What’s the difference between fields like music and sports and ones like investment banking and programming? Empirically, why does it seem like a higher percentage of the practitioners of the former fields are virtuosos than in most other fields? (A strong argument is that it’s a lot easier to identify virtuosity as an outsider in those fields than others and they also tend to be more visible, but I’m trying to make a point here.)
I think a lot of it comes down to environment. It’s a lot easier to achieve virtuosity in environments that are conducive to deliberate practice.
Some characteristics of these environments:
- Lots of practice
- Tight feedback loops
- Easy way to distinguish between success and failure
- High signal feedback
Example: Kaggle is an environment that made it a lot easier to do deliberate practice in data science/ml.