Talent
felixstocker.com
felixstocker.com
However, my motivating factor was my interest in the subject, not my innate strength in it, and that has pushed me to study it and become strong enough that I can (hopefully, I'm still in college!) succeed in that space.
There are subjects where I could probably succeed if I tried harder and effusively sweated blood (probably pure math related). Pure math is one of those things I just suck at. But the difference is that I don't find it personally interesting, and so the burden of learning and building talent feels infinitely more overwhelming.
Sometimes I wonder if interest influences not just my motivation, but my capacity for learning and talent. Sometimes I also wonder if my "lack of innate talent" is that actually "I generally learn more slowly." But maybe learning more slowly helps me learn things more deeply as well. Who knows.
* As a side note, the quote I was told is "if you want to be known as a dog killer, you should kill dogs."
If your parents present you with your first computer when you're five years old, and it drops you to a bash prompt, and that's all you have, then you'll probably know considerably more than everyone else just from that being your only choice for a computing environment.
So sometimes it's hard to quantify whether or not being more successful and growing faster is about the luck of exposure. There are times when I have switched textbooks for learning something or changed my learning style and suddenly catapaulted myself to having the highest scores in classes or understanding a topic infinitely better. People said assembly was easy for them, but maybe spending a year aimlessly typing "si" into GDB was not the most effective way to learn assembly.
But having access to all these resources for exposure allows people to develop their interests and find their talents. It's just hard to say sometimes if that's innate talent and aptitude or just interest and being exposed before everyone else.
Only if you have the interest and aptitude to dig in. Compare this with OP's story about trying to learn music instruments at an early age, and his brother. Like others have mentioned, it's a combination of things - you have to have the innate interest (or, if you're unlucky, really overbearing parents who force you to learn it, like Tiger Woods IIRC).
That is called school, everyone goes there. Before school was mandatory and most kids didn't go there was little opportunity to discover your talents, but today most kids gets to try crafting stuff and reading about a wide range of subjects and doing a wide range of physical sports and learning basic music in school.
There might still be some undiscovered talents after all that, but most do get in contact with something that relates to their talent if they have one.
But I wouldn't have progressed without having a parent who was a Java programmer at some point and local libraries with deeply technical books. I had to explore out of class to find my niche and develop my interests.
It does. Anything you have an interest in, you will spend more time thinking about in general, be more focused while learning the relevant bits, and will breed a willingness to learn something related, but not specific to what you need.
I'm senior technical in my dept and have had a lifelong interest in tech, how it works, why it works, etc. and in my case, my interest definitely influenced my ability to handle work, broad skillset, practical application and more.
YMMV, but imo, your statement is true.
GL!
especially the example of the indian boy who borrowed and worked through math textbooks of local college students made it pretty clear to me that the difference between him and the poor kids in the US was the inherent drive he seemed to have in this anecdote.
Same as for when the author described feeling to be deserving of praise for the work put in to get a C in math. He would not be satisfied with a C if he had an inherent drive to do math, hell he wouldn’t have gotten that C if he had and if he did he wouldn’t have felt deserving of applause since the work he put in would have felt like playing almost.
Whic implies that most of the time, they are.
And that's a good thing. If it took you years to grasp assembly and C, whereas e.g. asynchronous TypeScript is bequem for you the same way polynomials were bequem for David Hilbert in grade school, you would probably make more money, contribute more to the economy, and be an overall happier person overall working a job that is about 80-90% asynchronous TypeScript, and maybe 10-20% the interesting stuff you don't have natural talent at.
Exceptions exist to this rule but they face a double filter:
1. How are you so sure you know better than the people waving money in your face?
2. Even if you have a good reason, why are you the right person to be doing this? Wouldn't someone else whose strengths and talents already align be better still? Is it really impossible to find them and put them in that position instead?
The conclusion is that I would not be an "overall happier person" from this, even if I could be great at it. Besides, long-term, I would not be great at it, since my lack of interest implies a lack of motivation to succeed at it. And it was a real waste of time when it came to my goals in systems.
Interest plays a big role beyond talent. I would feel more fulfilled being a mediocre dog-killer than an excellent something-else. Either way, interest feels almost equally as important as talent to me. Interest can sometimes make up for what I lack in talent. To succeed at what I want to do, I am more than happy to put in twice the time as someone with natural talent.
