Ericsson and Pool—Peak

Ericsson and Pool
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
(2016)

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[12] We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level and then let it become automatic. ...

[but] once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance...you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie bak-

[13]

ing is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five...

But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of "acceptable" performance and automaticity, the additional years of "practice" don't lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate attempts to improve.

The Mind on Furlough

I am still furloughed and still on the public dole. It has been just over six months, and if it goes on for only another six that will hit the under for most people's bets. I have been tremendously productive in ways which probably don't count for much. The first thing that happened was that my apartment got very clean; now it is extremely messy, even by my standards. I stopped practicing on July 1 and have not yet resumed. Instead, I have torn through books and records, scrabble word lists and annotated games. I have given the life of the mind due regard. I would rather have my job back, but I also could never relate to those who found themselves "bored" or stir-crazy when the first lockdowns hit. Privately I already had enough on my plate for ten lifetimes, and much of it was going to require a lockdown of one sort or another anyway. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

The immediate future is very uncertain, but I have become more preoccupied with the long-term. Specifically, I cannot fully repress the thought that as I have just begun to find full self-actualization in the cultivation of the mind, the efforts and the thrust of the wider world are all directed toward rendering the human mind obsolete. I am reminded of this by things as varied as: Quackle simulations (a Scrabble computer program which plays quite well but not infallibly, and which almost every serious player now uses to self-evaluate); a podcast about the uses which VR and game engines are finding far outside of their conventional bailiwicks; the need for constant rule tweaks just to keep pro sports entertaining now that minds real and virtual have been unleashed upon them, thus exploiting the existing rules so brashly and effectively that the "product" suffers; and of course, the LAX jetpack stories, which remind us of just how far behind schedule we have gotten in fulfilling bygone pop-technological prophecies.

We may still be a long way off from the singularity, but I don't know that we are all that far off from a world where all of the mind-based abilities I have so enjoyed cultivating are either superfluous, obsolete, or politically retrograde. Life will surely go on, but I will look awfully silly. Silly, and incapable, and certainly unnecessary. Because this relates to closely-held values and to identity, I do care what people think about me in this respect. What the man-without-god question was for my god-oriented forbears, so the man-without-mind question has become for me. Of course we did get some good philosophy and cantatas out of the old paradigm; the bygone prophets of doom would probably be surprised to know just how much mileage we've gotten out of these old things even without an imaginary friend to guide us. Yet these too are mind activities, which just makes the analogy more troubling, makes it harder to imagine that life will indeed just go on, because it has to, just like it had to when god (and the author close behind him) died or were killed.

Aside from a couple of college summers, I have never had so much time to devote to my own work. I have often found myself thinking even so that lack of brain has been a far greater obstacle than lack of time. There are days where I can find 9-letter words through disconnected tiles, and there are days when I can't keep my 3s straight. There are days when I can read for 12 hours and other days when I can barely focus for more than a few pages. As for my former work life, there were days on the ol' Metrolink where I could fully absorb a difficult book chapter and other days where I had to punt and aim for a much-needed nap. I have always been this way, regardless of what else is going on in my life. Where I am almost inhumanly consistent is that I wake up every day, regardless of how much brain I have, with a burning desire to progress, develop, actualize. Like my coworker's old Powerbook G4 which I coaxed into running Lubuntu, my own power module flashes the message "No Kernel Support," which means I eventually overheat and have to rest. This can be demoralizing. The occasional triumphs are gratifying. But they seem increasingly like triumphs which technology will soon render superfluous.

