The Acceleration of Experience

Paul Graham wrote about the acceleration of addictiveness as a product of technological progress: our ability to create more concentrated versions of substances means we will create more potentially addictive substances, and this poses some risks to society unless we get better at dealing with them. I’ve been reading Peak, a book about expertise by Anders Ericsson (the scientist whose work gave rise to the 10,000 hour rule), and it struck me that addictiveness is not the only thing we’re learning how to concentrate. We’re also learning how to concentrate experience.

In the most basic sense, concentrating experience is what a good teacher is doing: they take what they know about a subject, distill it down to essential principles, prepare exercises to teach those principles, and provide feedback on a student’s progress. This way, a student can reach the edge of their teacher’s knowledge much faster than it took the teacher to reach that knowledge. And if the teacher is at the cutting edge of their field, the student can begin pushing into the unknown. 

We’ve been concentrating experience this way for hundreds of years: Ericsson uses chess as a main example. Chess has clear standards for performance, plenty of experts, immediate feedback on whether or not you were successful (based on winning or losing games), and enough rewards for being world class that practitioners have kept pushing their boundaries, building layer upon layer of expertise. 

With the last 150 years of globalization and specialization, there’s been an increasing level of support for people who want to pursue expertise in certain domains: two high profile examples were the founding of the modern Olympic Games in 1896 and the Nobel Prize in 1895. More recently, a 2013 study recognized nearly 67,000 trade and professional associations in the US – excellent places for practitioners to gather and swap expertise. 

But these developments have largely been enabling the existing process. A bigger shift is happening with the advancement of personal computing and the internet. These technologies have changed three key things about the process: it’s now significantly easier to collaborate with other practitioners in real time, track outcomes across time, and collect data from a breadth of practitioners.

Suppose you’re a doctor learning how to recognize breast cancer from a mammogram. You’d like to practice by looking at mammograms of different cases, attempting to make a diagnosis, and then check whether or not you were right. Unfortunately, breast cancer shows up only 4 to 8 times out of every 1000 mammograms (Ericsson, page 125). There’s no way you can personally practice as much as you would need to become an expert (which would require working through hundreds or thousands of cases). Not to mention the fact that even after you make a diagnosis, it might be a year or more before you get confirmation on whether you were right. Not ideal for getting feedback on your technique. 

But now, personal computers make it much easier to keep records about patients’ diagnoses and outcomes. Once collected, these examples allow us to get feedback at chess game speed instead of real life speed. And the internet solves the problem of collecting enough examples. Instead of individuals collecting examples (or looking at examples passed down over time), a community of practitioners can collect examples in parallel, reducing the work of many decades to a few years or less. The internet also enables that kind of real-time collaboration required to coordinate this kind of collection.

Learning how to diagnose breast cancer through mammograms is just one example. The same method can be applied wherever there’s a community of practitioners trying to develop a skill that has a clear input and output, but where there’s a delay between the two or where it’s hard to find enough examples in your regular experience. 

In effect, we can use the capability of modern communication technology to collapse distance in order to distill experiences across people, space, and time. By collaborating and collecting examples, we can live the important parts of hundreds of practitioners’ lives (at least in respect to whatever skill we’re developing). We can concentrate experience. 

As exciting as that is, there is a lot of work to be done: just because we can concentrate experience, doesn’t mean that anyone has. It remains a challenge to coordinate with a group of practitioners, gather data, and put together a set of high quality examples. Mostly this happens in fields where there is a lot of funding, like sports. But the potential is there. If you’re dedicated to a certain skill and want to push it to new heights, it’s easier than ever before to collaborate with other practitioners and collect experience to develop your abilities.

Thanks to Early Readers: Erin Rosenfeld