This cuts against a phenomenon where sometimes putting something down and coming back to it later (say, every week we have choir rehearsal) solidifies a thing that I was struggling with. It takes more calendar time than drilling the tricky bit till it's good by brute force, but that it works at all is interesting.
I also disagree with the post (sorry!) There are two variables: what kind of practice you do, and how long you do it. I've long felt that the most efficient kind of practice for many skills is some kind of imitation or immersion, improving you at multiple dimensions at once: for example, for music it would be jamming rather than learning pieces, and for foreign language learning it would be listening to audiobooks rather than doing duolingo. So in that respect I agree with you. But when it comes to learning schedule, I've found that doing this kind of multidimentional practice for half an hour a day can lead to very fast improvement, because the brain uses the downtime to consolidate things. It's almost magical how you come back to practice the next day and realize that you got better. There's just no need to do full time immersion; if the method of practice is chosen right, the return per hour of practice will be much higher if you allow plenty of downtime between sessions, and you'll also have time to do other things.
No worries, I appreciate the perspective. I agree that for many skills there is a consolidation and rest period that is needed. An obvious example is that you can't cram all of the effort needed to build muscle into one week and expect the same kinds of returns that you would get over many months. Though, I do expect you could master the biomechanical skills of weightlifting much faster with that attitude!
If you have examples of the multidimensional learning schedule, I'd love to hear them. I'm imagining something like {30 minutes of spanish language shows}?
I think if you have a set of books and audiobooks that are a gentle ramp from your current level, you can basically spend an hour a day reading and listening with pretty low effort, and the other skills will grow automatically: human languages are a bit magical that way. But building a set of materials with a gentle enough ramp is the hard part.
I disagree with your claim in general.
But also, more specifically,
The quintessential example of explosive skill acquisition is foreign language learning. It’s standard advice that if you really want to speak Spanish, you should do a language immersion—travel to Mexico and only speak Spanish while there—rather than practicing with apps and textbooks for an hour a week. I’d bet that the person who spent two months hanging around Tijuana - or who immersed themselves in spanish media and telenovellas for a few months, is going to be better at Spanish than the person who has a million Duolingo points.
I did move to a Spanish-speaking country a year ago. I did try to use Spanish with other people in that country wherever I went. And no, after two months my friend with a million Duolingo points but no experience in an actual Spanish-speaking country was still better than me.
1I find this terrifying, that I might be incompetent in many ways, and that if I had a little more awareness, a little more “oomph” I could be much better.
Consider whether the awareness of the terror is itself one of the key steps towards becoming more competent.
That is, much incompetence is caused by suppressed fear, which thereby becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
(Apologies for the vagueness here, though I guess my sequence on this elaborates.)
I agree with the claim that "compressing skill acquisition into extremely intense, short-duration periods ('explosive skill acquisition') can be much more effective than extending small chunks of skill acquisition over long-duration periods ('incremental skill acquisition')."
I also disagree with the claim that "explosive skill acquisition {Pareto dominates, is generally more effective than} incremental skill acquisition." I think that — if you do incremental skill acquisition right[1] — it can be pretty effective, sometimes (?often?) more effective than explosive skill acquisition.
So with that in mind, some healthy pushback to each of your points:
- Overlapping forgetting curves — the answer to "shoot I might forget stuff" isn't "bunch reminders as close as possible together." This is super inefficient, so will requires significantly more total time than optimally spacing your reminders.
- Richness of context — memory systems let you 'remember your rabbit holes'. If I spend a couple hours improving on some skill while encoding it in a web of flashcards, I can pick it up a few months later just where I left off.
- Discontinuous practice opportunities — yeah, I think generally explosive skill acquisition is better here.
- Self-signaling/top idea — I do think that being the top idea in your mind is a real thing and can be shockingly powerful; same re: self-signalling. However, incremental skill acquisition can have sort-of analogue for each:
- Re: top idea, spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention. When you review units of a memory system (be they flashcards, extracts, blips, etc), you bring them back into salience, where they collide with whatever else is on your mind.
- Re: self-signalling, spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice. Too often, people treat their memory systems like an inbox and subscribe to any email list they think they ought to like — then get overwhelmed with bullshit in the ensuing weeks. If it is instead treated like a mental home, then one feels more inclined to decorate it with only the most sacred, beautiful, valuable pieces. After all, the wall-space is limited.
