Succeed by being an Incrementalist | Hacker News Reader

Succeed by being an Incrementalist

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48 pointsedanm15 comments

The "entity theorist" street goes both ways: they're unwilling to learn skills outside of their expertise, and they are unwilling to share their expertise with others. The entity theorists I know all act like tasks require magic, and you have it or you don't.

My family has lost an excellent bread recipe as a result! Growing up, my mother always helped my grandmother in the kitchen. My grandmother was a fair cook, but she could (according to legend) make the best bread. She never permitted her children to make the bread - they just didn't "have the knack." Their loaves weren't as good as hers. So when she passed, so too did the recipe. But that's garbage! They weren't missing some magic knack, they were children who had never made bread before.

There is no magic. It's hard work all the way down.

I'd like to see research done on the teaching methods of entity theorists versus incremental theorists. I bet Incrementalists are more willing teachers!

I think this is related to pecking order, in that once someone is elevated to a dominant role in some sense, the tendency is to not question them, day-to-day. A challenge is a dramatic and unusual event. This tendency makes for a more stable society (or troop of chimps/flock of sheep).

There's a jurisprudential idea that people don't obey the law only out of the goodness of their heart, nor out of an economically assessed fear of sanctions, but of a "habit of obedience". This (to me) seems related to the pecking order instinct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence#Bentham_and_Austi...

Fairy tales (for young and therefore impressionable children) have a strong theme of people being born to a certain role. And the idea appeals to children.

The belief that you can improve is a revolutionary, subversive and dangerous idea.

A article about related research by Carol Dweck, academic psychologist

> During one unforgettable moment, one boy-something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type-faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, "I love a challenge."

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...

The thing that always interests me in these discussions is:

Apparently believing you can achieve through hard work increases your achievement over believing you're born good or bad.

What I'm curious about is how much this is actually true, which never seems to be addressed - articles (eg the linked one) talk about how holding one belief or another affects your success in life, but never about which is a better understanding of reality.

Given believing you can achieve through hard work increases your success it implies that being good or bad is at least partially based on hard work.

I've had plenty of tries at taking a field I know nothing about, then learning enough to be at least mildly good. I've never given anything the kind of commitment I give to computers, but I know that I can learn other things to a degree that I'll be good there.

That's not to say you shouldn't concentrate on your strengths; there are just some things you'll have to learn along the way, especially if you want to create a company, and you're going to suck at them, at least at first.

Pop psychology, you know? It can teach you a lot about the reductionist inclinations of people.

Let me posit something: A segment of the population thinks, for one reason or another, that hard work [1] isn't very useful.

Now, go back in time TEN THOUSAND years, learn the local language and ask the nearest slave/peasant/hunter (in the local dialect) whether hard work results in improvement. "Yeah, sure." say most. But some of them will be downers and say, "No."

What have we learned? That farmers from 10,000 years ago are up on the latest in pop pyschology. Now, if you try to apply this illuminating insight, and attempt to change children into harder workers then you're really doing something that no one's ever thought of before. Maybe write a book about it.

[1] By the way, I use the phrase "hard work" instead if "incrementalism" or whatever, because that is another bad habit: Renaming an existing concept in order to sound original.

I voted you up because I agree that the terminology being used is silly and that dividing people (especially children!) into one of two categories is "reductionist" in a bad way.

However, the less silly version of the point is valid and non-trivial, even if not in need of new technical categories.

People who think that talent or ability is basically innate are wrong and hindered by this fact. People who think that it's basically acquired by effort and time are right and are helped by this fact.

I also think it's valid to point out that smarter people often suffer more from having the wrong view on this issue. This isn't necessarily their fault, I think there are institutional causes for this. For example, American public schools seem to be structured to make it likely that smart students absorb lazy habits. Smart kids observe that they can get top marks pretty much effortlessly and never develop a work ethic.

Just a word on the terminology I used in the article: it was taken from Josh Waitzkin's book, and he took the terms from actual psychological studies performed by Carol Dweck, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck. So the terminology does have some roots in actual psychology).

Not sure what you're getting at. If someone means "hard work", or really, just "work", but they make a new term for the sake of making a new term, then it's all the worse that it's coming from an "actual" pyschologist. I hope I didn't suggest that professionals don't do that. They do obviously, especially in the soft sciences.

The term doesn't mean "hard work". It's shorthand for saying: "believing that hard work, and not inherent talent, is what brings success". So I think in this case, the term is worthwhile.

Yes, but academic psychology can also coin terms that are a bit silly.

There is a real distinction here, to be sure, and I'm glad that there are academics working on it. But "entity theorist" vs. "incremental theorist" is bad terminology for the distinction. It's "entities" (i.e. people) that do the learning, after all, and learning isn't necessarily "incremental", especially not in the sense of regular increases along a scale of fixed units. Implying that people are "theorists" of these things, either by calling them so or turning the terms into -isms or -ists, is also misleading.

What you really have are people with different kinds of mentalities or attitudes towards the relationship between ability and effort. If we need a new term, it could be based on that, such as "effort-oriented mentality" vs. "aptitude-oriented mentality" (or something like that).

Dweck popularized her work using the terms "fixed mindset" and "growth mindset".

I think there's probably a deeper explanation of this.

Our brains have a strong tendancy to see results as being caused by "essences". Our brains naturally think of all results and their causes in this fashion, and it takes work to override this kind of thinking. Science has been largely a matter of showing that causes are not essences but mechanisms.

And "entity theorists" are people who see human capabilities as the result of essences - as an intrinsic "essence" that you either have or haven't got.

So basically, practice makes perfect.

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