My friends and I once argued about the primary reason top schools "produce" overachieving students. She thought that at least a part of it is from better staff and student to teacher ratio, whereas I argued that most of it is a self fulfilling prophecy. Families that cares most about education will sacrifice the most (time, money, opportunity cost) to get kids into elite schools, and those kids will work harder and devote more resources to test-prep.
This article states that failure-rate went from 8-9% to 25%, but I'm curious how that compares to the regional average. If say 35%-40% of 9th graders failed in surrounding regions, it would be an argument to keep the lottery based system.
I wonder how much of this is a self fulfilling prophecy due to racially weighted admission. i.e Many Asian parents are painfully aware of how much the deck is stacked against their kid, and therefore allocates extra time and resources accordingly to overcome the difficulties.
I’ve always been taught to spend >50% time practice hand separate first, increase tempo one hand at a time, and only combine after much practice, which seems to differ than the post. Does anyone have a view on how soon to jump into two hands when learning a new piece?
It’s highly subjective but it’s also certainly not just me.
From [1]:
> Your experience is quite typical. Playing two hands at the same time is completely different than playing both separately.
But the point of learning parts separately is NOT about making it easier to play both hands together. It's about learning all the "other" stuff (like correct hand position, articulation etc.) without having the distraction of the second hand.
From [1] but another person:
> Put another way, instrument playing is a conscious action, controlled by our executive function, and we only have one area of the brain that controls the executive function. Thus, homo sapiens's conscious control is, for better or worse, unitary, and we cannot do two independent tasks at once.
> The same is true for the piano.
From [2]:
> Hands separate practices the aural knowledge, or aural memory; and the intellectual. It practices physical on a smaller level, because you aren't practicing the coordination between two hands, but rather the security of one hand alone. But I think the amount it gives to physical knowledge is small enough that it doesn't really count as a method for improving that knowledge.
Sorry, I'm just unconvinced. There is no doubt that learning, for example, a Chopin Etude with the busiest hand alone is going to be a natural step before adding the second hand. Think about the reverse, would you expect someone who can play both hands together well to also be able to play them separately? Muscle memory does not disappear just because you add a second hand. The coordination does have some differences, but it's hardly a totally separated phenomenon.
> There is no doubt that learning, for example, a Chopin Etude with the busiest hand alone is going to be a natural step before adding the second hand.
To me, the phrases “There is no doubt that” and “natural” come across as if a certain amount of debate might be warranted.
> would you expect someone who can play both hands together well to also be able to play them separately?
Some may be able to, some not so easily. Think of a Bach fugue whose middle voice sometimes alternates across both hands. I’d say it heavily depends on the player and the piece.
> Muscle memory does not disappear just because you add a second hand.
Good point. I think my choice of words was poor when I claimed muscle memory would reset. What I do claim is that some people, myself included, experience friction in their muscle memory when they move between practicing both hands and a single hand.
> Think of a Bach fugue whose middle voice sometimes alternates across both hands. I’d say it heavily depends on the player and the piece.
It's ironic as I was actually thinking of my own experiences learning Bach fugues and how, when I learned the hands separately, it seemed to help a lot. Especially since finger technique with Bach is so technical and how you choose your fingering is critical, it's hard to master that for both hands simultaneously. After all, you are still using the same fingers when you add the two hands together, so giving yourself a chance to focus on just one hand seemed to always help me a lot -- not just help me, but actually was a requirement to getting it learned. I don't think I could have ever learned some of those intricate fugues if I'd done both hands together. Or at least, it would have taken longer. For example, which is easier, sight reading music with both hands, or sight reading each hand separately?
> For example, which is easier, sight reading music with both hands, or sight reading each hand separately?
That highly depends on the performer and the musical properties of the work.
Sight reading a single voice can be harder than with both hands because the voice of one hand may not always give you a complete picture: what the tonal center and functions are, how a theme or sequence develops, and how the voices relate to each other.
I mean, from a technical level, it’s hard to argue that playing a single voice, or single hand, requires less effort than sight reading multiple voices or two hands simultaneously.
But when sight reading, there’s a lot more going on than just technical skill. Depending on the person who is sight reading and which piece, playing both voices at the same time can, on an intellectual level, help tremendously with comprehension that it more than offsets the additional technical burden.
What interests me most about the FI community on reddit is how they split into two very different subgroups(leanfire and fatfire). Part of it is a difference in frugality, but part of it is is a fundamental difference in modeling risk.
Well, fatfire just has a larger bucket. If you've calculated a budget down to the penny (or even have a budget outside of in a generalized way), it's a lot harder to absorb unmodeled risks.
Give that pg is someone who can walk away from running YCombinator to work on other stuff for fun, he probably doesn't care about maximizing utility or impact at this point.
This article states that failure-rate went from 8-9% to 25%, but I'm curious how that compares to the regional average. If say 35%-40% of 9th graders failed in surrounding regions, it would be an argument to keep the lottery based system.