Mastodawn

This perspective on human performance is super interesting!

Many of our stories about "genius," "superstars," and high performers are grounded in assuming that the patterns of early learning will extrapolate to the rest of life - e.g., child prodigies, gifted students, and those with early steep curves on the achievement trajectory. But what happens when you expand the window of observation?

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Cat Hicks Dec 20

This review challenges some of our long-standing myths about high performance. They suggest:

"The pattern of predictors that distinguishes among the highest levels of adult performance is different from the pattern of predictors of early performance. Higher early performance in a domain is associated with larger amounts of discipline-specific practice, smaller amounts of multidisciplinary practice, and faster early discipline-specific performance progress."

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt7790

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Cat Hicks Dec 20

I suspect there are downsides to early hyper-specialization that may not show up in human problem-solving until later; and this is the kind of pattern that really rocks the boat on many of our assumptions about what the best predictors for sustainable high performance really are.

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M. J. Fromberger

@grimalkina this seems right. Specialization has sharply diminishing returns, and only a tiny tail of problems benefit from it. The amount of specialization a person with a strong generalist background can acquire on-demand on short notice is overwhelmingly likely to be sufficient almost all the time. Hyperspecialization is hard, and also a massive investment in a single trick, so when that trick doesn't work it can distort outcomes as we try to make the expensive tool solve the cheap problem.

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M. J. Fromberger Dec 20

@grimalkina That's not to say nobody should do it. There are real advantages to having a system that can support hyper specialists among the rest. But it's not, I think, what we ought to optimize for.