the secrets of training has smashed into the same flavor of mixed-success, shattered, and given up on it as a bad job. This seems sad and desperately misguided, but what do I know? I haven’t exactly tried of my own accord, and I showed up too late to the party for the height of CFAR and the like. I know a few people are still trying to poke at questions like this one from various angles, but everyone I’ve talked to about the topic (5 or so of them?) seem extremely burned out on the whole enterprise, so maybe it’s all for the best that I never went.
What would it look like, to actually try again in these latter days? If the model in this post is correct—and I think that it is, that training is vastly more valuable than selection—then there’s gains to be had. It’d start—I think—by figuring out what went wrong previously and noticing and carefully attending to all the skulls without drowning in despair about them. The next step might be some careful trials—maybe randomized ones, maybe they need to be thoughtfully tailored to the student—and tests after the fact at a few time intervals. Something about the zone of proximal development is tickling the back of my mind here; so is something about crystallization and application of the skill, especially in a way that psychologically accords that you Have The Skill, which probably calls for some ordeal? Hard to say. I only have scattered thoughts about this. If anyone wants to try to elicit more of them from me I welcome the attempt.
My updates over the years:
I have generally updated in the direction of “training works but takes 10x more investment than it seems like it should”
Probably training could be made much cheaper—e.g. the framing practica and “what are you tracking in your head?” posts had useful directions. But making better training itself takes a huge amount of work.
The fundamental problem here is that there isn’t actually a way to increase human performance by deliberate training very much, absent gene editing, and the basic reasons for this sum up to “lots of ability is much more genetic in nature, and environmental factors are often overestimated heavily in learning, combined with the brain mostly not learning after 25 years old, and while the human brain always learns, it does so at a substantially reduced rate once you reach 25 years old, so most training programs can’t teach them too much, unfortunately.”
At least, this was my half-remembered view of what areas like neuroscience and genetics fields found out about human abilities.