Ultralearning Ch. 9 - Principle 6 - Feedback
Don’t Dodge the Punches
The Power of Information
Feedback is one of the most consistent aspects of the strategy ultra learners use. Feedback features prominently in the research on deliberate practice. In his studies, Ericsson has found that the ability to gain immediate feedback on one’s performance is an essential ingredient in reaching expert levels of performance. No feedback, and the result is often stagnation — long periods of time when you continue to use a skill but don’t get any better at it. Sometimes the lack of feedback can even result in declining abilities.
Can Feedback Backfire?
More isn’t always better. What matters is the type of feedback being given. Feedback works well when it provides useful information that can guide future learning. But feedback often backfires when it is aimed at a person’s ego. Praise, a common type of feedback that teachers often use (and students enjoy), is usually harmful to further learning. Further, even feedback that includes useful information needs to be correctly processed as a motivator and tool for learning. Sometimes, the subjects chose not to use good feedback constructively. Who is giving the feedback can matter.
When seeking feedback, the ultra learner needs to be on guard for two possibilities. The first is overreacting to feedback (both positive and negative) that doesn’t offer specific information that leads to improvement. Ultra learners need to be sensitive to what feedback is actually useful and tune out the rest. This is why, although all the ultra learners the author has met employed feedback, they didn’t act on every piece of possible feedback. Eric Barone, for instance, did not attend to every comment and critique on early drafts of his game. In many cases he ignored them, when the feedback conflicted with his vision.
Second, when it is incorrectly applied, feedback can have a negative impact on motivation. Not only can overly negative feedback lower your motivation, but so can overly positive feedback. Ultra learners must balance both concerns, pushing for the right level of feedback for their current stage of learning. Though we all know (and instinctively avoid) harsh and unhelpful criticism, the research also supports Rock’s strategy of disregarding the positive feedback that his celebrity automatically generates.
Ultra learners acquire skills quickly because they seek aggressive feedback when others opt for practice that includes weaker forms of feedback or no feedback at all.
How can I get feedback as a programmer? One way is comparing my code to the solutions for assignments. Another way is to have someone else review my code and give me critical feedback.
What Kind of Feedback do you need?
The opportunities for seeking better feedback will vary depending on what you’re trying to learn. Rather than try to spell out exactly what feedback you need for your learning project, I think it’s important to consider different types of feedback, along with how each one can be used and cultivated.
Outcome Feedback: Are you doing it wrong?
This tells you something about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse. This kind of feedback can come in the form of a grade — pass/fail, A, B, or C — or it can come in the form of an aggregate feedback to any decisions you’re making simultaneously. Applause or crickets after a speech is an example of outcome feedback. It could tell you if you’re getting better or worse, but it couldn’t really say why or how to fix it. Although outcome feedback isn’t complete, it is often the only kind available and can still have a potent impact on your learning rate.
Information Feedback: What are you doing wrong?
This feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it. This kind of feedback is easy to obtain when you can get real-time access to a feedback source. A computer programmer who gets error messages when her programs don’t compile properly may not have enough knowledge to understand what she’s doing wrong. But as errors increase or diminish, depending on what she does, she can use that signal to fix her problems.
Self-provided feedback is also ubiquitous, and in some pursuits it can be almost as good as feedback from others. Because this kind of feedback often comes from direct interaction with the environment, it often pairs well with the third principle, directness.
Corrective Feedback: How can you fix what you’re doing wrong?
This is the best kind of feedback to get. This is the feedback that shows you not only what you’re doing wrong but how to fix it. This kind of feedback is often available only through a coach, mentor, or teacher. However, sometimes it can be provided automatically if you are using the right study materials. You can see how your answer differs from a solution when doing a math problem, and this can be a form of corrective feedback. Similarly, flash cards and other forms of active recall provide corrective feedback by showing you the answer to a question after you make your guess.
This type of feedback trumps outcome feedback. Sometimes, if can be useful to pay for a tutor, mentor, or coach. The self-directed nature of ultra learning shouldn’t convince you that learning is best done as an entirely solitary pursuit. Maybe for technical interviews, I could hire a coach.
How quick should feedback be?
Faster feedback is generally recommended. This enables a quicker recognition of mistakes. However, feedback too soon may turn your retrieval practice effectively into passive review, which we already know is less effective for learning. For hard problems, the author suggests setting yourself a timer to encourage you to think hard on difficult problems before giving up to look at the correct answer.
How to improve your feedback
Tactic 1: Noise Cancellation
Anytime you receive feedback, there are going to be both a signal — the useful information you want to process — and noise. Try to extract the signal from the noise, and use less noisy data if you can.
Tactic 2: Hitting the difficulty sweet spot
Feedback is information. More information equals more opportunities to learn. You should try to avoid situations that always make you feed good (or bad) about your performance.
Tactic 3: Metafeedback
This is about evaluating the overall success of the strategy you’re using to learn. One important type of metafeedback is your learning rate. Chess players might track their Elo ratings growth. LSAT studiers might track their improvements on mock exams. Language learners might track vocabulary learned or errors made when writing or speaking. There are two ways you can use this tool. One is to decide when you should focus on the strategy you’re already using and when you should experiment with other methods.
If your learning rate is slowing to a trickle, that might mean you’re hitting diminishing returns with your current approach and could benefit from different kinds of drills, difficulties, or environments. A second way you can apply meta feedback is by comparing two different study methods to see which works better.
One data point for meta learning for me is I am tracking the amount of focus time for each course that I’m taking. This is a way of gauging my rate of learning, and each week I can analyze and see if I’m falling behind in my baseline level of effort.
Tactic 4: High-Intensity, Rapid Feedback
Sometimes the easiest way to improve feedback it simply to get a lot more of it a lot more often. This is particularly true when the default mode of learning involves little or infrequent feedback.
Beyond Feedback
Ultra learners expose themselves to massive amounts of feedback so that the noise can be stripped away from the signal. Feedback and the information it provides, however, is useful only if you remember the lessons it teaches. Forgetting is human nature, so it is not enough to learn; you also need to make the information stick. This brings us to the next principle of ultra learning, retention, in which we’ll discuss strategies that will ensure the lessons you learn aren’t forgotten.