The only thing worse than hardly knowing anything was knowing a little bit more

Sunday, January 31st, 2021

Tom Vanderbilt decided to learn to play chess as an adult, when his daughter started learning:

Even as your skills and knowledge progress, there is a potential value to holding on to that beginner’s mind. In what’s come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger showed that on various cognitive tests the people who did the worst were also the ones who most “grossly overestimated” their actual performance. They were “unskilled and unaware of it”.

This can certainly be a stumbling block for beginners. But additional research later showed that the only thing worse than hardly knowing anything was knowing a little bit more. This pattern appears in the real world: doctors learning a spinal surgery technique committed the most errors not on the first or second try, but on the 15th; pilot errors, meanwhile, seem to peak not in the earliest stages but after about 800 hours of flight time.

[...]

In the face of my agonised dithering, they would launch fast, brute-force attacks — sometimes effective, sometimes foolhardy. “Children just kind of go for it,” Daniel King, the English grandmaster and chess commentator, told me. “That kind of confidence can be very disconcerting for the opponent.”

Young children, for example, have been shown to be faster and more accurate at tests involving “probabilistic sequence learning” — the sort in which people must guess which triggers will lead to what events (for example, if you press button A, event X will happen).

After the age of 12, this ability begins to decline. As researchers suggest, people start relying more on “internal models” of cognition and reasoning, instead of what they see right in front of them. In other words, they overthink things. In chess games, where my adult opponents often seemed to battle unseen internal demons, the kids just seemed to twitch out a series of moves.

[...]

When I asked our chess coach about what it was like to teach adult chess beginners as opposed to child chess beginners, he thought for a moment and said: “Adults need to explain to themselves why they play what they play.” Kids, he said, “don’t do that”. He compared it to languages: “Beginner adults learn the rules of grammar and pronunciation and use those to put sentences together. Little kids learn languages by talking.”

[...]

A study that had adults aged 58 to 86 simultaneously take multiple classes — ranging from Spanish to music composition to painting — found that after just a few months, the learners had improved not only at Spanish or painting, but on a battery of cognitive tests. They’d rolled back the odometers in their brains by some 30 years, doing better on the tests than a control group who took no classes.

Comments

  1. Harry Jones says:

    “Beginner adults learn the rules of grammar and pronunciation and use those to put sentences together. Little kids learn languages by talking.”

    It’s not really an age thing. Before the disasters of 2020 I was very interested in travel and therefore in learning languages. I hated most of the learning material because of this. Something closer to a combination approach always worked better for me.

  2. Isegoria says:

    I feel like I know more than average about the Dunning-Kruger effect, and I say…

  3. Lucklucky says:

    “After the age of 12, this ability begins to decline. As researchers suggest, people start relying more on ‘internal models’ of cognition and reasoning, instead of what they see right in front of them. In other words, they overthink things. In chess games, where my adult opponents often seemed to battle unseen internal demons, the kids just seemed to twitch out a series of moves.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes

  4. Kirk says:

    Here would be the thing about learning: Most people, including most “educators”, have no idea how to go about doing it.

    It is one of those things that is, surprisingly, not that well studied or documented. You’d think it was, but when you go digging into the whole issue, what you find is mostly poorly conceived and specious reasoning by “experts” that really don’t know squat.

    Ever wonder why computer software manuals are so maliciously useless? It stems from just this problem–Nobody who writes the damn things really understands how the end user is going to go about using the damn things to learn the program. And, since the people writing them already understand the program, having written it and conducted the testing, they have no idea how to go about explaining the damn thing to a tyro approaching it for the very first time.

    Where they most often break down is in failing to lay out the entire paradigm of how the program has been conceived of by the programmers to work.

