Kind: captions
Language: en
do you bring this trick out at parties
oh no it's a terrible party trick here
we go
3.141592653589793 this is Grant Gusman
he watched an old video of mine about
how we think that there are two systems
of thought system two is the conscious
slow effortful system and system one is
subconscious fast and automatic to
explore how these systems work in his
own head Grant decided to memorize 100
digits of pi
then he just kept going he has now
memorized 23,000 digits of pi in
preparation to challenge the North
American record 45493 03 8196 that's
[Laughter]
200 that's
amazing I have wanted to make a video
about experts for a long
time this is Magnus Carlson the
five-time world chess champion
he's being shown chess boards and asked
to identify the game in which they
occurred uh this looks an awful lot like
T
Bic
whoops okay this is the 24th game from
sevil obviously now I'm going to play
through an opening and stop me when you
recognize the game and if you can tell
me who was playing Black in this one
okay okay
I'm sure you've seen this opening before
okay it's going to be
on against
sabata how can he do this it seems like
superhuman ability well decades ago
scientist wanted to know what makes
experts like Chess Masters special do
they have incredibly High IQs much
better spatial reasoning than average
bigger short-term memory spans well it
turns out that as a group Chess Masters
are not exceptional on any of these
measures but one experiment showed how
their performance was vastly Superior to
amateurs in 1973 William Chase and
Herbert Simon recruited three chess
players a master an a player who's an
advanced amateur and a beginner a chess
board was set up with around 25 pieces
positioned as they might be during a
game and each player was allowed to look
at the board for 5 seconds then they
were asked to replicate the setup from
memory on a second board in front of
them the players could take as many
5-second Peaks as they needed to get
their board to match from just the first
look the master could recall the
positions of 16 pieces the a player
could recall eight and the beginner only
four the master only needed half the
number of Peaks as the a player to get
their board perfect but then the
researchers arranged the board with
pieces in random positions that would
never arise in a real game and now the
Chess Master performed no better than
the beginner after the first look all
players regardless of rank could
remember the location of only three
pieces the data are clear chess experts
don't have better memory in general but
they have better memory specifically for
chess positions that could occur in a
real game the implication is what makes
Chess Masters special is that they have
seen lots and lots of chess games and
over that time their brains have learned
patterns so rather than seeing
individual pieces at individual
positions they see a smaller number of
recognizable
configurations this is called chunking
what we have stored in long-term memory
allows us to recognize complex stimuli
is just one thing for example you
recognize this as Pi rather than a
string of six unrelated numbers or
meaningless squiggles for that matter
there's a wonderful sequence I like a
lot which is uh
30173 which to me means Stephen Curry
number 30 173 games which is the record
back in 2016 so
30173 at its core expertise is about
recognition Magnus Carlson recognizes
chest positions the same way we
recognize faces and recognition leads
directly to intuition if you see an
angry face you have a pretty good idea
of what's going to come next Chess
Masters recognize board positions and
instinctively know the best move most of
the time I know what to do I don't have
to
I figure it out to develop the long-term
memory of an expert takes a long time
10,000 hours is the rule of thumb
popularized by Malcolm Gladwell but
10,000 hours of practice by itself is
not sufficient there are four additional
criteria that must be met and in areas
where these criteria aren't met it's
impossible to become an expert so the
first one is many repeated attempts with
feedback tennis players hit hundreds of
for hands in practice chess players play
thousands of games before their grand
Masters and physicists solve thousands
of physics problems each one gets
feedback the tennis player sees whether
each shot clears the net and is in or
out the chess player either wins or
loses the game and the physicist gets
the problem right or wrong but some
professionals don't get repeated
experience with the same sorts of
problems political scientist Philip
tetlock picked 284 people who make their
living commenting or offering advice on
political and economic Trends this
included journalists foreign policy
Specialists economists and intelligence
analysts over two decades he peppered
them with questions like would George
Bush be reelected would a partide in
South Africa end peacefully would Quebec
secede from Canada and would the dot
bubble burst in each case the pundits
rated the probability of several
possible outcomes and by the end of the
study tetlock had Quantified
82361 predictions so how did they do
pretty terribly these experts most of
whom had post-graduate degrees performed
worse than if they had just assigned
equal probabilities to all the outcomes
in other words people who spend their
time and earn their living studying a
particular topic produced poorer
