Stats for nerds
2recommend
9mentions
4people
2021–2024years
33% recommend56% neutral11% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think Accelerated Expertise comes to the same conclusion and references the studies to back it up. It's a good book!
- Pedagogy means 'methods of teaching'. Pedagogical development means that there is a some body of knowledge around how to teach the skills of the domain. For instance, in tennis, there is some understanding of how to teach serves, and a coach may be able to break down your technique into subskills and assign you specific exercises that are known (have been developed) to work on building those subskills, before building it back up to the full serve.
This body of knowledge is built up over time, usually through trial and error. It is then passed from coach to player and coach to coach.
The dirty little secret of DP is that it cannot be done in domains where no good pedagogical development exists. This is a definitional thing. You may read more about it in Peak, Ericsson's popular science book on the topic (summary: https://commoncog.com/blog/peak-book-summary/)
I want to repeat this, so it is very clear: you cannot do DP in a domain where there is no good pedagogical development.
So: rock music, jazz, some aspects of computer programming, software architecture, marketing, leadership, management — all of these are domains with under-developed pedagogical development. Don't get me wrong — there are experts in all of these domains. But they got there through trial and error and reflection, not DP (see: cognitive transformation theory for an explanation of how that occurs here: https://commoncog.com/blog/the-hard-thing-about-learning-fro...)
If you want to do DP, you would have to come up with training techniques for all of these skills, and test them over a long period of time. In other words, you would have to do pedagogical development yourself before you can do DP.
One other implication: anyone who says "oh, just go do DP" is likely someone who has not a) looked at the research closely, or b) not actually tried to put it to practice.
Applying DP is a lot harder than you might think.
Anyway, once you understand this, you may now pursue two different lines of inquiry:
- How do good coaches do pedagogical development? I recommend John Danaher to give you a taste: https://youtu.be/ktuw6Ow4sd0?t=2396 (on developing new techniques) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktuw6Ow4sd0&t=6211s (on his creation of the leg-lock system)
- How do you develop training without pedagogical development. And for that I recommend my tacit knowledge series (https://commoncog.com/blog/the-tacit-knowledge-series/) and my summary of Accelerated Expertise (https://commoncog.com/blog/accelerated-expertise/)
- I just read that review of Accelerated Expertise. I didn't know which link to click in all of this comment thread so I just picked that one at random, and -- wow -- that was one of the most interesting things I've read in a while. Thanks for posting!
- Author here. Quite the contrary, actually — I’ve read all the above sources. On top of that, with the exception of Chambliss (which is a landmark work, to be clear), and Dreyfus (which I prefer to look at adaptations of; Accelerated Expertise has several updated or derivative scales that expertise researchers in the military use), I’ve talked to collaborators of these researchers, and in the case of Klein, am actively in contact with and am following the rest of the work of his community (https://naturalisticdecisionmaking.org/).
I’ve updated the bottom of the post to link to the many other articles I’ve written on expertise. These are either summaries of papers, or summaries of branches of the research, or pointing out obvious holes in the popsci representations of the research, or synthesise various (mostly military-funded) approaches to accelerating expertise.
This particular essay is a note from personal application.
- As someone who's studied this field extensively and applied it professionally, I'll go ahead and say I wouldn't recommend Accelerated Expertise to anyone. Reading it I got the distinct impression that the authors did not understand a great deal of the research they cited, either when supporting or dismissing it. Some good criticism of the book can be found here[0]. If some acronyms confuse you, the main one to know is CLT, Cognitive Load Theory. The idea roughly is that humans have a relatively fixed amount of stuff they can hold in their head and the process by which we become more expert is by making "schemas" that allow us to automate processes and group many small ideas together. When learning you want to create robust, correct schemas quickly.
https://3starlearningexperiences.wordpress.com/tag/accelerat...
- I disagree with this assessment. (Or, more accurately, I’d like to see a more comprehensive counter argument).
The article you link to is essentially a response to 2 pages in the book, where Hoffman et al mention, almost in passing, that CLT is a silly theory when you want to train for real world scenarios (the intuition is that if you’re training marine fire squad commanders to plan on the battlefield, perhaps it helps to simulate shooting at them during training?) Hoffman et al use this as an example of a learning theory that doesn’t seem to map to real world requirements.
This reads like a disagreement over one particular dismissal in the book, perhaps because CLT is a pet theory of the article’s authors. The problem: this argument is not core to the book!
The article does not, for instance,
a) Deal with the many examples of successful real world accelerated training programs with no curriculum design (as is commonly understood; ordering of simulations isn’t really designing a syllabus) in Chapter 9 (some of which were designed by some of the authors)
b) Have a rejoinder to the two learning theories presented in Chapter 11 that the authors claim underpins their training approach (if there were something to attack, this would be it!)
c) Nor have a rejoinder to a more central claim in the book, (and to my mind a more controversial claim) that atomisation of concepts impedes rapidised training.
And, perhaps most surprisingly to me, your claim that
> Reading it I got the distinct impression that the authors did not understand a great deal of the research they cited, either when supporting or dismissing it.
is remarkable, given that one of the authors of Accelerated Expertise is Paul J Feltovich, one of the founders of the field of expertise research, and a contemporary of Ericsson’s.
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