How experts are made
BoingBoing points to an interesting cover story from Scientific American on how experts are made: "The August issue of Scientific American takes a deep look at how experts -- chess grandmasters, musicians, physicians -- develop their ability to make the right decisions, so often, in an instant. A better understanding of how expertise is acquired might help educators teach more effectively. The article uses studies of chess grandmasters as a port-of-entry into this exploration of how experts are made not born."
As the article from Scientific American points out, chess is one of the few activities that can be rigorously studied and analyzed in order to come up with some definitive conclusions about experts:
"Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists--as in, say, teaching or business management--it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.
"Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking--the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called."
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[image: Scientific American]
Tags: chess grandmasters boingboing stock pickers professional stock superiority rigorous credentials novice definitive conclusions exploration physicians musicians decades