A bad doctor might forget anything she sees less than once a week, a mediocre doctor might forget anything she sees less than once a month, and a great doctor might forget anything she sees less than once a year. And suppose that an average doctor sees 5 diseases ~weekly, another 5 diseases ~monthly, and another 5 diseases ~yearly. Suppose that you forget any fact you haven’t reviewed in X amount of time (X might be shorter or longer depending on your intelligence/memory/talent). The first explanation is a “dynamic equilibrium of forgetting”.
And here I talk about a slightly different phenomenon: ADHD children given Ritalin study harder and better, but haven’t learned any more vocabulary words at the end of a course (even though they haven’t learned all the vocabulary).Īfter a lot of looking through the psychological literature, I’ve found two hypotheses which, combined, mostly satisfy my curiosity. We find the same phenomenon in formal education on a standardized test of book learning for student doctors, there’s a big increase the first year of training, a smaller increase the second year, and by year 4-5 the increase is basically indistinguishable from zero (even though some doctors remain better than others). Why? Wouldn’t you expect someone who’s practiced medicine for twenty years to be better than someone who’s only done it for two? However, Goodwin et al find that only first-year doctors suffer from inexperience by a doctor’s second year, she’s doing about as well as she ever will. The linked study doesn’t go any younger (eg under 35, under 30…).
Young doctors (under 40) have slightly better cure rates than older doctors (eg 40-49). If acheivement is a function of talent and practice, at some point returns on practice decrease near zero. But you can’t get there just by practicing more. But this can’t be true most 35 year old writers aren’t Shakespeare or Dickens, so higher tiers of ability must be possible.
Sure, middle age might bring some mild proto-cognitive-impairment, but surely nothing so dire that it cancels out twenty extra years!Ī natural objection is that maybe they’ve maxed out their writing ability further practice won’t help. Isn’t this strange? However good a writer is at age 35, they should be even better at 55 with twenty more years of practice. Economist Philip Frances finds that creative artists, on average, do their best work in their late 30s.
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