"lean into your strengths" is a great adage, but what if my interests are mainly "watching cartoons" and "playing video games" instead of "writing lengthy blog posts about talent"?
i dispute that there exists a singular path that everyone should strive to follow - after all, some people follow their interests and go bankrupt as a result. some people take medication to help cope with the realities of their own capabilities. that's life.
Totally absurd if you ask me but that's the reality we live in. Advertising completely fucks up all the incentive systems in society.
But the streaming platforms and game developers love that so many people do try.
Advertising does fuck our society in many ways, but I don't think its demise would be the end of streaming, or even of "react" content.
I do. I find things like professional sports to be extremely problematic due to the disproportional rewards. It's quite demoralizing to watch people get paid millions of dollars to play games while those who get educated and become tradesmen, professionals and whatnot get paid peanuts by comparison.
Ask newer generations what they want to become and too often you get back bullshit like soccer player, streamer, influencer. It's the sort of thing that makes me think society is sick and needs to be completely overhauled.
> I don't think its demise would be the end of streaming, or even of "react" content.
I don't think those things should end. I think they should not be incentivized via ad money. Get rid of the advertising and all these distortions will correct themselves. Plenty of people will do it anyway for the love of it and that's okay.
Paying video games alone doesn't print money [0], it's being a great entertainer that does, and it's not easy and usually requires quite a bit of talent and the right personality.
And as others have said, just go into Twitch pick a category and check how many channels are streaming that have 0 viewers... it's staggering, I would argue that perhaps only 2% or so of Twitch channels have more than 1 viewer.
Making bank streaming requires not only grueling work of putting video after video, empty streams, etc. for years but also probably being quite lucky, we only see a tiny fraction of people making content out there.
I agree though that this didn't exist 15 years ago, so it's definitively a possibility when before it wasn't!
[0]: Okay you can be a pro-gamer but I think that's even more niche and harder than making content.
One unusual skill is the military "coup d'œil". This is the skill of looking at a battlefield and maps, and knowing what to do to win. Some commanders have this, and some don't. Bolger, in his "The Panzer Killers", comments on which WWII generals had it and who didn't. (Bolger is a modern US general who has commanded tank units in combat, so he has experience with this.) This seems to be a skill that does not come from training and experience - either you have it or you don't.
The US Army tries to understand this.[1] This writer claims it is a trainable skill, but the training required is long. You have to fight a lot of battles, real or simulated. Even then it may just be bringing out the ones who have the innate talent. There aren't that many good generals. Each generation has only a few greats - Giap, Patton, people like that.
[1] https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Eng...
It discusses ideas similar to the ideas in the link you posted.
Haruki Murakami describes a similar discovery in his memoir "Novelist as a Vocation." He didn't set out knowing he had talent for writing, he discovered it through consistent practice. Only by writing his first novel did he realize he might have aptitude for it. Talent wasn't something he was born knowing about, but something he uncovered through action.
I don't think this ideas are incompatible, or even unintuitive: most people intuit that it's equally wrong to murder a gas station attendant and a professor of medical ethics, even if the latter is more prestigious and/or talented in some sense than the latter.
(This is a recurrent theme in Scott Alexander's writing: establish a dichotomy and run with it, even if it's facially incorrect.)
``` There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. While the one have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, the others want money; and so they write, for money. Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. ```
``` As soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw the book away; for time is precious. The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say. ```
Erdos did _great_. I had no idea he spent decades working for longer than most people spend awake but I know the name. If he'd listened to the advice he was given, we'd have a lot less mathematics and he'd have been less content.
Some other people would have been a little less worried about him. Bad tradeoff.
But who wants to be that special breed?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-12/palantir-...
"Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it."
Edit: Never read about Erdős before and came across this: "Erdős published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed". Maybe he was just a functional addict :)
In my experience, those who are truly interested in something and have an innate need to get things done by taking the initiative themselves almost always beat natural talent.
It just so happens that lots of people with those traits end up looking like people with natural talent.
The line that stuck with me was how you do something is how you do everything.
I follow an indian mystic named Sadhguru who had the same advice. He said if you do not know yet what to get involved in, then do everything with absolute involvement.
This I think was also the core message of the movie Soul from Pixar.
We all might earn different amounts of money in our lives but all of us have the same ability to create a meaningful life for ourselves.
Free will does not exist, but I suppose it's handy for society at large to pretend that it does.
I don't know why, but I let myself believe for so long that I was the captain of my ship. Now that I embody the fact that everything's out of my control, I have become so much more relaxed and content with life. I do not compare myself with people that are better (or worse) off than me. They lucked into their lives as well.
