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Comment by voiper1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, I was really into the whole Deliberate practice thing and then I read this and thought "Oh no, did I have it all wrong?"

So I read the book he quoted - "Source of Power". And you know what? It has a tremendous overlap with Deliberate Practice.

The proponents of Deliberate Practice never claim to "just do it over and over" - you have to have background knowledge, a teacher/coach, etc... the tacit knowledge. Part of it is given to you and part of it is something that you're put into a position to experience for yourself.

It seems the "divide" is overstated.

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Deliberate practice can also be developed in fields unlike music and math and chess, such as the pursuit of mastering experimentation & discovery which also takes a lifetime to never entirely master itself.

The combination of tacit knowledge with deliberate practice is especially powerful, even more so when augmented by working smart, in addition to working hard rather than instead of working hard.

Leveraged furthest when applied to a foundation of natural unfair advantage of some kind or another.

Over the longest lifetime you can muster.

Indeed, this seems a little misleading (or perhaps I have too broad a view of deliberate practice). The submission talks about learning to ride a bike by first gliding for short periods, then longer periods, then pedalling. Is this not deliberate practice? Or identifying that you struggle with understanding software design, and then working on create designs and getting feedback to improve them so you can develop your own intuition for how to design good software - this also seems like deliberate practice to me.

I'll assume the best in the author, that he simply interpreted deliberate practice differently than I did such that it was not useful for most things, and now he's trying to share the method that worked for him. But to me this is exactly what I would expect from deliberate practice.

As someone who's recently gotten into deliberate practice, I, too, started reading this worried I'm heading in the wrong direction.

And it left me with a similar feeling: the author suggests that acquiring tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice, when in fact deliberate practice is the most effective way to acquire tacit knowledge.

In the bicycle example, that would mean trying out different approaches, figuring out what works and what doesn't, and working with a coach (parent) to practice more effectively.

So, pitting these concepts against one another seems wrong, but keeping tacit knowledge in mind when applying deliberate practice might make it more efficient.

I am completely with the author on his defense of the reality of tacit knowledge, but his argument against deliberate practice depends on pedantic, hair-splitting definitions that would be better presented as second-order refinements applicable in certain circumstances, such as when you are "in a field where no ‘highly-developed, broadly accepted training methods’ exist." It may be that this style of presentation is a reaction to highly specific claims that some proponents of deliberate practice insist are universal truths.

Indeed - after the long build up, the "reveal" was distinctly underwhelming. Arguments against a straw man are only persuasive if no-one notices that your foil is a straw man.

Yeah, I always understood deliberate practice as reflecting on what you're doing and focusing on parts which are wrong, i.e. figuring out where you might be missing the "tacit knowledge".

And this is that makes practice deliberate and not just repeating things over and over.

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