10,000 Hours to Reach Expert Level

[neonlyte]

I heard a programme on the radio yesterday. The hypothesis is that anyone can can become and 'expert' if they are prepared to put in the work. Doesn't necessarily mean they excel, just that the minumim number of hours required to reach expert level is 10,000. The speaker was a university professor researching excellence. He claims no one excels with less than 10,000 hours of devotion to a single field of study/research. He cites the case of Mozart and his first symphony, only remarkable because of the age at which it was written, the work itself is not outstanding even though the achievement in writing it was.

For authors, the 10,000 hours equates to five years at 40 hours per week with no guarantee of success, only that you might have cracked the punctuation and spelling dilemmas. The situation is even more dire for those who wish to become proficient lovers, at ten hours a week (which I doubt most could sustain) it's a twenty year gruel, more likely forty years, by which time the acquired skill might be deflationary downward spiral.

ETA: Found the reference: This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin, I'll try to find a link.

 

[Recidiva]

How long until you're an expert parent?

What is that in years?

Poor kids.

 

[Liar]

Interresting.

Except that 10.000 sounds suspiciously like an arbitrary number pulled out of someone's rear end.

 

[Recidiva]

Interresting.

Except that 10.000 sounds suspiciously like an arbitrary number pulled out of someone's rear end.

And doesn't explain savants.

 

[rgraham666]

"An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until finally they know everything about nothing at all." Robert A. Heinlein

 

[cantdog]

I know you'll be shocked to hear this, but I have an opinion about this, too.

I think most people are functioning on a low level of concentration and attention, most of their lives. Practice or training at that sort of level would be nothing much more than merely putting in the 10,000 hours. But greater levels of engagement are possible. Athletes call it being 'in the zone,' or at least they did once. My slang is seldom current.

When you're in that zone you can do no wrong. Midas has nothing on you. It all turns to gold, and you're noticing everything, seeing it all, you're utterly in the moment. You don't even have to calculate what someone else might do, because you anticipate nothing but what is happening right now, and you're reacting before you really know what just went on, and flawlessly.

That sort of state of mind doesn't happen all the time, but there are levels between that and just putting in your time. I watched a fellow become proficient on the concertina. He'd been to England and ordered one made for him, and once it arrived, that thing never left him. He was a fool for it. He played it constantly, drove everyone crazy. Played it in the car, having his girlfriend drive him places, at work, on the street, hours and hours.

He had an intense interest, and he was paying extreme attention. Proficiency came rapidly.

 

[Handprints]

For authors, the 10,000 hours equates to five years at 40 hours per week with no guarantee of success, only that you might have cracked the punctuation and spelling dilemmas.

I think that's about right. I've seen any number of knowing and dismissive glances passed among writers when a non-writer praises someone's "fantastic natural ability." More than anything else in life, sports and writing excellence look to me like the crystallisation of tens of thousands of hours of hard work. Certainly when I have to hire/work with a writer, I don't ask if he's any good; I ask how long he's been writing.

H

 

[cantdog]

I think that's about right. I've seen any number of knowing and dismissive glances passed among writers when a non-writer praises someone's "fantastic natural ability." More than anything else in life, sports and writing excellence look to me like the crystallisation of tens of thousands of hours of hard work. Certainly when I have to hire/work with a writer, I don't ask if he's any good; I ask how long he's been writing.

H

Exactly so. But you can put in the time without learning a damn thing, too. Rocks would be running the planet, else. They've been at this for a billion years, some of them. Talent, natural ability-- this is just code for engagement in the task, so that training and experience mean something. Isiah Thomas once got hot under the collar when someone remarked that black athletes had an edge. He detailed the hours he spent every day, every week, in practice, in study, in weight training and endurance trial. He said talent was bullshit. Let them put in my hours, and they can all do it. To say I have talent is to devalue all those hours of effort and sacrifice, he said.

 

[Handprints]

Talent, natural ability-- this is just code for engagement in the task, so that training and experience mean something.