- Quantity — IDK man, ceteris paribus (including holding skill-level constant), I'd really rather do fewer reps. For some skills (e.g. writing) ceteris doesn't end up being paribus, but for others (e.g. remembering a vocab word in another language) it totally is.
Some more reasons against explosive skill acquisition:
- It's costly. In high school, I had my summer breaks cut in ~half so that I could spend eight-twelve hours a day bouncing between lectures and drills and practice debates and research on policy and philosophy and critical theory. I became a vastly
more competentless incompetent debater; I missed out on a few family vacations. Totally worth it, but still quite costly.- It's both costly in terms of opportunity cost (I missed out on family vacations), but also in terms of direct costs (those were in ~5th percentile most stressful weeks of my life).
- It's (often) not durable. I think this is more the case for some skills and less for others, but my impression is that people underestimate how quickly the skill they just learned will be forgotten. I think that incremental skill acquisition (done well[1]) solves this.
- You don't get enough contact with reality to know what parts are important. When you spread skill acquisition over time, it's easier to notice "hey wait I'm learning this sub-skill, which seemed important at first, but it sure looks like nobody in practice ever actually needs it? maybe I can just skip it?" or "hmm interesting this other sub-skill which wasn't in the textbook seems pretty clearly foundational to all of the actual stuff, maybe I should focus a bit more on that."
But I think most of the above is basically moot relative to the fact that most people do skill acquisition way way way way way less effectively than they could (cf "The MathAcademy Way" & more of Justin Skycak's stuff; "How Learning Happens").
Thanks for writing this, Ben!
- ^
Which itself can require quite a bit of skill/effort!
Thank you for the comment Saul - I agree with a lot of your points, in particular that "explosive" periods are costly and inefficient (relative perhaps to some ideal), and that they are not in and of themselves a solution for long-term retention.
I expect if we have a crux it's whether someone who intends to follow an incremental path vs someone who does an intense acquisition period is more likely to, ~ a year later, actually have the skill. And my guess is, for a number of reasons, it's the later; I'd expect a lot of incrementalists to 'just not actually do the thing'.
* My ideal strategy would be "explore lightly a number of things, to determine what you want -> explode towards that for an intense period of time -> establish incremental practices to maintain and improve"
* Your comment also highlighted for me, something that I had cut from the initial draft, my belief that explosive periods help overcome emotional blockers, which I think might be a big part of why people shy away from skills they say they want.
1This post confounds several factors. There's a lot more to immersion language learning than massed practice. And bodybuilding has almost nothing to do with learning. The brain is not a muscle.
There are whole sciences of learning; to be fair they're not very good, but you reference none of them, and they're at least worth referencing. In the past this would be fine, but in a world where you can talk to Claude, it just doesn't make sense to make claims of fact with this much effort without bothering to even learn say anything about relevant science.
If you’re going to learn a new skill or change in some way, going hard at it for a short intensive period beats spreading a gentler effort across months or years.
I’m on day 29 of Inkhaven, where we committed to writing a blog post a day for a month. It has been great; one of the best periods of “self-development” I’ve been in. I’ve progressed far more at the skill of putting my thoughts on the internet than some counterfactual where I wrote twice a month for a year.
The quintessential example of explosive skill acquisition is foreign language learning. It’s standard advice that if you really want to speak Spanish, you should do a language immersion—travel to Mexico and only speak Spanish while there—rather than practicing with apps and textbooks for an hour a week. I’d bet that the person who spent two months hanging around Tijuana - or who immersed themselves in spanish media and telenovellas for a few months, is going to be better at Spanish than the person who has a million Duolingo points.[1]
Why explosive acquisition works
Several reasons compound together:
Overlapping forgetting curves. If you practice a skill, the clock starts ticking before you forget what you learned. You go to a dance class every week, and by the time you’re back you’ll probably have forgotten a fair bit of what you went over last time.
To get good at something, you often need to chain skills on top of each other—building foundation until you reach the next level where the skills become mutually reinforcing. Explosive periods layer learning close enough together that you can actually chain them and build up, rather than repeatedly relearning the basics.
Richness of context. Explosive acquisition periods are ones where your world is dominated by the skill, and often you get varied practice. If you’re in Mexico to learn Spanish, you encounter the language in its full richness—tied to real situations, real triggers, real use cases -- where the different contexts reinforce each other and give you hooks to remember its use.
