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The Expert Myth

Veritasium

21M subscribers • 15 videos on Rounds

YouTube
  • Recommended by 6 people, in Hacker News, across 5 different months.
  • Sells products. The upload promotes a product, supplement, program or service, or the speaker sells what they recommend.

For anyone, no background needed. Education, not medical advice.

16M views4 years ago6 recommendations

Brain and nervesMemory and learning

This video explores the psychological conditions required to develop true expertise and why some experience does not lead to skill.

Which experts have real expertise? This video is sponsored by Brilliant. The first 200 people to sign up via brilliant.org/veritasium get 20% off a yearly subscription. Thanks to chess24.com/ and Chessable for the clip of Magnus. ▀▀▀ Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive psychology, 4(1), 55-81. – ve42.co/chess1 Calderwood, R., Klein, G. A., & Crandall, B. W. (1988). Time pressure, skill, and move quality in chess. The American Journal of Psychology, 481-493. – ve42.co/chess2 Hogarth, R. M., Lejarraga, T., & Soyer, E. (2015). The two settings of kind and wicked learning environments. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(5), 379-385. – ve42.co/Hogarth Ægisdóttir, S., White, M. J., Spengler, P. M., Maugherman, A. S., Anderson, L. A., Cook, R. S., ... & Rush, J. D. (2006). The meta-analysis of clinical judgment project: Fifty-six years of accumulated research on clinical versus statistical prediction. The Counseling Psychologist, 34(3), 341-382. – ve42.co/anderson1 Ericsson, K. A. (2015). Acquisition and maintenance of medical expertise: a perspective from the expert-performance approach with deliberate practice. Academic Medicine, 90(11), 1471-1486. – ve42.co/anderson2 Goldberg, S. B., Rousmaniere, T., Miller, S. D., Whipple, J., Nielsen, S. L., Hoyt, W. T., & Wampold, B. E. (2016). Do psychotherapists improve with time and experience? A longitudinal analysis of outcomes in a clinical setting. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(1), 1. – ve42.co/goldberg1 Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363. – ve42.co/anderson3 Egan, D. E., & Schwartz, B. J. (1979). Chunking in recall of symbolic drawings. Memory & Cognition, 7(2), 149-158. – ve42.co/chunking1 Tetlock, P. E. (2017). Expert political judgment. In Expert Political Judgment. Princeton University Press. – ve42.co/Tetlock Melton, R. S. (1952). A comparison of clinical and actuarial methods of prediction with an assessment of the relative accuracy of different clinicians. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota. Meehl, E. P. (1954). Clinical versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence. University of Minnesota Press. – ve42.co/Meehl1954 Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. – ve42.co/Kahneman ▀▀▀ Special thanks to Patreon supporters: RayJ Johnson, Brian Busbee, Jerome Barakos M.D., Amadeo Bee, Julian Lee, Inconcision, TTST, Balkrishna Heroor, Chris LaClair, Avi Yashchin, John H. Austin, Jr., OnlineBookClub.org, Matthew Gonzalez, Eric Sexton, john kiehl, Diffbot, Gnare, Dave Kircher, Burt Humburg, Blake Byers, Dumky, Evgeny Skvortsov, Meekay, Bill Linder, Paul Peijzel, Josh Hibschman, Timothy O’Brien, Mac Malkawi, Michael Schneider,

Why it's here

6 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent explanation of deliberate practice and the specific environmental conditions required to build genuine expertise.

ourmandavein Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: 10k hours rule to master anything. Could I switch career when I am 43?”

The youtuber Veritasium recently did a video on the 10,000 hour expert. Summary: you need 4 things to become an expert. From comment with timestamps: 5:00 Repeated attempts with feedback. 6:47 Valid environment. 11:23 Timely feedback. 13:50 Don't get to comfortable. Video link: link to this video Comment link: link to this video

Zensynthiumin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: 10k hours rule to master anything. Could I switch career when I am 43?”

Derek from Veritasium had a pretty good video on becoming an expert in anything and I didn't see age as a blocking factor. I'd say go for it! Also check out the video here, it's worth a watch link to this video

somenameformein Hacker News • Recommends

On “How to Start a Rocket Engine”

I'd also add this standard. Another amazing YouTuber is Veritasium. He went from 1 to 2. The production quality is more than slightly improved, but the "spirit" remains identical. And I think that spirit is what drives success or failure. The production quality is just icing. 1 - link 2 - link to this video

angarg12in Hacker News • Recommends

On “Learning needs to be effortful to be effective”

Deliberate practice is a well studied phenomenon. My favourite talk in the subject is this one from Veritasium link to this video

swframe2in Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?”

