Research results about experience

[nancylebov]

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1717927,00.html

Experience only helps if you're paying attention, and it helps most with routine events.

The article talks about the virtues of directed practice-- working on improving the hardest parts of what you do, but Effortless Master by Kenny Werner also gets into the importance of focusing on improving one's skill at the undramatic parts of one's craft.

http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Effortless_Mastery has a decent summary of the book.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Mmm, very interesting stuff which I have to deal with on a daily basis... In my field we talk about "Recognition-primed decision-making", which is a (somewhat old, but useful) model that says that experts glance at a problem, make a snap decision which fits the facts, and then ignore data to the contrary unless something breaks them out of the original hypothesis. A lot of work in the Decision Support field is about getting people out of this mindset in the minority of cases where the experts are *wrong*, and/or training them to take actions to get the right information to distinguish between similar-looking cases. Most doctors are good at this, asking you a tree of differentiating questions, but they're still prone to "diagnosis lock". As are soldiers. Same problem, really.

(Novices don't understand what is going on as often, and tend not to trust their gut as much. Ironically.)