All true. The only one of the thousands of slogans I've had shouted at me by coaches (who were, in spirit if not in fact, the descendants of Prussian cavalry officers) that stuck was: Attendance is not Commitment. Even today I can hear the capital letters...

H

 

[neonlyte]

All true. The only one of the thousands of slogans I've had shouted at me by coaches (who were, in spirit if not in fact, the descendants of Prussian cavalry officers) that stuck was: Attendance is not Commitment. Even today I can hear the capital letters...

H

Commitment is the difference. Your self-drive has to be capable of surmounting the highest obstacles and even then might not be sufficient to succeed. Even on this forum, where there exists a great deal of goodwill to fellow writers, one still perceives a reluctance to post 'works in progress', presumably out of fear of negative reaction.

 

[Handprints]

Commitment is the difference. Your self-drive has to be capable of surmounting the highest obstacles and even then might not be sufficient to succeed.

Absolutely right and made me think: I don't just ask how long a guy's been writing, I also ask who he wrote for and what he did for them. That tells me everything I need to know about how hard he's been tested. There are some things writers (in my professional area) just can't do well until they've put a few thousand miles on the odometer (audience connection, tone control) and there are others that depend entirely on how rough the miles were that they traveled (writing quality at speed, for example.) When you know your competitors' output reasonably well, those are good indicators of how much someone's been willing to work in order to become that little bit better than the next guy.

(Or woman, obviously: a penis is not an advantage in my field, although being one is very common.)

H

 

[rgraham666]

I was once committed. I have the papers around here somewhere.

Seriously, my experience with being committed to something is that one day I'm told, "Thanks for all the work. But we don't need you any more. So fuck off!"

So I'm rather leery of commitment.

 

[cantdog]

It's like love, though. You don't really get off the blocks without committing. Dangerous but necessary.

 

[Liar]

"An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until finally they know everything about nothing at all." Robert A. Heinlein

Hmm, what is that other Heinlein quote...?

<goes Googling>

Ah yes, here it is:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

 

[rgraham666]

Hmm, what is that other Heinlein quote...?

<goes Googling>

Ah yes, here it is:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

That may be my favourite quote by him

 

[3113]

Attendance is not Commitment. Even today I can hear the capital letters...

Wow! That's a great little truism. You're right. Rings like a bell. And I agree with all that's been said, with one caveat...I do think there is an extra element needed if we're going to talk about Mozart as compared to an "expert." This guy is talking about becoming an "expert" and he's right; hours of commitment are what's needed to do that--but if you want to be Mozart, you have to be, well Mozart.

Hours of commitment in and of themselves do not magically transform anyone into Shakespeare, Mozart, Van Gogh, Newton or Baryshnikov. If they did, every kid and teenager passionately playing basketball on the playground day in and day out would be a Kobe and there'd be no reason to pay Mr. Bryant so much money. The whimsical movie Ratatouille points this out as well (and I'll grant that it's fictional, but I think it has a ring of truth). You can train for those 10,000 hours to be a chef--and become an expert able to put out marvelous dishes, perfect and delicious every time. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to create some new and transcendent cuisine.

And the same goes for writing. I know writers who have taken intensive workshops where they wrote for hours daily over many weeks; they lived, breathed and did nothing other than write. Believe me, their writing improves significantly and how they can turn a phrase becomes very professional. But that doesn't mean their stories stick with you. I remember reading a story by one such writer: I couldn't find a single fault with its style; it wasn't hard to read and some turns of phrase were lovely, very professional....but it didn't grip me, or make me want to hear it again...I can't even remember what it was about. On the other hand, there have been a number of raw, *BEGINNERS* stories that I've read by people who didn't have nearly so many hours--in some cases, it was their very first story. Yet I still remember those stories; they hit me right in the gut. I may have hoped the person would edit, polish and re-write them (or not!), but they had that *something* that made them shine when the "expert" story did not.