Three Views on Competition

-I-
Mid-quarantine sports media has gone nostagic out of necessity, with the recent Michael Jordan documentary leading the charge, and thereby it has been pointed out that MJ's pathological competitiveness would today run afoul of numerous sensitivities. Leaving aside for now the litigation of those sensitivities and the triteness of the observation, I think it is nonetheless an observation worth dwelling upon and extending: the games are mere escapist entertainment and the Darwinistic element is, unlike the analogous Roman spectacles, more symbolic than real; yet the people are real, and if they are not usually worth truly feeling sorry for, that is not to say that their outrageous salaries somehow void their basic human entitlement to dignity and health. MJ in his more infamous moments undoubtedly created a Hostile Work Environment. Since his playing career ended, American pro sports have seen a handful of high-profile breakdowns, AWOLs, and early retirements which are either partly or wholly attributable to similar behavior by less-revered teammates. The social ground has indeed shifted beneath the feet of bigtime sports, making this human toll seem less collateral and more integral. It is doubly inconvenient, then, to be told that MJ's now-questionable motivational tactics were integral rather than peripheral to his success. I love sports and I also think it is okay to be uneasy with this, i.e. to impose today's standards on yesterday's events. Nothing would ever get better if that type of hindsight was not allowed. The anti-civs can howl all they want about PCness and Revisionist History, but even they know that there is a right and a wrong way to treat people. Some of them may even have had an experience that (gasp!) changed their mind! I certainly have...and somehow I still love watching sports. Love of sports is, paraphrasing a girlfriend-of-a-friend, my only "normal" trait. I take no offense to the comment; rather, taking it at face value, I choose to strategically deploy this aspect of my public-facing self in those tough social situations where it is crucial to seem normal. But of course in my remaining abnormal moments, it has only gotten more difficult with time to ignore everything about sports that is unseemly.

For the most part, even pro sports lockerrooms have at least met the new sensitivities halfway. The greatest countervailing force to this belated enlightenment is not the odd Old School jock, but rather the amount of money at stake. Rule-bending/breaking is itself something of an art form, and exceedingly thin competitive margins in high-stakes endeavors tend to encourage its consolidation and refinement. MJ of course authored the definitive work of contextual rule-bending when he...created separation from Utah's Bryon Russell in the closing seconds of the 1998 NBA Finals (his only signature moment that I vividly remember watching on live TV). It is a "work" without parallel even in MJ's oeuvre, by, of and for that moment and that moment only. Among the commentators I listen to, the ones who not only were there but also have dug deepest into all of this after the fact tend to emphasize a similarly contextual, circumstantial, incentive-driven understanding of MJ's most infamous interpersonal conflicts. Context and circumstance are crucial to the sensitivity question, no matter where you fall on it. It is of course possible for high-stakes athletic competition to unfold with minimal "personal" friction, but it is not possible 100 percent of the time. Similarly, high-level competition might emerge without correspondingly high stakes, but it probably won't. A long-winded way of saying: sports cannot be sanitized much further than they already have without harming their intrinsic appeal to "normal" people (or, as the case may be, to the little tiny "normal" person that lives inside even of weirdos like me).

For now, a basketball game still has a winner and a loser, and the team sports franchise remains nothing less than the contemporary archetype of patriarchal, non-particularistic organization. The Chicago Bulls can turnover personnel a dozen times and still be the Chicago Bulls. If the rarefied air of hyper-thin competitive margins is then thought to be first and foremost hazardous to one's health, and thus unseemly on specifically that basis, this represents a particularistic turn which is anathema to what bigtime sports are. If the human toll is no longer acceptable then I will fall in line with that new reality, but I don't have to enjoy the new sports-like product. I'm not very normal, but I am too normal to enjoy games where no one wins or loses. If we now "root for players, not for teams," as even some of the above-mentioned sports commentators claim to, then it does seem that winning and losing no longer matters. I can't relate to this, but I think I at least understand it. Why we would continue to channel competition-averse desires through sport is, conversely, something I can't even understand.