The Veritasium youtube channel has a few interesting videos related to this topic: This one is on IQ: link Pay attention to the stats on how IQ correlates to success (near the end). This one is about becoming an expert: link to this video This one is about someone who just worked harder than everyone else: link

lolinderin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Learn perfect pitch in 15 years”

It's absolutely pseudoscience. 10k hours doing what ? And why would we expect to see an approximately equal amount of time to achieve expertise across so many different human endeavors? Veritasium has a really good video on the subject 0, with a much more compelling explanation for what it takes to develop expertise. He comes up with 4 things, but the two that stood out the most to me are that the field needs to be deterministic—the more randomness is involved the less expertise is possible—and that the learner needs consistent and accurate feedback on what they get right and wrong. Absent those factors no number of hours will do you any good. 0 link to this video

manholioin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Against Discipline”

"Vision" is what happens in your brain after you grind 10,000 hours on a skill that is improvable: link to this video At that point, you no longer have to grind, because your brain has hardwired decision paths that are automatic and produce correct results for extremely complex problems like "is this character likeable and understandable by the reader", and you can effortlessly add a few high value paragraphs to their backstory. But it's foolhardy to think that level of "flow" can be achieved out of thin air, without writing hundreds of characters before them, re-reading them, getting feedback from other readers, studying other briliant authors with a eye for their technique etc.

lathiatin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Multitasking, something we copied from computers”

Sounds a bit like “System 1/System 2” thinking. can definitely drive and listen to a podcast when you’re good at it. link to this video

ninjagooin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributors or Leave”

There might be fundamental incompatibilities here because of orthogonal goals - if you're an ambitious person in a corporate hierarchy won't one (or maybe even primary) goal be to climb the ladder? And if you're a founder won't your goal be to 'grow the product or service'? Now one way to climb the ladder may be to grow the product or service, but in a larger org the ability to influence a product or service in a major way might be a bit limited, with decision-making at the business level being controlled by upper echelons. So the ladder-climbing process would select for different skills and temperament than founding/running a company. Essentially, in a corporate hierarchy, we're asking peop…

afry1in Hacker News • Mentions

On “Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next (2019)”

The 2:00 timestamp in this Veritassium video on expertise goes into exactly that phenomenon. We acquire expertise by recognizing the patterns in what we do. But once you take the patterns away, a lot of that "expertise" disappears too: link to this video Jazz piano vs classical is a perfect example of this: same instrument, two paradigms with totally different idioms.

NalNezumiin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator”

Not just a problem in US but I'd say one of the issue is that we have expert inflation, and not all expertise are equally valid. We have some insight from Decision theory. Klein and Kahneman have both identified required properties for valuable expert intuition (or knowledge, tacit or not) to be available to aquire. (here's a simplified version of this by Veritasium 1) Most people would see through the conartist claiming "I'm a roulette expert. I've done roulette for 10 years, I have 10 years of roulette expertise, you should listen to me when it comes to what number you should bet on a roulette!" Yet we all fall for other form of expert where their problem domain follow similar structures…

incomingpainin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Generalists, when do you say "I know enough" about any particular topic?”

>The idea is generalists know a lot about everything and when to pass it off to a subject matter expert. link to this video link It's all about history repeating; or better yet understanding when it's something new and often forcing that. They say 10,000 hours to become an expert, but that's brute forced learning. When you actually learn how to learn, what universities USED TO teach and have since stopped teaching, you can do it much quicker. People who know how to learn can become an expert in under 1000 hours. >In 2025, with everything in tech changing by the minute, I’m realizing I need to set boundaries about how deep I go on any particular topic. But I’m unsure how. Particularly if I don’t want…

dahartin Hacker News • Mentions

On “210 IQ Is Not Enough”

Weschler’s definition of intelligence fits almost all functional adults, and most animals on the planet for that matter, and it doesn’t really back up your claim above about extreme intelligence. You’ve conflated a lot of things together here. There’s no evidence of any concepts that average adults can’t understand given time and interest. Ability to solve Fermat’s last theorem is function of interest and grit and time and context and education and whole slew of things not directly related to intelligence. Your example actually demonstrates my point quite nicely: there are a lot of people who understand Wiles’ proof even though they didn’t come up with it. You and I could too, if we wanted;…

NalNezumiin Hacker News • Mentions

On “The better the autopilot the worse the pilot”

…es when people don't keep this up. This can be seen in the diagnostic performance differences between junior and senior doctors, not always in the favor to the senior 3. If you add a layer of automation but the insight gathered by working on that layer is great (and falls off) then deliberate practice start to become a requirement 1 link 2 link to this video 3 link…