I think this is definitely part of it. But I've been going to the gym since college, and it wasn't until I got really into it as a hobby that the science-based stuff popped up on my radar. I'm not sure that casual gym goers know who Dr. Mike is. But maybe I'm wrong!
For a lot of people getting to the other side of 40 and 50, science helps explain the body changes and then the fitness gurus seem to provide an answer to reverse what likely is irreversible. Some wonderful ones out there wisely suggest strengthening and clarify that it won't reverse aging but help survive it better. We shouldn't throw out all the advice. The manosphere is unbearable but women's fitness advice for peri-and menopausal women isn't bad at all.
I definitely agree we shouldn't throw away the advice! But it's also important to separate the advice that comes from experience and wisdom from the advice that comes from systematic reviews of clinical trials.
Trying to scientifize the arts is strange. Imagine trying to tell artists that your scientific method will produce the best and most optimal artwork. Being an artist myself, I know for a fact that all of them would look at you like your crazy and dismiss you immediately.
I started learning an instrument in middle age. A few things struck me.
First, the *astounding* athletic gaps between: A) someone who has never picked up an instrument at all, B) someone who can scrape out Suzuki book 3 competently, C) your typical area music teacher, and D) the concertmaster of the LA Philharmonic.
Second, the fact that our civilization has figured out how to consistently produce new musicians who can play at the paid professional level, at vast scale. Without RCTs, as far as I know.
And finally, how astonishing it is that so many people are somewhere above level B and can just, you know, make music that is nice to listen to. Regular people! With day jobs and everything! Just unreal.
I think there are some hidden assumptions, one that comes to mind is that music is more open to creative evolution, new forms emerge and imitate or build on old ones. So there's a level of creativity in music that doesn't track simply along performance in the form of faster speeds, microtones, i.e., skill is more like a prerequisite, and even that requires qualification. Look at Addison Rae, is she a skilled musician?
In sports and weight lifting, the objectives are few, lift heavy or get shredded and huge. With such specific outcomes, it's easier to science, since the goals can be better isolated and RCTs are actually valuable. If speed and microtones, etc., were the primary goals in people playing instruments and we had way more people interested in those goals, I do think we'd see an evolution of our professional music schools and how they teach their students.
There are attempts to do sciencey evaluation around formalized or semi-formalized "methods" in music instruction, which is maybe close? For example here's a systematic review of the effectiveness of the Suzuki method, following PRISMA and all: https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241297265.
One difference might be that the audience isn't the same. My impression is that adult gym nerds are reading RCTs in hopes of improving their own gymming, while the primary target of literature on effectiveness of music education methods is parents. Probably the same parents who might be interested in systematic reviews of non-music education methods; whether, say, the Montessori method is effective: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7
While I should have added the caveat that academics will write papers about anything, I don't think these particular examples are evidence that there's a lot of swing with parents. Maybe if Emily Oster wrote about them...
Excellent question, Ben. On the one side, doctors (well some smart and honest ones, rare as they may be) are acknowledging that medical stats goes only so far to treat a person and subtly asking patients to zoom in on their own care as who else can best see all the nuances? (Meuopausal) Womens sports health "queen" Stacy Simms says a lot of things you mention and there are now dozens of group chats where women recognize not everything she says works for them. The problem is that these generally smart people start digging in and not allowing for either the statistical variation or limited sample observations (largely, extremely fit athletes) to clarify their comments.
Coming to music, coming from a household of amateur and seriously want-to-be professional musicians, we research voice and piano techniques a lot. There is much science to some of this and as with everything else it changes both with time and with the instructor. Western vocal music has focused a lot on the science of good healthy voice production. Guitar, while a serious instrument, perhaps hasn't been given that level of detail. Other cultures like India have developed a vast repertoire of how to build complex rhythms with math and how to do so in performance. Southern Indians are masters of complex rhythm unheard of us in western music.
