2024-01-03
- My contribution to the nature/nurture debate. One, some things are innate. Others are taught/learned. No question there, hopefully not controversial. With that said, I’ve seen so many instances where people (myself included!) think something is Nature only to find for myself that it is highly Nurture-able, that I think Nurture generally dominates, along most areas people care about. I think the disconnect between Nature/Nurture groups is most prominent when discussing achievements that take a long time. Nature is often credited (Kanye is a genius) when really Nurture very likely played a larger role (Kanye, in one song, raps about how he “did 5 beats a day for 3 summers,” a testament to his nurturing of his own talent). Seems likely in those cases that the availability bias overwhelms more rational reasoning processes: it’s easy to see the great outcome and the person next to it, there’s an immediacy and availability of that image. It requires comparatively much more
imagination/mental effort to see the outcome/person at the end and walk back to a kid in a basement making beats. To us, Kanye was always a crazy genius! In any case, a ton of stuff is amenable to nurturing, and the extent to which a thing can be nurtured is also generally very impressive. So like, you may not have the talent to become the literal best piano player in the world (as recognized by your peers/general community), but you probably have the ability to become top 1% of piano players, which is still very impressive and generally well beyond the goals of what people would want at the outset of picking up piano. So, I guess to sum it up, I am mostly team Nurture at this point.
- mmm have had such a wonderful back and forth with my music teacher about some music philosophy stuff. It was a long, and rich conversation, and I won’t really get into all of it here. But I wanted to write down some of the really juicy stuff. We were talking about this notion of “quality.” The question we were discussing was whether people need to be “educated” in order to have a deep appreciation for music “quality.” Is training important? As you might guess from my previous message here, I am very pro training. My teacher was in more of the opposite camp: that music quality is very real, and if you just really listen, you can tell what great music is without being told/taught. Our discussion eventually reached for analogies/metaphors that were helpful. My teacher brought up that everyone can tell the difference between a Ferrari and a Nissan when driving. I thought that was a fairly good example, in that I would have been mostly happy to take the other side of that bet.
But, to be specific about my claim, it’s not that I think people don’t perceive a difference when driving a Ferrari or Nissan (I think they generally do), it’s that the average person, will “know” a Ferrari is better because they are paying attention to signals that correlate with quality. Critically, the average person would not be able to pick up actual quality signals outside of those correlations being present. To make it more concrete, I think people perceive differences in quality in cases like this mostly based on things like brand recognition and perceived “rarity” (how many do you see in normal life). Those are real signals, they are just one step removed from being the signals that make up actual quality (most of the time). Anyways, the car example isn’t great because neither of us has driven a Ferrari or Nissan recently. But I think the point stands that most of the time, in areas where people are not expert and where a base
quality bar is achieved among all options, people’s perceptions of quality are extremely influenced by things correlated with quality but when asked “why is this good?” they would largely fail to identify the specific signals an expert would note when assessing quality. Aka “expertise” is a real thing that is trained, in most domains. Man, this is getting rambly, but whatever, it’s a blog. Ok, in the context of the convo, we agreed to explore that kind of thing more later and moved on. But I want to expand on it. I think actual this notion of “signal processing” is a useful metaphor. And specifically, I want to use my last effort here to connect “signal processing” and “expertise” to the hedonic treadmill. Ok, so let’s say you become very skilled in some domain. As a result, you are very attuned to real quality signals and have strong, defensible positions about what is “good” and what is “not so good” in that domain. For me, this domain is computers, but it could be
any number of areas (e.g. music). And, as an expert in your area, you will often find yourself thinking “good taste” is important. This is not imaginary, and is traceable to the many instances in real life where the basis for important decisions comes in large part from that “good taste” developed by years of practice. Ok, taste/expertise are real and important. I’ll note here that this is my actual belief too! It’s not that this is wrong, it’s just that it reliably leads somewhere interesting. Anyways, continuing. Of course, it doesn’t take much to generalize this existence of “good taste” in your area to realize “good taste” exists in other areas. And not only does it exist, but, just like in your domain, it should be attainable and it’s important to attain it. These thoughts come together to make you want to enjoy the “good taste” in all fields. Very understandable, and a good idea, for sure. Unfortunately, in those other domains, you are not an expert. This means you will have to
put in work and time to develop expertise. That’s kind of ok, I like learning things. But…I don’t really like waiting. So, instead of waiting to learn what the “real” quality signals are in a domain, I try to short-circuit the process with cash. I obviously can’t “become an expert overnight” in any given domain (ridiculous notion, though you can absolutely do it in a handful of years). But I can easily pay attention to signals that correlate with quality. The most common/basic one is price. So, I go out and search “best X” and then buy it. This is all well and good, generally speaking. But it is also a cycle. It feeds on itself. There is no end to domains in which you can have “good taste.” And there’s no end to people willing to sell you “best X” when you can’t even distinguish between “bad X” and “average X.” So yeah, “expertise” in one domain can trigger a desire to have achieved “expertise” across other domains without triggering a desire to do the work to achieve
“expertise.” And we can more easily read/pay attention to signals correlated with quality than become tuned to actual signals of quality. Put those together and you’ve got a nice little treadmill going! And it all starts with developing a little expertise.
- As an addendum, these days, I am interested in breaking this particular hedonic treadmill cycle by committing to just being a true beginner. Most notably, in the area of learning music. It is hard. It means I do stuff that looks/feels “basic” and “stupid.” It means I embrace working with systems, at least at the beginning, that feel “weak.” It means buying the entry-level thing and seeing if I can hack it before going for the full-bells-and-whistles expert option (though, I still struggle with this tbh). Probably most importantly, it means that I have to be wrong and make mistakes, a lot. Indeed, it has been and continues to be, humbling to do this. But also, kind of cool to be there at the beginning again, when things aren’t working, when things don’t make sense, when the whole road is still ahead of you, and you know that even though many others have walked it, you get to do it all in your own way.
Date
January 3, 2024