Now there's been a lot of airtime, I suppose, around the idea of the 10,000 hours of expertise.
Is there anything to that figure, the 10,000?
I have no idea, really, about the 10,000 hours—that is, I'm a customer of this. I mean, Ericsson,
who has promoted this figure, is a highly reputable researcher, but it's a crude approximation,
I'm sure. I mean, there's nothing magical about 10,000, and I'm sure that it doesn't
take the same amount of time to different people, and expertise is not wholly defined
and so on, but it gives you an idea that this is a lot of hours, that to become an expert
where you see that qualitative change in the way things are done, where basically performance
switches from what I call system two to system one, that takes a long time. How many hours,
I'm not committing myself, and I don't know.
Yes. One of the goals of the course is to cue people to the difference between people
who are actual experts and people who simply just claim to be experts. Is there anything
that people should watch out for, any red flags to tell the difference between people
who actually know or can actually do what they claim for themselves?
Yes, I mean, I think—Gary Klein and I wrote a paper in which we actually suggested and
then said— it's embarrassingly simple—but when somebody acts like a self-confident expert
on a range of problems, then there's one question to be asked: did that person have a decent
opportunity to learn how to perform the task? That requires getting feedback on the quality
of performance and getting rapid and unequivocal feedback. In the absence of rapid and unequivocal
feedback, expertise is just the self-confidence that comes with a lot of experience, and that
is uncorrelated with accuracy. This is something we've known for 50 years or more.
So if somebody wanted to become an expert at a new task, what's the fastest and most
efficient way to turn, as you said, that system two, that effortful sort of processing, into system one?
Well, there are really two ways of doing this, and you have to use both. You have to use
system two. For somebody to become an expert driver, you have to tell them how to drive.
I would say for somebody to become an expert diagnostician on the basis of X-rays, you
have to teach them what the things look like so that they'll be able to recognize them.
But then you'll need also a lot of practice with high-quality feedback. Merely telling
people how to do something is not going to turn them into experts, and repeatedly telling
them the same thing is not going to help. It's a lot of practice with feedback that
creates real expertise, but you can abbreviate the time that it takes to reach expertise
by having high-quality instruction about what cues you should be paying attention to.
Yes, so actually knowing what it is that discriminates the two categories, if it's an abnormal scan
versus a normal scan and so on?
Gary Klein has a beautiful example. He talks of a nurse in the cardiac ward who comes home
and talks to her father-in-law, as I recall, and says, "We have to go to the hospital,"
because he doesn't look good to her. It turns out that, yes, he had to go to the hospital.
He's in deep trouble. He needs—twelve hours later or something, he is on the operating table.
What she had done...
Gary Klein did what he and others—but I think he is the main guru of this type of
enterprise—he found out what the cues were, although she was not aware of the cues that
she was using. He found out that when arteries are obstructed, getting obstructed, which
will lead to a heart attack, there is a pattern. The pattern of distribution of the blood in
the face changes. Now she had recognized, she had learned that pattern, but she didn't
know what it was. Now when you're training nurses, you can show them the pattern.
That's clever. The goal of the course, the title of the course is "The Science of Everyday
Thinking," and what we're trying to do is to provide people with the ability to think
more clearly, argue better, reason better, I suppose learn to use system two, to be more
analytic, to unpack, read more carefully and so on. Do you have any advice for somebody
in the course who's trying to improve their everyday thinking?
Well, you know, my advice would be quite conservative. I mean, it would be: pick a few areas and
pick a few things where you want to change what you're doing, and focus on those. I mean,
do not expect that you can generally increase the quality of your thinking because I think
you really cannot, but if there are repetitive mistakes that you are prone to make, if you
learn the cues, the situations in which you make that mistake, then maybe you can learn
to eliminate them. I'm not...
The history of success in enterprises like yours is that they're not always successful.
I mean, people feel great when they hear of all these ways of doing things and of controlling
themselves, but then when they are making a mistake they are so busy making it that
they have no time to correct it.
One of the reasons, I think, for my skepticism about this is that I don't think my thinking
is very much better than it was 40 years ago or 45 years ago when I started doing this
work. This suggests some humility. So pick your shots, pick a few areas, and then in
those situations that you recognize as situations where you're prone to make a mistake, slow yourself down.
One piece of advice, by the way, is that recognize situations where you can't do it alone, where
you need a friend, where you need advice because if you do it alone you are going to make a mistake.
My name is Danny. I think about thinking.