jadagul:

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

jadagul:

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

jadagul:

@evolution-is-just-a-theorem if people want to see what effectiveness looks like, they should probably study either professional athletes or professional musicians.

Seems reasonable. When I was making my original claim I was thinking in terms of “how do I make this analogy better without breaking it”, not “what analogy should we be using instead”. Possibly I should have just done the latter.

I do think there’s some value in looking at the difference between traditional martial arts and MMA (and its components). Useless traditions can survive for a really long time if they aren’t getting tested! People can totally fool themselves into thinking they’re competent and awesome when they’re maybe not even better than average!* Pomp and circumstance don’t actually contribute to success, but people will totally end up believing they’re important!

* Well that doesn’t seem very applicable to rationalists. Right? Guys? Guys?

Sure, I agree. Though I have essentially no object-level knowledge about martial arts and/or fighting; I’ve literally never witnessed an act of violence in my life.

But I wanted to take the opportunity to go on one of my usual crusades: most people are really bad at practicing; they’re doing a really bad job of practicing even when they’re trying; and if you look at how music students are trained to practice, you can pick up a lot of low-hanging fruit just by applying those techniques to as much as possible.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be music students, because high performers in basically any skilled activity (professional sports, dancing, competitive video games…) do basically the same things. Because those are the things that work.

What things do music students do?

Focused, deliberate, controlled, carfully-selected repetition.

We’ve all heard the adage that “practice makes perfect.” This is…not the case. The musician’s tweak on that saying is “practice makes consistent; perfect practice makes perfect.”

Most people confuse repetition with practice. “If I do this a hundred times, I’ll get better at it.” But if you do it badly a hundred times, then you’re practicing doing it badly. You want to practice doing things well.

I get ranty about this subject so I wrote long; below the cut to not clutter people’s dashboards. I’m also a fan of this Lifehacker piece on the subject.

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