You are spot on in the tradeoff between extreme practice and much needed practice. There are crazy piano teachers who do push their students a lot and yet others who insist on good technique (sadly a losing art in the USA) and most who simply want students and parents to be happy. After much experimentation, we chose the former for our musically inclined teen but it is intense. I am sure there are papers on improving performance but a performance is not a beauty contest --- and so maybe cannot be judged the same way. We all know that young (predominantly Asian) performers have pushed the boundaries of playing piano fast and yet perfectly. My daughter got a chance to perform in Japan a few weeks back and she did well and then along came a local kid (younger than her 16 years of age) and nailed a complex piece so well that the combination of technique and sound was astounding. YouTube is full of advice for musicians --- gotta be smart to know how to traverse it. Whether it is scientifically justified is another story and I wonder if this is being done. Certainly not like the buff-obsessed worlds.
Another thing I realise is that progress is touted as being "measurable". That is, "you are now lifting more than you could before". That is fertile ground for maxxing. I'm pretty naive when it comes to the music industry, but I guess this may show up more as "you are doing more concerts/earning more money", but these seem like much harder optimization problems compared to "keep lifting more and eat better"
Much musical technique is measurable insofar as there are particularly difficult pieces that are hard to play at the right tempo. But I agree about the deceptive simplicity numbers promise in weightlifting. Having failed a lift I should have been able to make this week, I can tell you that numbers don't always go up for mysterious reasons!
Check out Anton Oparin. His schtick is exactly the opposite: "my dad was a Soviet sports scientist and I applied his principles to develop the Physiologically Perfect Picking Technique to Rule Them All".
Re. "no RCTs", I think music educators' reasoning implicitly goes "there's too much that's context-specific and endogenous, so the best you can do is find a first-principles based aprioristic theory and refine it into a praxis from your own experience with students". Anton has focused on #1 (my friends' experience with #2 isn't that great).
Also... There's just not a lot of money to fund RCTs in music education, and probably for good reason :P
"what it is about the gym that makes us think that we can science it"
Is it as simple as: more people go to the gym and there's no sense of creative process/sacredness when lifting weights for most people. I think.
I think this is definitely part of it. But I've been going to the gym since college, and it wasn't until I got really into it as a hobby that the science-based stuff popped up on my radar. I'm not sure that casual gym goers know who Dr. Mike is. But maybe I'm wrong!
For a lot of people getting to the other side of 40 and 50, science helps explain the body changes and then the fitness gurus seem to provide an answer to reverse what likely is irreversible. Some wonderful ones out there wisely suggest strengthening and clarify that it won't reverse aging but help survive it better. We shouldn't throw out all the advice. The manosphere is unbearable but women's fitness advice for peri-and menopausal women isn't bad at all.
I definitely agree we shouldn't throw away the advice! But it's also important to separate the advice that comes from experience and wisdom from the advice that comes from systematic reviews of clinical trials.
Casual gym goers know who Dr Mike is, we true freaks know who Lyle McDonald is
Trying to scientifize the arts is strange. Imagine trying to tell artists that your scientific method will produce the best and most optimal artwork. Being an artist myself, I know for a fact that all of them would look at you like your crazy and dismiss you immediately.
I started learning an instrument in middle age. A few things struck me.
First, the *astounding* athletic gaps between: A) someone who has never picked up an instrument at all, B) someone who can scrape out Suzuki book 3 competently, C) your typical area music teacher, and D) the concertmaster of the LA Philharmonic.
Second, the fact that our civilization has figured out how to consistently produce new musicians who can play at the paid professional level, at vast scale. Without RCTs, as far as I know.
And finally, how astonishing it is that so many people are somewhere above level B and can just, you know, make music that is nice to listen to. Regular people! With day jobs and everything! Just unreal.
Thought provoking.
I think there are some hidden assumptions, one that comes to mind is that music is more open to creative evolution, new forms emerge and imitate or build on old ones. So there's a level of creativity in music that doesn't track simply along performance in the form of faster speeds, microtones, i.e., skill is more like a prerequisite, and even that requires qualification. Look at Addison Rae, is she a skilled musician?
