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markfrankel18

Malcolm Gladwell got us wrong: Our research was key to the 10,000-hour rule, but here's... - 0 views

  • First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practiced by the time they were eighteen — approximately seventy-four hundred hours — but he chose to refer to the total practice time they had accumulated by the time they were twenty, because it was a nice round number.
  • And the number varies from field to field.
  • Third, Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the type of practice that the musicians in our study did — a very specific sort of practice referred to as “deliberate practice” which involves constantly pushing oneself beyond one’s comfort zone, following training activities designed by an expert to develop specific abilities, and using feedback to identify weaknesses and work on them — and any sort of activity that might be labeled “practice.”
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  • The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn’t say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But nothing in the study of the Berlin violinists implied this. To show a result like this, it would have been necessary to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that the Berlin study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.
Lawrence Hrubes

Malcolm Gladwell - Zeitgeist Americas 2013 - YouTube - 1 views

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    Using statistics from high and low ranked universities, Gladwell argues that what really matters is how well we do relative to our peer group, not how elite our school is globally. Better to be a top student in a mediocre school than an average student in Harvard.
markfrankel18

Malcolm Gladwell: Do Genetic Advantages Make Sports Unfair? : The New Yorker - 0 views

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    "Eyesight can be improved-in some cases dramatically-through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. Major League Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the athlete's body. Tendon-replacement surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self. But when it comes to drugs Major League Baseball-like most sports-draws the line. An athlete cannot use a drug to become an improved version of his natural self, even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful, and is something that-like testosterone-is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone, available by prescription to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Forum, Advantage - 0 views

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    "We explore what can confer advantage. Bridget Kendall talks to best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell about whether the power of the underdog has been under-estimated; psychologist Kathryn Asbury on why some kids start school with a biological advantage over their peers, and globalisation professor Ian Goldin on ensuring future generations' advantage now."
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