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Comment by GregBuchholz | Hacker News Reader

Your mention of deliberate practice prompted me reinvestigate the guy who was doing the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a golf pro. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, he did get to 10,000 hours, but it doesn't seem like it panned out. Anyone have further sources of information?

http://thedanplan.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_McLaughlin_(golfer)

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He did not get to the 10,000 hours, he had to quit after 6,000 due to back injury.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/the-dan-p...

Survivor bias seems to be a thing in Pro Sports

Not everybody can get to 10k hours without getting hurt and/or managing to work through it

6000 seem like just totally close to 10K for all practical purposes...

What do you mean? It's barely more than half of the goal.

There was a recent HN discussion on it, I believe - I think he got to around 6,000 hours, and was doing really well at golf actually, but then injuries started happening.

Maybe a slightly different topic.. but from what a lot in the running field think, its all about how fast your body recovers.

There are 10,000 amazing marathoners in the world. If you gave them all the same training, they would all be absurdly good, as they got better and better. But 9,990 or so of them would get injured and wash out.

So it seems at least in some sports, your limiter is not how genetically gifted you are the SPORT, but how genetically gifted you are at recovering from training so that you can train more.

So perhaps this guy has the genetics to be a pro golfer, but his body can't take the strain and recover between sessions.. so he would never quite make it.

If his body cannot take the strain and recover between sessions then wouldn't that suggest that he does not have the genetics to be a pro golfer, but merely a good one?

I'm not convinced that the recovery is genetic (well it is, but that's not the point.) People give themselves repetitive motion injuries in music all the time. It causes tons of otherwise amazing musicians to wash out.

It's become such a problem, that it's basically become the biggest issue the pedagogy community as a whole is actively trying to address. This is interesting, because there has been a lot of progress made in injury-preventive technique.

Even in running, a quick Google search revealed that injury preventive techniques exist.

So I guess, I'm not convinced that injury isn't technique related and that not being injured doesn't have more to do with luck (in terms of natural technique) than genetics.

> It's become such a problem, that it's basically become the biggest issue the pedagogy community as a whole is actively trying to address. This is interesting, because there has been a lot of progress made in injury-preventive technique.

Could you please give me some references for this? Guitar has loads of famous people who encourage people to do things that will cause injuries. Having some actual research to fight against this would be really useful.

An egregiously bad example: Paul Gilbert (who is like 6'5" and has enormously long arms and fingers) actually SELLS an especially long guitar strap that is practically guaranteed to give you RSI. I wish I were joking: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paul+gilbert+gu...

Side note: this made me hugely disappointed in Paul Gilbert. Prior to this, I thought of him as an amazing guitar player with a very wry/dry sense of humor who was simply making fun of the guitar stereotype crowd. Actually encouraging something which is damaging in order to profit from it crosses the line whether he is serious or joking--too many people will listen and believe him.

Jerome Lowenthal, the pianist and pedagogue has focal distonia, and speaks about it in his teaching. Opera singers get vocal nodes from incorrect use or overuse of the vocal chords... musicians often turn to Pilates, Feldenkreis, or other techniques- but mostly it is about finding the posture that is the most natural and the motion that is most efficient. Cellists have special orchestral chairs, and violinists use better and better chin and shoulder rests these days- all in service to this.

>So I guess, I'm not convinced that injury isn't technique related and that not being injured doesn't have more to do with luck (in terms of natural technique) than genetics.

Certainly luck is a factor, but genetics is an important factor as well. Many studies have linked genetics to a predisposition for inflammation, wound-healing, and other injury-related phenomena.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160302135149.h...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16472051

ansolutely. an expert knows the most efficient motions from refining inefficient ones or from a coach who can spot issues. inefficient motions create repetitive use injuries.

Kind of related is that one of the biggest advantages of using performance enhancing drugs/steroids is the greatly reduced recovery time. Even if someone tests clean before an event because they genuinely are clean rather than being on something undetectable, they still benefit from all of the extra training they managed to get in in-between events when they were juicing.

I wouldn't discount the not insignificant amount of luck involved either. Anecdotally, I know of one baseball player who got called up to the majors only to have his career ended by taking a bad hop to the face just before his rookie season.

Well, when you consider that even Tiger Woods had to take an extended break from golf and completely redesign his swing to prevent permanent shoulder and back problems, it doesn't seem to be a 'genetic' thing per se, but rather a human mechanics limitation.

Some sporting activities are just outside the scope of design of our bodies, it would seem. Much like trying to use a Japanese chef knife to prise open jar lids. It will work up to a point, but not being the core design of the tool, you are guaranteed of breaking the knife at some point, or at least severely damaging it.

It would appear that the human frame is not suited to short, explosive, twisting action of the arms and shoulders while the lower body remains planted.

> genetically gifted

No need to narrow this down to genetics. Just say "how fast you recover", thanks.

I mean, unless you give specific insights into how detrimental slack after training and superb wound healing are directly genetically correlated, you might as well not mention it.

Edit: Also, you seem to presuppose a benefit from wounding. I do doubt that.

Well compared to where he started or the average golf player but still very far away from a anything resembling a pro. Which in general is the scientific consensus. Which is you can get a lot better at things by practicing but being that best is always a matter of talent.

Since you mentioned both deliberate practice and 10,000 hours: are you familiar with Anders Ericsson's criticism of the 10,000 hours idea? Do you think it's still a concept worth talking about?

I liked Gladwell's response, that 10,000 hours was never intended as the goal it turned into. Rather, it was intended as an order of magnitude. More than that however, it was intended to call attention to the support structure being expert requires. I.E. nobody can get 10,000 hours in on their own.

This. I'm listening to Outliers right now (where he builds up that concept). I can understand how people think Gladwell is a load of crap... if you focus on his points out of context. It was never "get 10,000 hrs and you'll be an expert", but instead "once you get to a certain level of talent/innate ability, it's deliberate practice that makes the difference."

like the constant factors usually omitted in complexity analysis

Academia has put its nose up far in the air, it's become a career-crime to write anything for the public, so it falls to journalists to explain scientific results. Gladwell did a good job, then got manure tossed at him from scientists for daring to speak their results; and laypeople who flatly misunderstood what he said, or never read the articles/books and imagined what he said.

But the root problem is inequality - science has begun to see itself as an immaculate priesthood that mustn't mix with the plebs. Scientists should have been presenting their results to the public, but snobbishness now prevents this.

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