Experience

I’ve never taken the time for politics.  I don’t think I could really get it without extreme exertion, which I cannot afford right now.  I have no idea what the candidates stand for.  And I only know that the primaries are voting starting on Tuesday since Elliot is going to help at the polls (he has those heavy things in the back of his jeep and in his house).  But I have heard that Clinton and McCain keep rapping on Obama for having less experience than they do.  I don’t know if it matters, but here’s an interesting article (which of course is biased being it’s from TIME, although again I am ignorant as to which slant it has):

“The Science of Experience”
Would you prefer a doctor who has practiced medicine for 30 years or just 10?  Research into expert performance shows that the choice isn’t simple
http://205.188.238.109/time/health/article/0,8599,1717927,00.html 
John Cloud / Tallahassee

The 10-year rule was posited as long ago as 1899, when Psychological Review ran a paper saying it takes at least that long to become expert in telegraphy. The modern study of expert performance began in 1973, when American Scientist published an influential article by researchers Herbert Simon and William Chase saying chess enthusiasts had to play for at least 10 years before they could win international tournaments. (Bobby Fischer was an exception; he played for nine years before becoming a grand master at 16.)

It doesn’t guarantee success. As Anders Ericsson writes in the introduction to the 901-page Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2006), “The number of years of experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Ericsson, 60, is a professor at Florida State who moved to the U.S. from his native Sweden in 1976 to study with Simon, co-author of the seminal chess paper. (Simon went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making.) Today Ericsson runs Florida State’s Human Performance Laboratory, where Thomas and Monica participated in the robot simulations.

Experts tend to be good at their particular talent, but when something unpredictable happens — something that changes the rules of the game they usually play — they’re little better than the rest of us. Ericsson’s primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion “deliberate practice,” by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding.

Take figure-skating. For the 2003 book Expert Performance in Sports, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley observed 24 figure skaters as they practiced. “All skaters spent considerably more time practicing jumps that already existed in their repertoire and less time on jumps they were attempting to learn.” In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.

Experience is not only insufficient for expert performance; in some cases, it can hurt. Highly experienced people tend to execute routine tasks almost unconsciously, rarely pausing to apply rules. Driving is a good example. In a 1991 paper in the journal Ergonomics, a team of researchers found that while new drivers and truly expert drivers (members of Britain’s Institute of Advanced Motorists) checked their mirrors often and applied their brakes early, regular drivers with 20 years’ experience rarely checked their mirrors and braked much later. Experience in a particular task frees space in your mind for other cognitive pursuits — but those things can distract you. Experience can also lead to overconfidence: a study in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention found that licensed race-car drivers had more on-the-road accidents than controls did.

The Cambridge Handbook concludes that great performance comes mostly from deliberate practice but also from another activity: regularly obtaining accurate feedback. In a 1997 study published in the journal Medical Decision Making, researchers found that only 4% of interns had known a group of elderly patients for more than a week; by comparison, nearly half the highly experienced attending physicians had known the patients for more than six months. But even with the advantages of years of medical experience and months of knowing the patients, the attending physicians were no more accurate than the interns at predicting the patients’ end-of-life preferences, a crucial factor in determining whether a patient has a good death. It was attention to the patients’ feelings and values that mattered, not having more knowledge of their diseases. And in the end, determining which of the presidential candidates pays more attention to your concerns requires not adding up their years of experience but a far more complex calculation: deciding what their experiences have led them to truly value.