predictions than random chance even in
the areas they knew best experts were
not significantly better than non-sp
Specialists the problem is most of the
events they have to predict are one-offs
they haven't had the experience of going
through these events or very similar
ones many times before even presidential
elections only happen infrequently and
each one in a slightly different
environment so we should be wary of
experts who don't have repeated
experience with
feedback the next requirement is a valid
environment one that contains
regularities that make it at least
somewhat predictable a gambler betting
at the roulette wheel for example may
have thousands of repeated experiences
with the same event and for each one
they get clear feedback in the form of
whether they win or lose but you would
rightfully not consider them an expert
because the environment is low validity
a roulette wheel is essentially random
so there are no regularities to be
learned in 2006 legendary investor
Warren Buffett offered to bet a million
dollars that he could pick an investment
that would outperform wall Street's best
hedge funds over a 10-year period hedge
funds are pools of money that are
actively managed by some of the
brightest and most experienced Traders
on Wall Street they use Advanced
Techniques like short selling leverage
and derivatives in an attempt to provide
outsized returns and consequently they
charge significant fees one person took
Buffet up on the BET Ted Sidis of
Protegé partners for his investment he
selected five hedge funds well actually
five funds of hedge funds so in total a
collection of over 200 individual funds
Warren Buffett took a very different
approach he picked the most basic boring
investment imaginable a passive index
fund that just tracks the weighted value
of the 500 biggest public companies in
America the S&P 500 they started the bet
on January 1st 2008 and immediately
things did not look good for Buffett it
was the start of the global financial
crisis and the market tanked but the
hedge funds could change their Holdings
and even profit from Market Falls so
they lost some value but not as much as
the market average the hedge funds
stayed ahead for the next 3 years but by
2011 the S&P 500 had pulled even and
from then on it wasn't even close the
market average surged leaving the hedge
funds in the dust after 10 years
Buffett's Index Fund gained 125.81614610
perform fail to beat the market well
because stocks are a low validity
environment over the short term stock
price movements are almost entirely
random so the feedback although clear
and immediate doesn't actually reflect
anything about the quality of the
decision-making it's closer to a
roulette wheel than to chess over a
10-year period around 80% of all
actively managed investment funds fail
to beat the market average and if you
look at longer time periods
underperformance Rises to 90% And before
you say well that means 10% of managers
have actual skill consider that just
through random Chance some people would
beat the market anyway portfolios picked
by cats or throwing darts have been
shown to do just that and in addition to
luck there are nefarious practices from
insider trading to pump and dump schemes
now I don't mean to say there are no
expert investors I mean Warren Buffett
himself is a clear example but the vast
majority of stock Pickers and active
investment managers do not demonstrate
expert performance because of the low
validity of their environment brief side
note if we know that stock picking will
usually yield worse results over the
long term and that what active managers
charge and fees is rarely compensated
for in improved performance then why is
so much money invested in individual
stocks mutual funds and hedge funds well
let me answer that with a story there
was an experiment carried out with rats
and humans where there's a red button
and a green button that can each light
up 8 80% of the time the green button
lights up and 20% of the time the red
button lights up but randomly so you can
never be sure which button will light
and the task for the subject either rat
or human is to guess beforehand which
button will light up by pressing it for
the rat if they guess right they get a
bit of food and if they guess wrong a
mild electric shock the rat quickly
learns to press only the green button
and except the 80% win percentage humans
on the other hand usually press the
green button but once in a while they
try to predict when the red light will
go on and as a result they guess right
only 68% of the time we have a hard time
accepting average results and we see
patterns everywhere including in
Randomness so we try to beat the average
by predicting the pattern but when there
is no pattern this is a terrible
strategy even when there are patterns
you need timely feedback in order to
learn them and YouTube knows this which
is why within the first hour after
posting a video they tell you how its
performance compares to your last 10
videos there's even confetti fireworks
when the video is number one I know it
seems like a silly thing but you have no
idea how powerful a reward this is and
how much YouTuber effort is spent
chasing this supercharged dopamine hit
to understand the difference between
immediate and delayed feedback
psychologist Daniel Conan contrasts the
experiences of anesthesiologists and
Radiologists anesthesiologist work
