On Tue, 03 Jul 2018 09:14:37 -0700, Jim Lee wrote: > On 07/03/18 01:34, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> I said *indefinite* not infinite. > > Yes, you did. My bad.
Thanks Jim, your acknowledgement is appreciated. >> You did read the article I linked to, right? You know that people don't >> suddenly and instantly turn from "beginner" to "expert" when they >> exceed 9,999 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds? Quibbling over the exact >> number of hours is foolish. > > > Of course I know that. I've been familiar with the concept for a long > time. I've taught several guitarists and have seen it first hand. I've > also trained several programmers. Okay, so you *do* understand that the "ten thousand hours" concept is a rough, order of magnitude, average figure. Great. Which makes your quibbling over whether it is 10,000 hours or five years or two years all the more mysterious. > Quibbling over the exact number of hours *is* foolish - but nobody was > doing that. Ah nice to see the ol' "deny everything" debating tactic. > I was simply pointing out that you used three vastly > different numbers in almost the same breath to describe how long it > takes a person to master something. I love watching pedantically precise people panic and dig themselves into a hole. Since I'm an extremely pedantic person myself, I can recognise it in others -- especially when they're not as precisely correct as they think they're being. It was two numbers, not three, and not even close to "vastly" different. Both numbers I mentioned (ten thousand hours, a couple of years) are within the bounds of acceptable precision to each other: their (figurative) error bars overlap. My first reference to the number was in quotation marks: "10,000 hours", not 10,000 hours. That was your first hint that I was not using it as a precise number, but as a "vague quantifier" (to give the technical name for the concept). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_and_fictitious_numbers#Specific_numbers_used_as_indefinite My second reference was to EXPLICITLY state the number was intended to be read as an imprecise quantity. No second number was mentioned. And the third was to reference a number (a couple of years) which even if read literally rather than figuratively is within an order of magnitude of the original. Even read as *different*, they're not "vastly" different (a vague quantifier which surely means more than merely a single order of magnitude: jumping from five to five billion would surely be a vast difference, not five to fifty). > I think we both get the idea - let's back out of this rabbit trail > before we get lost, ok? :) Translation: "Yeah Steve, you're right, I was kinda a dick for pedantically telling you off for imprecision in numbers even though I knew full well that no greater precision was possible or desirable, but how 'bout you drop it and leave me with the last word, hmmm?" No worries Jim, I totally agree. *wink* -- Steven D'Aprano "Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
