10000 hours

[Mef]

I would worry, if I play more games that aren't of high quality, I'll reinforce bad habits, and get stuck with them.

Only if you win, otherwise you'll be deterred from your habits and feel you must change! So really you only need to worry if you're on a winning streak (=

[Kirby]

I would worry, if I play more games that aren't of high quality, I'll reinforce bad habits, and get stuck with them.

Only if you win, otherwise you'll be deterred from your habits and feel you must change! So really you only need to worry if you're on a winning streak (=

Yep. So I think I'll still stick to my "just do it" philosophy for now.

[Mef]

I think that as long as you are looking for mistakes, "practice makes permanent" isn't a big deal. The real problem comes up when you are training yourself to make mistakes, doing something wrong and doing lots of repetitions of it, without discovering that you're doing it wrong.

This is a big debate in language learning. On one hand, some people say that you should just speak as much as you can and try to do it with people who will point out your mistakes so you can improve. There is another camp that says that you should learn to say things perfectly and never say anything that you can't say perfectly. IMO, the first group get so much more exposure that they end up running circles around the latter group, just like people who play a lot of casual games of go get so much more experience, that they see and identify so many more mistakes that it must be better.

....or as is often asked on KGS: "Why is it that so many of the high dan players just play blitz games?"

[hyperpape]

If you have a very strong mathematical background and good intuition/problem solving abilities, it takes a significantly reduced effort to go from being in one technical field to another.

Agreed. But unless there's a reasonably sharp distinction between relevant background and irrelevant (I tend to assume experience with poetry won't get you anywhere in engineering), the 10000 hours idea just becomes an exaggerated way of saying that experts typically have experience doing something relevant.

[Mef]

If you have a very strong mathematical background and good intuition/problem solving abilities, it takes a significantly reduced effort to go from being in one technical field to another.

Agreed. But unless there's a reasonably sharp distinction between relevant background and irrelevant (I tend to assume experience with poetry won't get you anywhere in engineering), the 10000 hours idea just becomes an exaggerated way of saying that experts typically have experience doing something relevant.

The point I was trying to make is that the author's claim that since an elite competitor in one sport was able to become competitive at an elite level in another sport in a short time implies that it is possible to become an elite competitor in a short time is dubious. The fact is that a large amount of the time spent becoming an elite competitor in a physical activity is making sure your body is in peak physical condition, and this will be broadly applicable.

I guess to try and extend the earlier analogy...It would be comparable to saying that you took a group of engineering graduate students/post-docs, taught them meteorology for one year and got them developing complex weather models. Therefore it is clearly unnecessary for meteorologists to study <however many years of undergrad/grad school one studies to become a meteorologist>, you only need one year!