    Consider the byzantine way that Word approaches formatting of text. I defy you to figure out a logical path into understanding all that crap, wherein a single change of location for a single illustration can completely and comprehensively destroy an entire document’s formatting. There isn’t one, and the fact that Word is absolutely not meant for that kind of work is not ever laid out for someone trying to use the program. Word is a program meant strictly for handling business correspondence, not lengthy documents containing complex and varied formatting like you’d find in trying to write an operations manual for some organization. But, does that ever get laid out for the user in the documentation…? Nope.

    “Learning”, in general, is very much the same. No manual has been written for it, no process is taught or laid out for the average student, when in fact, it really ought to be the first thing a child is taught after achieving baseline literacy.

    It’s a surprising thing to realize, but there it is. Consider the process by which you go about entry into a new hobby or avocation. Is this process ever formalized or taught to anyone? Nope. Never mentioned, by anyone in any educational facility or process that I’ve gone through. And, you’d think it would be, particularly in the military.

    From time to time, while on active duty, I’d encounter a situation or piece of equipment that was entirely new to me, and for which there were no available “subject matter experts” from which to seek guidance. There were rather more of these than you’d think I should have run into, but… Yeah. That’s the Army I knew and experienced–One with a decided lack of essential SME guidance on a lot of things that should have had them.

    What I found was that there was a “best practices” path forward with it all, which started with a survey of available literature. Read up on it, in other words. Then, the next step was “get hands on with said new equipment or process”, in order to familiarize oneself with everything. Third step was something that went on simultaneously with the others, if possible, which was to observe others with the equipment or process, taking in what went wrong and what did and did not work. Final step was to put it into operation for yourself, in regular use, and then evaluate how it was all going. Only after that last one, and a few duty cycles of using it, could you really say that you knew what the hell you were doing with said piece of equipment.

    The guys doing what the Army laughingly termed “NET” or “New Equipment Training” often left out an awful lot of essential “stuff”. Case in point would have been the recommended curriculum for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon or Light Machine Gun, which was the same weapon in two different roles. Most of the background information about the weapon was left out of the NET curriculum, which meant that while the new gunners might know how to make the gun work mechanically, the small problem of “How am I supposed to use this thing under fire…?” was left off, with no explanation offered.

    Part of that, truthfully, stemmed from the fact that the Army itself was rather “unclear on the concept” to begin with. The supposition was that, since we’d been using the M16 as an AR in the role of squad support weapon (actually, fire team support…), the M249 would just plug in seamlessly and serve the same role with the same effect.

    The problem was that the guns were far heavier and a lot less “wieldy” than the M16 was. You had to modify how you used them tactically, and how you maneuvered your fire teams and squads to get the most out of them. The Marines never really adapted to this, and eventually went over to what amounted to a “super M16″ in the M27, in order to fill the same role.

    All of this stems from the issue of “learning”, which is never really taught. It’s a lot like “scientific method”, which is another thing they don’t teach at all well–It’s a process, one that goes on continuously and which requires full honesty and self-awareness. Is what you’re doing working? Do you get the results you want? Is it efficient, and are you really doing the least amount of work possible?

    People don’t get formally taught this at any stage of life, and it is truly unfortunate. Everything you do should be subject to self-examination and criticism, from how you go about running a job to how you load your dishwasher. And, you should be consistent about it all, to the point where you aren’t having to reinvent the wheel every time you do it.

    I’ve lived with some people that are utterly chaotic and completely insane to my point of view–Even the little things, like loading that dishwasher. If you do it systematically, then you can fill and empty it rapidly without having to expend much thought on it–Sort the silverware as you put it in, and then you can take it out with minimal handling and contact, quickly emptying the baskets. Do it chaotically? LOL… Yeah, good luck on the emptying–Odds are really, really good you’re going to stab yourself on a steak knife or something along the way.

    I think there are some serious holes in how we go about educating people, and this is really one of the bigger ones–The utter failure to teach people how to learn for themselves, and any sort of process for doing so. It’s all informal, and randomly self-taught. Which really does not work out all that well, for society or individuals.

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