Discontinuous practice opportunities. Compressing the learning period means you get the benefits of competence earlier. This matters more than people realize, because opportunities to use and grow a skill are discontinuous. For example you need a baseline level of skill to be able to enjoy dancing with a wide array of partners, you need to know enough Spanish to actually have conversations that make you want to continue. Getting to good enough means you unlock more practice opportunities and the positive feedback loops where the skill sustains itself.
Self-signaling. It’s costly to commit to an intensive period. That cost signals—to yourself—a level of commitment that rallies more of you toward the goal. Signing up for the Mexico trip makes you a person who is learning Spanish. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but it seems like you then start to notice more opportunities to do the thing and be that person. Like Paul Graham’s The Top Idea in Your Mind:
When you’re in an intensive period, the skill becomes your top idea.
Quantity: Most obviously, intensive periods of practice mean you simply practice more. For the last five years I’ve written my newsletter once a month; in total that’s sixty posts. By the end of this month I will have written thirty posts. Practicing guitar 30 minutes a day, three times a week, for a year gives you about 78 hours. A two-week intensive where you’re playing 6 hours a day gets you 84 hours. Doing more of the thing will make you better at it.
Why we don’t do this more
If explosive acquisition is so effective, why doesn’t everyone do it? A few reasons:
It’s intense. Having the entire period be about the activity prevents you from shying away from contact with the world and the feedback you’re getting about who you are and how good you actually are. That sucks. It’s quite nice to engage in fantasy and ego protection.
Explore/Exploit Tradeoffs. If you’re making a period of time all about one thing, you’re foreclosing other options. This is a real cost. It’s reasonable to wonder whether you should spend a week on knitting or programming, or whether to master French pastries or British ones. But it’s easy to let this uncertainty become permanent—to keep “exploring options” forever and never reach the decision point where you commit to one and go deep.
Confusing building mode with maintenance mode. I remember Derek from More Plates More Dates talking about time investment with bodybuilding, and work needed to build new muscle is very different from the work needed to maintain it. You might need ten hours in the gym weekly when actively trying to add muscle, versus two or three hours to persist. Skills work similarly. People spread out the “building” effort so thin that they never actually build—they just do maintenance-level work on a foundation that was never constructed.
Blame the schools. In the formative skill acquisition period of our lives, the structure of school focuses on continuity and discipline and many spread-out efforts. You are in fact explicitly discouraged from cramming before tests. Which, fair, but I think cramming is a natural expression of how people want work—single-threading attention instead of trying to run parallel learning processes.
I often think about ordinary incompetence, the way in which, as Gwern says: “Incompetence is the norm; most people who engage in a task (even when incentivized for performance or engaging in it for countless hours) may still be making basic errors which could be remedied with coaching or deliberate practice.” Dan Luu describes it in 95%-ile isn’t that good:
I find this terrifying, that I might be incompetent in many ways, and that if I had a little more awareness, a little more “oomph” I could be much better. I expect that explosive periods of skill acquisition can go a long way toward remedying this.
This is part of my explanation for why change gets harder as you get older. Yes, neuroplasticity and crystallized intelligence, sure—but also you end up with more obligations and more parts of your life you can’t drop to go off and explode. I took two weeks off to do this writing retreat, and have been juggling work the rest of the time. This has been challenging. Lots of people can’t make that tradeoff.[2]
But, tragically, tradeoffs are real, and nobody can do everything. If you’re going to take the effort to try and change—which, as a humble descendant of the Californian Human Potential movement, I think is one of the joys of life—it behooves you to be strategic. Explosive acquisition works as a natural decision heuristic: if it’s not worth going off and exploding for, maybe it’s not worth the scattered effort either.
After philip_b's comment I googled and a million duolingo points is ~ four years of an hour a days practice. It might not be better than that! Consider a million to be a stand-in for several months to a year of duolingo use
But not all the way! Feedback and reflection are important, and I can imagine that there are ways to explode that wouldn’t have those loops built in. For instance, Dan Luu’s scrub player who dedicates weeks, ten hours a day to playing overwatch, but never watches their tapes and gets feedback. I think you are likely to get more implicit feedback from the world if you are doing a skill a lot continuously, and have more opportunity to notice how to improve, but it’s not guaranteed.