This professor may argue that Mozart's first symphony isn't remarkable, and I'm sure he's right. But there are some first books, first symphonies, first works of art, done before the person ever came close to those 10,000 hours or knew what the fuck that they were doing...that however raw and wrong and problematic still contain in them art or genius or whatever you'd care to call it. That thing which captures us and we know: Here is something special. Here is someone special.

And if those hours becoming an expert don't ruin such a person...they'll carry them to the stars...

 

[rgraham666]

And if those hours becoming an expert don't ruin such a person...they'll carry them to the stars...

That is the the biggest danger of expertise, that you spend so much time learning 'proper' you forget how to be good.

 

[3113]

That is the the biggest danger of expertise, that you spend so much time learning 'proper' you forget how to be good.

It's the sort of thing that would have killed Van Gogh and other impressionists had they listened to people telling them what was proper and how thing *must* be done: "Here is how you paint! Anything else is nonsense!"

On the other hand, I'll be the first to remind people that artists like Picasso and Pollack did know how to create photo-perfect paintings--they knew all the rules of perspective, light-and-shadow, etc. Too many people think such artists were playing around, that they didn't know what they were doing or that they did something anyone could do. Truth is, they knew exactly what they were doing, and did it with intent. They knew the rules before they broke them, and they broke them to gain a particular effect. Doesn't mean they didn't follow their instinct and inspiration or even serendipity, but that instinct and inspiration was finely honed.

 

[neonlyte]

Hmm, what is that other Heinlein quote...?

<goes Googling>

Ah yes, here it is:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

change a diaper, done that
plan an invasion, does the wife count?
butcher a hog, done that and made the sausages
conn a ship, I've sailed the Greek islands solo
design a building, Yup
write a sonnet, he would bring up sonnets!
balance accounts, double column entry - it's boring
build a wall, several
set a bone, nursed a set bone
comfort the dying, three times
take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, prefer the last
solve equations, analyze a new problem, ok but boring again
pitch manure, or compost, I'd add make hay
program a computer, cook a tasty meal, these are different, right?
fight efficiently, nah, not me - I run efficiently
die gallantly. I'll let you know
Specialization is for insects. Sure it is. I also know I can do one of this list at a time to a high degree of proficiency, some of them took years to learn the skill. Others I will never master (except dying) because I don't have the commitment. What the researcher was saying (I wish I could remember his name) and as 3113 says, no matter how much dedication and commitment you give to a task, there is another element that cannot be taught or learnt, that is the element that transforms the commited to the outstanding.

ETA: Found the reference: This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin, I'll try to find a link.

 

[R. Richard]

Hmm, what is that other Heinlein quote...?

<goes Googling>

Ah yes, here it is:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Interesting concept. Since Heinlen made his living as a 'word artist,' I would like to see some of his other artistic endeavors. Perhaps someone could direct me to his paintings, his sculpture and his music. TIA.

Or was it that Heinlen was pretty much a specialist in being a 'word artist?' Well, he could also pitch manure, that I will give him.

 

[neonlyte]

I found this review:
(AH members (largely female) should avoid googling Daniel J Levitin - you may end signing up for a course you have no intention of completing )

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel J. Levitin. New York: Dutton, 2006. Appendices, bibliographic notes, index. 314 pp. ISBN 0-525-94969-0, $24.95.

Daniel Levitin (who directs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University, where he also holds the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication) writes in a spirit reminiscent of Douglas Hofstadter’s now classic Gödel, Escher, Bach or Andy Clark’s Being There—making the difficult transition from technical reflection on the minutiae of cognitive science to an engaging account of the mind at work look easy. Thinking about thinking lies at the heart of philosophy, and making it popular without dumbing it down has a pedigree as old as Socrates. Levitin, like many who have shaped the discipline, thinks of cognitive science as experimental philosophy. The experimental orientation opens philosophical investigation to constant transformation and grounds it in the concrete experience of the world; this takes it back to Socratic roots and invites a narrative dimension that, in turn, invites readers. There is a sense of being engaged with the author, with the world, with an inquiry, that non-philosophers often miss in philosophical texts.