-II-
The current slogan of the North American Scrabble Players Association is, "Making Words, Building Friendships." What exactly does this imply? (Or not?) Perhaps most basically, a matter-of-fact concurrence with reality: even I have made at least two unusually good/close friends on the Scrabble scene, and the proportion of people I find tolerable is non-negligibly greater than the baseline expectation. This being as it may, if an equivalence is what is implied in the slogan, I think this is wholly illogical and dishonest. Certainly it is not in concurrence with the reality I've observed. There is at least as much animosity as friendship in Scrabble; this much was palpable in the room from my very first expedition to a NASPA-sanctioned club. What has only become clear with experience is that this animosity exceeds the mere social background radiation one expects to find everywhere; it is, rather, intrinsic to the game itself. The disproportionately extreme consequences of seemingly marginal strategic decisions make Scrabble as much about mastering one's own emotions as about cognitive ability or competitive spirit, and no one in this pressure-cooker is a perfect master of their emotions, no matter how friendly they are the rest of the time. If you want to engender friendship, you definitely do not place people into this sort of dynamic interaction with chance; and if you have a friend-target in mind, it's best that this friend-target not embody the opposition in a zero-sum test of the two acquaintances' comparative abilities to manage said dynamic interaction with chance. Given some of the dust-ups I've witnessed, I give myself relatively high marks for civility; but mere civility is not friendship. I confess that I find friendship (d)elusive here, not only in the heat of competition, where it is colored by visceral emotion, but also upon distanced reflection, where it is colored by a wider interest in sport as expounded upon above. I grant that the drawing of any analogies between the NBA and the NASPA strains credulity. Nonetheless, both a game of basketball and a game of Scrabble have a winner and a loser; if the analogy can be extended only that far, this is nonetheless quite a significant fact with many significant implications. As such we might add that both are ritualized, sanitized reenactments of base instincts, or some flavor of that old trope. What does this phylogenetically distant basis in primal violence mean? Is it the distance or the violence which is more meaningful? Sensitivity is the obsession of the moment for hard-liners on both sides that question, but I think the answer really depends more on our intelligence than on our sensitivities. (I also believe the covariability of intelligence and sensitivity to be generally overstated¹, though I do need to learn more about this and could be swayed.) For the most part, sentient adults are capable of compartmentalizing ritualized reenactments from so-called real life. As a species we are, I think, quite capable of civility per se in this scenario, if not always of friendship; and as the eminently social species, there is much to be gained if we can achieve this, and certainly also lost if we cannot: the ventilating function of such ritualized, non-destructive competitive outlets, the lexico-cognitive dimension of Scrabble as healthy mental exercise, the greater acuity of such exercise-benefits when they are channeled by competition rather than pursued casually, and so on. Call these the Extrinsic Benefits if you insist, though really they are intrinsic to this uniquely human institution. Of course the institution of friendship matters too. But if friendship is your end, tournament Scrabble is a strange choice of means. If friendship were the ultimate aim, what wouldn't we change about Scrabble? And if winning and losing isn't what really matters, what are we doing playing a game that has a winner and a loser?


-III-
My 2002 summer expedition to the Aebersold workshop in Louisville was rather fruitless from a playing perspective, but the lengthy evening concerts were, as many others have remarked, themselves worth the trip. By now most of the finer details have blurred, but I specifically recall a Don Braden-Eric Alexander tenor battle not for the music (which I'm sure was fine nonetheless) but for Braden's mid-set remark to the assembled newbs. Paraphrasing: it can't help but be a competition when the two of us are up here together, and this is fine as long as it serves the music. I can't help but agree, which leads us seamlessly back into navel-gazing: is competition thought able to serve a constructive purpose here because there is, metaphors and figures of speech aside, no winner or loser in music? Certainly there is an aesthetic dimension to sport: John Stockton is said to have described the Dream Team scrimmages as "poetry;" and Scrabble played at the highest level certainly has struck many an informed observer as "beautiful." But only in the case of exhibition games can I imagine a convincing argument that aesthetics are essential to sport, even as they are quite essential to my own interest in it. Conversely, as Debussy would have it, "Pleasure is the law" in music. That assertion can be problematized from any number of abstract ethical perspectives, same as can ritualized competition; but the overwhelming thrust of real social practice, rational or not, is on the side of pleasure here. Hence I think the burden is on the ethicizer/moralizer to demonstrate that pleasure and competition alike are entirely about wants and not at all about needs. I do not believe this to be true in either case.