alongside the patient and get feedback
straight away is the patient unconscious
with st able vital signs with this
immediate feedback it's easier for them
to learn the regularities of their
environment Radiologists on the other
hand don't get rapid feedback on their
diagnosis if they get it at all this
makes it much harder for them to improve
Radiologists typically correctly
diagnose breast cancer from x-rays just
70% of the time delayed feedback also
seems to be a problem for college
admissions officers and recruitment
Specialists after admitting someone to
college or hiring someone at a big
company you may never or only later find
out how they did this makes it harder to
recognize the patterns in ideal
candidates in one study Richard Melton
tried to predict the grades of freshman
at the end of their first year of
college a set of 14 counselors
interviewed each student for 45 minutes
to an hour they also had access to high
school grades several aptitude tests and
a four-page personal statement for
comparison Melton created an algorithm
that used as input only a fraction of
the information just High School grades
and one aptitude test nevertheless the
formula was more accurate than 11 of the
14 counselors Melton's study was
reported alongside over a dozen similar
results across a variety of other
domains from predicting who would
violate parole to who'd succeed in Pilot
training if you've ever been denied
admission to an educational institution
or turned down for a job it feels like
an expert has considered your potential
and decided that you don't have what it
takes to succeed you know I was rejected
twice from film school and twice from a
drama program so it's comforting to know
that The Gatekeepers at these
institutions aren't great predictors of
future success so if you're in a valid
environment and you get repeated
experience with the same events with
clear timely feedback for each attempt
will you definitely become an expert in
10,000 hours or so the answer
unfortunately is no because most of us
want to be comfortable for a lot of
tasks in life we can become competent in
a fairly short period of time take
driving a car for example initially it's
pretty challenging it takes up all of
system two but after 50 hours or so it
becomes automatic system 1 takes over
and you can do it without much conscious
thought after that more time spent
driving doesn't improve performance if
you wanted to keep improving you would
have to try driving in challenging
situations like new terrain higher
speeds or in difficult weather now I
have played guitar for 25 years but I'm
not an expert because I usually play the
same songs it's easier and more fun but
in order to learn you have to be
practicing at the edge of your ability
pushing beyond your comfort Zone you
have to use a lot of concentration and
methodically repeatedly attempt things
you aren't good at you can practice
everything exactly as it is and exactly
as it's written um but at just such a
speed that you have to think about and
and know exactly where you are and what
your fingers are doing and what it feels
like this is known as deliberate
practice and in many areas professionals
don't engage in deliberate practice so
their performance doesn't improve in
fact sometimes it declines if you're
experiencing chest pain and you walk
into a hospital would you rather the
doctor is a recent graduate or someone
with 20 years experience researchers
have found that diagnostic skills of
medical students increase with their
time in medical school which makes sense
the more cases you've seen with feedback
the better you are at spotting patterns
but this only works up to a point when
it comes to rare diseases of the heart
or lungs doctors with 20 years
experience were actually worse at
diagnosing them than recent graduates
and that's because they haven't thought
about those rare diseases in a long time
so they less able to recognize the
symptoms only after a refresher course
could the doctors accurately diagnose
these diseases and you can see the same
effect in chess the best predictor of
skill level is not the number of games
or tournaments played but the number of
hours dedicated to Serious solitary
study players spend thousands of hours
alone learning chess Theory studying
their own games and those of others and
they play through compositions which are
puzzles designed to help you recognize
tactical patterns in chess as in other
areas it can be challenging to force
yourself to practice deliberately and
this is why coaches and teachers are so
valuable they can recognize your
weaknesses and assign tasks to address
them to become an expert you have to
practice for thousands of hours in the
uncomfortable Zone attempting the things
you can't do quite yet true expertise is
amazing to watch to me it looks like
magic but it isn't at its core expertise
is recognition and recognition comes
from the incredible amount of Highly
structured information stored in
long-term memory to build that memory
requires four things a valid environment
many repetitions timely feedback and
thousands of hours of deliberate
practice when those criteria are met
Human Performance is astonishing and
when it's not you get people we think of
as experts who actually
aren't if you want to become a stem
expert you have to actively interact
with problems that's what you can do
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watching