In sports and weight lifting, the objectives are few, lift heavy or get shredded and huge. With such specific outcomes, it's easier to science, since the goals can be better isolated and RCTs are actually valuable. If speed and microtones, etc., were the primary goals in people playing instruments and we had way more people interested in those goals, I do think we'd see an evolution of our professional music schools and how they teach their students.
There are attempts to do sciencey evaluation around formalized or semi-formalized "methods" in music instruction, which is maybe close? For example here's a systematic review of the effectiveness of the Suzuki method, following PRISMA and all: https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241297265.
One difference might be that the audience isn't the same. My impression is that adult gym nerds are reading RCTs in hopes of improving their own gymming, while the primary target of literature on effectiveness of music education methods is parents. Probably the same parents who might be interested in systematic reviews of non-music education methods; whether, say, the Montessori method is effective: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7
While I should have added the caveat that academics will write papers about anything, I don't think these particular examples are evidence that there's a lot of swing with parents. Maybe if Emily Oster wrote about them...
Excellent question, Ben. On the one side, doctors (well some smart and honest ones, rare as they may be) are acknowledging that medical stats goes only so far to treat a person and subtly asking patients to zoom in on their own care as who else can best see all the nuances? (Meuopausal) Womens sports health "queen" Stacy Simms says a lot of things you mention and there are now dozens of group chats where women recognize not everything she says works for them. The problem is that these generally smart people start digging in and not allowing for either the statistical variation or limited sample observations (largely, extremely fit athletes) to clarify their comments.
Coming to music, coming from a household of amateur and seriously want-to-be professional musicians, we research voice and piano techniques a lot. There is much science to some of this and as with everything else it changes both with time and with the instructor. Western vocal music has focused a lot on the science of good healthy voice production. Guitar, while a serious instrument, perhaps hasn't been given that level of detail. Other cultures like India have developed a vast repertoire of how to build complex rhythms with math and how to do so in performance. Southern Indians are masters of complex rhythm unheard of us in western music.
You are spot on in the tradeoff between extreme practice and much needed practice. There are crazy piano teachers who do push their students a lot and yet others who insist on good technique (sadly a losing art in the USA) and most who simply want students and parents to be happy. After much experimentation, we chose the former for our musically inclined teen but it is intense. I am sure there are papers on improving performance but a performance is not a beauty contest --- and so maybe cannot be judged the same way. We all know that young (predominantly Asian) performers have pushed the boundaries of playing piano fast and yet perfectly. My daughter got a chance to perform in Japan a few weeks back and she did well and then along came a local kid (younger than her 16 years of age) and nailed a complex piece so well that the combination of technique and sound was astounding. YouTube is full of advice for musicians --- gotta be smart to know how to traverse it. Whether it is scientifically justified is another story and I wonder if this is being done. Certainly not like the buff-obsessed worlds.
Another thing I realise is that progress is touted as being "measurable". That is, "you are now lifting more than you could before". That is fertile ground for maxxing. I'm pretty naive when it comes to the music industry, but I guess this may show up more as "you are doing more concerts/earning more money", but these seem like much harder optimization problems compared to "keep lifting more and eat better"
Much musical technique is measurable insofar as there are particularly difficult pieces that are hard to play at the right tempo. But I agree about the deceptive simplicity numbers promise in weightlifting. Having failed a lift I should have been able to make this week, I can tell you that numbers don't always go up for mysterious reasons!
Check out Anton Oparin. His schtick is exactly the opposite: "my dad was a Soviet sports scientist and I applied his principles to develop the Physiologically Perfect Picking Technique to Rule Them All".
Re. "no RCTs", I think music educators' reasoning implicitly goes "there's too much that's context-specific and endogenous, so the best you can do is find a first-principles based aprioristic theory and refine it into a praxis from your own experience with students". Anton has focused on #1 (my friends' experience with #2 isn't that great).
Also... There's just not a lot of money to fund RCTs in music education, and probably for good reason :P