1. Anecdotally, the phenomenon of the pathologically cutthroat pickup basketball player always seemed to me a product of vulnerable class position, not of individual psychology, and certainly not of intelligence. Where individual psychology comes in, I suppose, is in the case of players whose competitive drive stems from perceived vulnerability that is not necessarily real. MJ and Tom Brady are often mentioned in this connection, as is the significance of what I am calling "perceived vulnerability" (as opposed to the real kind) in the realm of politics and demagoguery.

Scrabble Shop (possibly the first or last in a series)

Just like music, what started as an activity became an obsession.

When I first started playing Scrabble online, I set the racks to display vowels first, consonants second. As a newb this seemed more logical and easier to process than the "alphagram" (alphabetical) order that is more common among tournament players and study materials. Pretty soon I found that a vowel-centered approach also helped me organize and remember words more effectively, so nowadays the vowels are my "stems" and I make comprehensive lists based on them. Above is the second of three cards containing A+I+I and five consonants. Below in rack order:

I found full rote memorization just took too long considering the number of words, so now I make a pass at decoding the rack orders once a day for two or three days in a row. This has greatly accelerated the pace with only a small sacrifice in long-term retention.

Studying this way means setting one's sights high, indeed quite a bit higher than anything I've been able to accomplish in a rated tournament. In this system, MINYANIM takes equal priority to INCASING, which is rather illogical considering one is far less likely than the other to present itself in an actual game. Even some top players don't bother with the very most unlikely words for this reason and are no worse for wear. I have allowed my word knowledge to outpace my strategy rather absurdly at this point, a bit like a soulless technician with no musicality. As Mumford would have it, perhaps owing to the sea of subjectivity that artists are set adrift in, I find it therapeutic to play the technical busy-beaver in my "spare" time, even if the circuitous path I'm taking toward lexical completism has not necessarily bore fruit in tournament play just yet.

Millennial Ambivalence: The Road

If you're from the future and you're reading this blog from start to finish, it probably comes as a surprise that this weekend brings another junket and another Scrabble indulgence. The ascetic image I like to cultivate here is more cultivated than real. I have always worked on projects in bursts and then floundered for days, weeks or even months. I take lots of breaks which can last for lots of different durations. I seem to have a fixed quantity of creative energy which, like semen, is best spent in large bursts rather than constant emissions. My old roommate in The Valley claims that Asians can work more steadily and that this is why they excel. (He voted for Trump.) Blog Month itself was partially conceived as an experiment in working against what seems to be my ineluctable nature. It is informative that I have several times failed to adhere to its strictures.

Poring over lists of arbitrary words in solitude and then venturing out to mediocre hotels and senior centers to sit across the table from other socially stunted word grinders is not everyone's idea of a vacation. It's not really my idea of a vacation either, because I'm allergic to the word "vacation," and to the middle-class obsession with leisure travel generally, and to all of the specious rationalizations for leisure travel as a means of personal growth. It's the intellectual and creative challenges, and the competition, which draw me to Scrabble; the temptation to bankrupt myself traveling to more and more tournaments is a serious drawback.

I have been a core member of two bands which have toured on a scale of weeks rather than days. I learned that when a musician claims to "love touring," either they are lying or they are really saying that they love the things that touring gets you, like money (maybe), looking busy (always), an intensification of focus/interplay in an ensemble which can only come from performing a lot on a compressed schedule (probably), being received by new people/communities (depends on where you are), and group bonding in transit (temporarily). I am not ignorant of the benefits other people see in these things, but four of the five of them hold no interest for me and have no relevance to my work. And because touring is even less conducive to keeping up with other projects in "spare" time, I dislike it even more than the idea of travel for its own sake. I must confess, though, that the ensemble sharpening aspect is real: a short tour is ideal for getting a band in peak form, especially on difficult music, and as long as you are not already a mere short tour away from strangling each other. Touring is the new rehearsal, because actual rehearsal sounds like a lot less fun than traveling.