That Levitin chooses to investigate music adds to the appeal, but it also adds to the significance of the inquiry. As he notes in his introduction (5), “Music is unusual among all human activities for both its ubiquity and its antiquity. No known human culture now or anytime in the recorded past lacked music.” What Levitin means by the antiquity of music is straightforward: where we find the earliest evidence of human culture, we also find evidence of music. Music is as old as human culture, and it appears where human culture appears. Whether it is unique to humans is a subject of some controversy; but whether it is present to humans is not. And this leads directly to the assertion of ubiquity. Where humans have been, there has been music; and where humans are, music is. There is an intimate connection between humanity and music that reaches across both time and space and may well justify an even stronger claim than the “obsession” of Levitin’s subtitle. It may be the case (and I think this was Plato’s suspicion) that we are not only obsessed with music but also formed by it. The aforementioned implications for definition apply as much to “humanity” as to “music,” and this is of profound significance in our increasingly instrumental age.

But there is more to the ubiquity. Levitin notes that “music listening, performance, and composition” engage “nearly every part of the brain” (6). Its ubiquity is “internal” (cognitive, psychological) as well as “external” (cultural, social). Where humans are, music is—but, even more striking, the experience of music is pervasive in each human being that experiences it. Listeners as well as performers are inclined to describe the experience of music as something in which we are entirely involved—body and soul. We can lose ourselves in it, abandon ourselves to it--and many of us do so frequently. This could mean (as Levitin thinks it does) that our perception and appreciation of music can tell us something fundamental about our humanity. It could also mean (again, as Levitin thinks it does) that our perception and appreciation of music can tell us something fundamental about the structure of brains which are so thoroughly engaged by it.

On this count, the relatively recent distinction between performer and listener is a significant one—particularly because the evidence belies any depiction of the music listener as passive. Listening, as surely as performing and composing, engages the whole brain; and that is important for thinking about thinking. At the very least, it favors an understanding of musical perception as active. But it also points to a field in which to explore the activity experimentally rather than simply asserting it. By investigating perceptual mechanisms engaged in listening to music and comparing them to mechanisms engaged in making it, we may learn something of the working of perceptual mechanisms more generally. This is precisely what Levitin does, and the results are significant not only for a science of music but also for an experimentally grounded philosophy of perception with implications for aesthetics, epistemology, and language. The relation between music and language has, of course, been a subject of controversy. But even if we do not think of music as language, that the cognitive mechanisms at work when it engages us as listeners have much in common with those at work when we are engaged in making it suggest that we consider the possibility that something similar happens in what we do identify as language. Reading written language or listening to spoken language, for example, are not passively receptive; they are activities analogous to writing and speaking. The reader is a writer, the listener a speaker, in much the same way that a fully engaged music listener is a maker of music.

Levitin addresses this early, and he continues to develop it throughout, as a challenge not only to the rigid separation between performers and listeners but also as a challenge to the rigid separation between experts and non-experts. Many people, he notes, who claim to know nothing about music can nevertheless identify the music they like and distinguish it from the music they don’t. And many, as experiments conducted by Levitin and others demonstrate, can also reproduce the music they like with remarkable accuracy. Part of the challenge here is to the understanding of “expertise.” Music is so intrinsically a part of human experience that all humans share some musical ability, just as we all share some linguistic ability. (As the often quoted African proverb has it, “If you can walk, you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing.”) The rigid separation of performers from listeners and the further categorization of both into experts and non-experts may explain some of the difficulty “ordinary” listeners have in talking about our musical experience. Abandoning some of the jargon that institutionalizes the separation opens access to what is arguably a universal human experience. Making human experience accessible is consistent with the kind of philosophical inquiry Socrates carried on, and it is in the spirit of the “pragmatic” philosophy of writers like William James. The point is not to build and defend a specialized realm so much as to open human experience (and the world in which it happens) to critical and appreciative reflection—to “enlarge the universe of human discourse” (as Clifford Geertz put it).

