Re: Bad training
"The 10K hours rule is also a myth.."
I wouldn't call it a myth. Certainly the idea that you need exactly 10k hours, no more, no less, would be ridiculous, but as a nice round number representing the idea that you need to spend a lot of time doing something to become an expert, it's really not that bad. It's often brought up in relation to musical instruments, and that's not a bad analogy here. Not everyone needs to spend decades of their life dedicated to being one of the world's best, but the drivers we allow on our roads are the equivalent of an 11 year old strangling a cat with their violin. Or worse, someone who was once like that but is now in their 30s and hasn't touched a violin once in the intervening 20 years but is still treated as if they are a competent professional musician.
10k hours certainly shouldn't be taken as gospel, but it's a good illustration of the gap between the practice and experience required for competence/expertise, and what we actually require of people before letting them loose on the road.
I should also note that I'm well aware of the problems actually requiring a sensible amount of practice would cause - no-one would be able to drive before their 30s and most people would never be able to find the time and money to manage even that. The trouble is that as things stand, since finding a solution is tricky we, as a country, just throw up our hands and don't even bother looking for one. Instead of thinking about how to produce good drivers, we just make stupid laws punishing people for not having the competence we never required them to have in the first place.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