Scrabble, Ethics, and The Meritocracy

Another confession: over the last several years I have allowed myself to get sucked into the strange and beautiful world of more-than-casual Scrabble playing, and I like it a little more than is probably good for me. Yes, I have become "that guy" who thinks nothing of playing words like UVEA, COOEE, and AENEOUS whether he's at a Scrabble club (yes, it has gone that far) or with a bunch of drunk friends, and who, when inevitably accused by said drunk friends of "cheating" in the moral sense (if hardly in the legal sense), thinks nothing of pointing out that (1) these words in fact appear on a widely available list of "vowel dumps" that anyone with an internet connection can easily seek out and learn if they care enough to do so, and (2) though these words seem pretty random, Scrabble vocabulary is hardly an anything-goes proposition, specifically because there is an international organization of people who really care about this stuff and whose administration of the rules and their application reflects said high degree of caringness. In contemporary terms now: don't hate the player, hate the game.

Having thus passed from being someone who only thought he was good at Scrabble to being someone who knows he's nowhere near an "expert" (and there is, as with the words themselves, a finite definition of experthood), I have also made the concurrent transition from being someone who viewed studying such lists of meaningless words as "cheating" to being someone who understands that access to such lists or the willingness to make them oneself represents so much less than half the battle. To compete on the highest levels of this game, you still need a steel trap mind, a killer instinct, and an iron poker face; if you lack any of these, experienced players will summarily devour you. You do, admittedly, also need to know a lot of words that you're highly unlikely to encounter anywhere else. Even so, "knowing" them is one thing, "finding" them in crucial moments of a game is another; and that throws the whole proposition back on to familiar territory: practice.

As professor Jerry Luckhardt at the U of MN would always say, "Practice is not a sign of weakness or insecurity." It certainly is not cheating either. Get a bunch of drunk music majors together some weekend and they will unite behind this battlecry concerning their own metier, then decry it in the next breath once someone grabs the Scrabble board off of a nearby bookshelf and deals them a death by a thousand cuts using some of the over 1,000 permissible 2- and 3-letter words. The truth is that the two pursuits are overwhelmingly similar in their Gladwellian dimensions: the intuitive genius and the hapless grinder are, while not unheard of, exceedingly rare birds both in Scrabble and in music. There is also this: given a modicum of discipline and motivation (the afterburn of having one of those vowel dumps played on you for the first time and then losing your challenge seems to provide an adequate, if temporary, dose of both for most drunk music majors), there's no reason virtually any fully developed adult couldn't grasp the most basic elements of high-level Scrabble in one sitting, thereby becoming nearly unbeatable in occasional drunk living room games against less enterprising friends while expending a disproportionately paltry amount of effort. Similarly, I have often found it both maddening and heartbreaking when my adult students seem unable or unwilling to solidify foundational skills and knowledge that would open up the world for them. Too many hobbyists look at professionals with the same mixture of awe and contempt that my music major friends point in my direction when I take the rack AICNNRT and drop down TYRANNIC through a Y for 80-some points. The truth of the matter, though, is that while I've put in only a fraction of the time the experts have, I have made an investment, I have put some thought into prioritizing certain tasks over others in the limited time I am willing to devote specifically to Scrabble, and it has been sufficient to deliver a much more enjoyable and satisfying Scrabble experience. Some find it off-putting simply that you can be capable of plays like the one described above and not yet be near the experts. They should not feel this way: you get out of it what you put into it, and there is plenty of fulfilling, even exhilarating grey area to be inhabited without jeopardizing prior commitments to other life-dominating pursuits.

If you have an iOS device and a Facebook account, let's play Scrabble over the interwebs sometime. I promise I won't go easy on you.