This is related to another question Levitin poses early, that of the relationship between music and science—which stands in here for the broader question of relationship between art and science. He subtitles the introduction “I Love Music and I Love Science—Why Would I Want to Mix the Two?” The answer, developed not only in the introduction but also throughout the book, brings “art” and “science” together around an experimental attitude that (in Robert Sapolsky’s words) “reinvents and reinvigorates mystery.” Once again, this taps an ancient philosophical discussion—and it reclaims an old tradition in which the artist and the scientist share an experimental/experiential attitude toward the world. More to the point, it suggests that creative engagement with the world combines “art” and “science” in the celebration and exploration of mystery. It is not new to claim that philosophy begins in wonder, but it is worth repeating; and Levitin (in the long tradition of philosophers who “abandon” philosophy to engage the world) repeats it eloquently.

Levitin doesn’t leave readers guessing what he is about. At the end of the introduction, he writes “Your brain on music is a way to understand the deepest mysteries of human nature. That is why I wrote this book” (11-12). There will be philosophers who want to argue about “human nature,” and Levitin will provide substantial material for the argument in the process of writing “the story of how brains and music co-evolved—what music can teach us about the brain, what the brain can teach us about music, and what both can teach us about ourselves” (12). When Levitin asks “What is music?” (as he does in the first chapter, he is also asking “What is human?” The answers to both questions fall in the realm of natural philosophy. By taking an experimental approach, Levitin sidesteps explicit arguments about “essence” but puts himself in a broadly constructivist tradition familiar from philosophical approaches most influenced by evolutionary theory—pragmatism, process thought, Bergsonism, and genetic epistemology. To speak of the co-evolution of music and brains is to suggest a “natural” evolutionary process in which both are constructed while mutually influencing one another in a process that is itself constructive. He is interested not only in what brains make of music, but also what music makes of brains. And he is convinced that the making is key to understanding mind (along the lines of Marvin Minsky’s assertion that “mind” is what brains do).

Levitin works his way back from timbre (which he says has come to dominate our appreciation of music, particularly since the advent of rock) to rhythm (which he says has been the dominant dimension of music through most of human history). In this regard, it is most interesting that he points to composers such as Scriabin and Ravel and popular songwriters like Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon who describe their compositions as “sound paintings, with timbre playing a role equivalent to the one that color does in visual art, separating melodic shapes from one another” (53). For both artists and philosophers of art, this raises significant questions about the relative importance of line and color that have been hotly debated. In Levitin’s account of music, the equivalent debate revolves around timbre and rhythm. In neither case is it a question of either/or—line or color, timbre or rhythm. Each of these elements works together in a composition to make a whole, so the question is always one of mutual tension and interrelationship. In distinguishing music from visual art, Levitin adds the dimension of time: “one of the things that makes music different from painting is that it is dynamic, changing across time, and what moves the music forward are rhythm and meter” (53). In Levitin’s archaeological account, digging through timbre leads us to rhythm; and that is the engine that drives his composition of the brain. In a familiar pattern of ethnographic investigation, what is older is “under” what is newer, and what is newer is constructed on the foundation of what is older. That is consistent with evolutionary theory, of course; but what is not consistent—and therefore stands out here as a question for further investigation—is the implication that painting is not dynamic. One implication of evolutionary theory, developed at length in Bergson and Whitehead, is that “nature” itself is dynamic. Painting is in nature as surely as music. If rhythm and meter move music forward, what moves painting? In the process of supporting the assertion, Levitin gives us substantial material with which to address the question, and it points in the direction of at least a partial rehabilitation of Bishop Berkeley. For painting as for music (and as for poetry), what moves it forward is as much a matter of what happens between viewer or listener or reader and painting or song or poem as what happens “in” the object of art. One could argue that you typically see (and hear) music being made in a performance while you typically see only the product of performance in a work of visual art. But, from beginning to end, art is as much about seeing/hearing/experiencing what is not there as about what is—and an aesthetic theory inclined to break down divisions (as Levitin’s is) is wise to extend the work beyond an object passively observed.

