10,000 hour rule DEBUNKED

Facts by their nature are independent of human agreement.  The Earth is around 4.2 billion years old and just because ancient Greeks thought it was mere hundreds of thousands didn't change that fact.

"So 10,000 is neither necessary nor sufficient.  It's just that practice is guaranteed to make you better."

He's more likely to be claiming that 10,000 is necessary, but not sufficient. But of course it's hard to imagine such a specific number as 10,000 would apply everywhere. But even a Carlsen, for example... I don't see him being GM in his first 10 hours of playing, in fact he would probably be pretty bad after just 10 hours. He simply was the kind of person who could benefit from all that encoding of patterns, and for that it's hard to get around obnoxiously large amounts of study. We are not engines, of course, but just pure thought without patterns, in a game with so many possibilities, is terribly slow, even if that thought is really clever.

To believe the ideas above does not commit one to accept everyone who puts in the hours. It just means to refuse everyone who does not.

Actually that "notwithstanding all the stories of natural prodigies" is a bit odd (I missed it) because it does seem to go against the very point he was trying to make.

Anyway I do believe in "necessary but not sufficient" here, although I don't necessarily have a precise number like "10000" in mind. But it's a number large enough (a decent amount of thousands), that it's just not the kind of thing you can do overnight but have to keep at it very consistently.

In other words, it's not like how a smart person may be able to cram for an exam without knowing much about the topic prior. Such a hope is laughable for something like chess, no matter how smart you are.