Working on a newsletter edition about deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is crucial if you want to reach expert level in any skill, but what is it, and how can it help you learn more precisely?

A thread based on @augustbradley's conversation with the late Anders Ericsson.

You can find my complete notes from the conversation in my public Roam graph:
https://t.co/Z5bXHsg3oc

The entire conversation is on YouTube:
https://t.co/1VzK2P3bJp
The 10,000-hour 'rule' was based on Ericsson's research, but simple practice is not enough for mastery.

We need teachers and coaches to give us feedback on how we're doing to adjust our actions effectively. Technology can help us by providing short feedback loops.
There's purposeful and deliberate practice.

In purposeful practice, you gain breakthroughs by trying out different techniques you find on your own.

In deliberate practice, an expert tells you what to improve on and how to do it, and then you do that (while getting feedback).
It's possible to come to powerful techniques through purposeful practice, but it's always a gamble.

Deliberate practice is possible with a map of the domain and a recommended way to move through it. This makes success more likely.
Teachers and coaches help you get the fundamentals right.

Many who start out practicing on their own need to unlearn certain habits. Learning it well from the start is preferable.

Fundamentals are needed for expert-level performance, and teachers help to do them well.
At some point, you won't need a teacher anymore.

As you move close to the edge of your domain, you're becoming an expert yourself. At these stages, purposeful practice may become preferable to find techniques others haven't seen yet.
Even if you have a team coach, it pays to have a personal coach.

In many settings, the team coach also gets to judge your performance, making it less likely you're willing to expose your weak spots.

A personal coach can give you a safe learning environment.
Mental representations are crucial in expert performance.

A mental representation is an internal understanding of external reality. If you're an expert, you have a richer understanding of certain situations than beginners, enabling you to make better decisions.
Their mental representations enable experts to predict what result their actions will have in the world.

Like master chess players, experts can think multiple steps ahead, hypothesizing what reactions their actions will trigger and how they will act in turn.
Mental representations are important to give information meaning.

Experts are often faster because new information is meaningful for them. They can use it in a richer structure to inform their decisions.

Beginners tend to look at situations in isolation.
If you record your deliberate practice, you can enrich your mental representations through analysis.

Looking back at how you performed and what steps you took, you can create new mental representations that weren't present while you were practicing.
In deliberate practice, it's important to move outside of your comfort zone.

You often plateau with skills you're satisfied with or find fun to do. Teachers can help you break through your current level by identifying what you can improve and how to improve it.
Teachers and coaches are important for staying motivated when moving outside of your comfort zone.

Beginners often have unrealistic expectations of how fast they can progress. Teachers do know what's realistic (through their experience) and let their students know.
Willpower is not a sustainable driving force for deliberate practice.

You need to cultivate a passionate commitment to becoming better at a skill. Practicing a skill needs to be fun in itself to be sustainable, even though you will hit to unpleasant points.
Not the amount of practice but the quality of practice matters.

Coming back to the 10,000-hour 'rule': only deliberate *peak* performance leads to improvement. For this, it's necessary to practice when you feel refreshed.

Sleep is crucial to hitting peak performance.
Want to read more about deliberate practice and learning strategies in general? Join my bi-weekly 'Sunday School' newsletter.

https://t.co/xK98tEo5to

More from Education

Time for some thoughts on schools given the revised SickKids document and the fact that ON decided to leave most schools closed. ON is not the only jurisdiction to do so, but important to note that many jurisdictions would not have done so -even with higher incidence rates.


As outlined in the tweet by @NishaOttawa yesterday, the situation is complex, and not a simple right or wrong https://t.co/DO0v3j9wzr. And no one needs to list all the potential risks and downsides of prolonged school closures.


On the other hand: while school closures do not directly protect our most vulnerable in long-term care at all, one cannot deny that any factor potentially increasing community transmission may have an indirect effect on the risk to these institutions, and on healthcare.

The question is: to what extend do schools contribute to transmission, and how to balance this against the risk of prolonged school closures. The leaked data from yesterday shows a mixed picture -schools are neither unicorns (ie COVID free) nor infernos.

Assuming this data is largely correct -while waiting for an official publication of the data, it shows first and foremost the known high case numbers at Thorncliff, while other schools had been doing very well -are safe- reiterating the impact of socioeconomics on the COVID risk.
Last month I presented seven sentences in seven different languages, all written in a form of the Chinese-character script. The challenge was to identify the languages and, if possible, provide a


Here again are those seven sentences:

1) 他的剑从船上掉到河里去
2) 於世𡗉番𧡊哭唭𢆥尼歲㐌外四𨑮
3) 入良沙寢矣見昆腳烏伊四是良羅
4) 佢而家喺邊喥呀
5) 夜久毛多都伊豆毛夜幣賀岐都麻碁微爾夜幣賀岐都久流曾能夜幣賀岐袁
6) 其劍自舟中墜於水
7) 今天愛晚特語兔吃二魚佛午飯

Six of those seven sentences are historically attested. One is not: I invented #7. I’m going to dive into an exploration of that seventh sentence in today’s thread.

Sentence #7 is an English-language sentence written sinographically — that is, using graphs that originate in the Chinese script. I didn’t do this for fun (even though it is fun), or as a proposal for a new way to write


I did it as a thought experiment. Why? Because thinking about how the modern Chinese script might be adapted to write modern English can give us valuable insights into historical instances of script borrowing, like those that took place centuries ago in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
OK I am going to be tackling this as surveillance/open source intel gathering exercise, because that is my background. I blew away 3 years of my life doing site acquisition/reconnaissance for a certain industry that shall remain unnamed and believe there is significant carryover.


This is NOT going to be zillow "here is how to google school districts and find walmart" we are not concerned with this malarkey, we are homeschooling and planting victory gardens and having gigantic happy families.

With that said, for my frog and frog-adjacent bros and sisters:

CHOICE SITES:

Zillow is obvious one, but there are many good sites like Billy Land, Classic Country Land, Landwatch, etc. and many of these specialize in owner financing (more on that later.) Do NOT treat these as authoritative sources - trust plat maps and parcel viewers.

TARGET IDENTIFICATION AND EVALUATION:

Okay, everyone knows how to google "raw land in x state" but there are other resources out there, including state Departments of Natural Resources, foreclosure auctions, etc. Finding the land you like is the easy part. Let's do a case study.

I'm going to target using an "off-grid but not" algorithm. This is a good piece in my book - middle of nowhere but still trekkable to civilization.

Note: visible power, power/fiber pedestal, utility corridor, nearby commercial enterprise(s), and utility pole shadows visible.

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