The point, one might say, is to get into it.

And this is connected to Levitin’s discussion of the classic definition of music as “organized sound.” The definition, first, extends the realm of music beyond the human. Birds, for example (as Charles Hartshorne, among others, argued at length), are masters of organized sound. But it also leaves two critical features unspoken. First is the significance of silence to the experience of music. This is (appropriately) implicit in Levitin’s discussion, since rhythm and meter depend as much on silence as on sound. But both John Cage and Wallace Stevens (not to mention a long list of Chinese theorists) might push Levitin to give more explicit attention to silence—and to its implications for our understanding of “organization.” But leaving that aside for a moment, we can turn (as Levitin does) to another unspoken feature, surprise. Recalling the definition of music as organized sound, Levitin writes (109) that “the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic.” Emotionally flat, robotic, and boring, if we recall Hartshorne’s study of bird song. Once again, the critical element lies in a relationship—marked by what Hartshorne called the “threshold of monotony.” A creative work—whether its matter is sound and silence or pigment and paper—has to maintain a tension between giving us what we expect and giving us what we don’t. Too much of the one and we are lost to monotony. Too much of the other and we lose the composition in the background. Cage could see the value in both types of loss—but that was an aspect of his composition. And it is consistent with Levitin’s argument, which points not toward a simple matching of patterns “out there” with patterns “in here” but to a process of constructing patterns in which mind, brain, and world are actively engaged.

Given the reference to Hofstader with which I began, it is appropriate that Levitin boils this down to a conversation with Francis Crick that itself came down to connection. (Hofstadter’s book is subtitled “An Eternal Golden Braid.”) For Crick, as for Levitin, investigation of human evolution leads to the interconnectedness of regions of the brain, of neurons, of genes, of elements all the way down. But the interconnectedness is itself a dynamic product of connection as action—the process of connection, all the way down.

This Is Your Brain on Music is an accessible synthesis of contemporary research in cognitive science as it relates to music. Because Levitin attends with care to connections, it serves as a more general entry point to philosophical issues relevant to cognitive science—particularly issues related to perception, memory, and aesthetics. Like most good arguments, Levitin’s invites new connections that are likely to generate new arguments that lead in new directions. By making the argument accessible to a non-specialist audience, it broadens the circle of conversation—all of which makes the book of interest to philosophers for what it does as much as for what it contains.

Steven Schroeder

 

[Weird Harold]

Perhaps someone could direct me to his paintings, his sculpture and his music. TIA.

I can't help with sculpture or music, but IIRC, a couple of his paintings/drawings are used as illustrations in Grumbles From the Grave, the posthumous publication of his unfinished work and other stuff.

Or was it that Heinlen was pretty much a specialist in being a 'word artist?' Well, he could also pitch manure, that I will give him.

Like many of the Golden Age SF authors, Heinlein was an engineer by training and is credited with the "invention" of many real world concepts -- Heinlein's best known invention (which patented) is the waterbed.

 

[WRJames]

I passed for an expert most of my career -- and you, it's pretty hard to fool the computers. They really don't give a shit about your reputation. But I NEVER tried to know EVERYTHING about ANYTHING -- my intention, at each moment, was to know just enough to accomplish what I was trying to do at that particular moment. Sometimes, granted, that involvled delving fairly deep.

The other thing is -- you don't have to know the answer, you just have to know where and how to find the answer. This is even more true today with Internet search engines. If you have some vague recollection of a fact or idea, you can usually find a more or less solid reference to it within a few minutes. I don't think I ever memorized all the details of Java, or HTML, or Java Script, or Lotus Notes -- but I certainly knew where to look up the answers if I needed them.

 

[R. Richard]

I can't help with sculpture or music, but IIRC, a couple of his paintings/drawings are used as illustrations in Grumbles From the Grave, the posthumous publication of his unfinished work and other stuff..

It would appear that Heinlen's paintings/drawings were an]mateur stuff, usable only because of his word artistry.

Like many of the Golden Age SF authors, Heinlein was an engineer by training and is credited with the "invention" of many real world concepts -- Heinlein's best known invention (which patented) is the waterbed.

From Wiki:
In 1871 a waterbed was in use in Elmira, NY for "invalids". It was briefly mentioned by Mark Twain in his article "A New Beecher Church" which was published in The New York Times on 1871-07-23. There Twain said that: "In the infirmary will be kept one or two water-beds (for invalids whose pains will not allow them to be on a less yielding substance) and half a dozen reclining invalid-chairs on wheels. The water-beds and invalid-chairs at present belonging to the church are always in demand, and never out of service." This article does not contain enough information to determine the form of the beds involved.

Dr. William Hooper of Portsmouth, England, patented a waterbed in 1883. He devised it to relieve bed sore pains in his patients. Unable to contain the water and control its temperature, his invention was a market failure.

The modern waterbed was created by Charles Hall in 1968, while he was a design student at San Francisco State University in California. Fellow SFSU students Paul Heckel and Evan Fawkes also contributed to the concept. Hall originally wanted to make an innovative chair. His first prototype was a vinyl bag with 300 pounds (136 kg) of cornstarch, but the result was uncomfortable. He next attempted to fill it with Jell-O, but this too was a failure. Ultimately, he abandoned working on a chair, and settled on perfecting a bed. He succeeded. However, because a waterbed is described in the novels Beyond This Horizon (1942), Double Star (1956), and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein, Hall was unable to obtain a patent on his creation. In 1980 Heinlein recalled in Expanded Universe that:

"I designed the waterbed during years as a bed patient in the middle thirties; a pump to control water level, side supports to permit one to float rather than simply lying on a not very soft water filled mattress. Thermostatic control of temperature, safety interfaces to avoid all possibility of electric shock, waterproof box to make a leak no more important than a leaky hot water bottle rather than a domestic disaster, calculation of floor loads (important!), internal rubber mattress and lighting, reading, and eating arrangements—an attempt to design the perfect hospital bed by one who had spent too damn much time in hospital beds."

However, Heinlein made no attempt to build his invention.

What my point is, is that Heinlen was an Annapolis graduate engineer and also a writer. Other than his engineering training and his writing, he was at best a dilletante. The market for dilletantes is very limited.

 

[R. Richard]

I passed for an expert most of my career -- and you, it's pretty hard to fool the computers. They really don't give a shit about your reputation. But I NEVER tried to know EVERYTHING about ANYTHING -- my intention, at each moment, was to know just enough to accomplish what I was trying to do at that particular moment. Sometimes, granted, that involvled delving fairly deep.

The other thing is -- you don't have to know the answer, you just have to know where and how to find the answer. This is even more true today with Internet search engines. If you have some vague recollection of a fact or idea, you can usually find a more or less solid reference to it within a few minutes. I don't think I ever memorized all the details of Java, or HTML, or Java Script, or Lotus Notes -- but I certainly knew where to look up the answers if I needed them.

True. However, you do have to know the basics of the underlying knowledge you are attempting to use. An experienced programmer can very quickly come up to speed in a new language/operating system. Someone with no programming background cannot.

If you want to succeed in something at a commercial level, you have to be a trained specialist. Once you have the basic, underlying knowledge, you can operate in pretty much the same environment. However, the idea that someone with no specialist training can succeed as an employee in today's commercial world is, IMHO a fantasy. [It is true that a self employed individual can hire experts to get him past the hard technical steps and he/she can produce interesting and useful things. However, the idea that some generalist can just walk into a specialized environment and do useful technical work is, IMHO, a myth.