I am very grateful for everything I have been given. Even the fact that I exist and get to experience this beautiful thing called consciousness. I do not complain much anymore. I work hard to give back. Not that I am rich. But I am strongly inclined to produce more and consume less, perhaps that is because I wish to show appreciation for the gift of the present that I have been given.
And my reaction isn't positive based on only good luck. I've had my fair share of bad luck, and I have been deeply disadvantaged in certain areas of life. But even for those areas, I do not blame myself. Since I believe that it was 100% the role of luck in shaping everything.
I know some people can react to the lack of free will in a negative way, but that has not been the case for me. Would be interesting to dive deeper into why. This realization has also not taken my agency, or my will to live and take action. I know that sounds contradictory, but it's true.
Also the hard deterministic view of the universe gets incomplete at the quantum level, so maybe our brains do have some spark of pure chaos that gives us non-deterministic freedom.
Consider thermodynamics: even without quantum weirdness, we can't compute/predict the micro interactions of atoms in a gas. But most average out, and we can make a lot of meaningful predictions on a macro scale.
Back to brains: even if there is some underlying quantum process that might free us from full determinism, on a macro level, it might not matter - you're still gonna value what you value, and make the same "choices".
And if in some cases a "decision" is actually impacted by some quantum effect... is it "agency"? Or just yet another external process affecting us?
* Don't work in power-law / winner-take-all industries, unless you are truly remarkable (and even then, you need a lot of luck). Entertainment is the most obvious example of such an industry.
* No shit talent exists. Just look at basketball players. Presumably nobody thinks Wemby is 7'5" because he just trained harder at growing tall than anyone else? Why would any other characteristic be different?
Is it? Consider the case of nepo babies: often no extreme talent (or perhaps any at all), yet extreme luck.
For pop stars you need to have some combination of the right look and ability to perform. Ed Sheeran looks a bit like a muppet but seems to be very good at creating catchy songs. Taylor Swift, to me at least, isn't that good at catchy tunes but she has the look and lives the life style. I imagine there are aspects of personality that are not as obvious but very important to survive in the industry.
I suspect a lot of fields are like this also, like academics (nowadays at least) and some other things. Maybe a lot of life is like it.
The discussions often seem to me to become oversimplified, like comparing some poor genius with access to books who overcomes it all by sheer ability, to some hypothetical other person with comparatively great education that's taken for granted. But what if that hypothetical other person is being ridiculed for liking math? Or reading books? Or what if there is no college math books around, they get bored, and go off on the wrong path? What if their interests are for something more complex in its ability determinants than math, or that someone doesn't encounter until later in life usually?
Sometimes I feel like people aren't necessarily exposed to what they are best suited for, for all sorts of reasons. This is a classic "finding a career" problem, with advice to try things until you stumble on it — the converse situation being one where you think you like a vocation and then find out later you hate it. It's not like what you're best suited to is just on a shelf for you to look at and have an immediate grasp of; it comes from having experience with it, which not everyone might have. Maybe there's an excellent potential rugby player out there who never had the opportunity to play rugby or even knows what it is.
Life is just so complex, people get in each others' way for all sorts of reasons, and corruption complicates things more.
In tennis, being too tall is clearly net bad, but being too short is also definitely bad. 80% of male pro tennis players are 5'10" - 6'4", which is certainly not the statistics of the general population.
Talent, Experience, Professionalism, Education, and Skill.
doing math is way easier nowadays though i mean there's discord, stack exchange, various llms that help you, etc.
erdos & ramanujan have amazing mathematica intuition which is kinda the 'heart' of math imho. btw...
for a lot of people its possible to become the best plumber in bemdiji. however close to impossible to become the #1 world's tennis player or golfer.
when we play on the internet we are competing globally instead of locally. choose wisely.
Like...maybe. But I think it's pretty well understood that taking amphetamines is a net-negative for individuals and society.
I would have stopped reading your comment after realising this, but I was already at the end.
The evidence provided by any observational study is no more than the sum of many small pieces of evidence exactly like this one.
Depends on the amphetamine. They are not made equal. It's absolutely possible to maximize benefits and minimize risks. Remember that this stuff treats attention deficit disorder.
And why is writing a less valuable profession than another job? Writing is also "doing a thing" - it just so happens to be a profession for some, a great one for those who are skilled and gifted at it.
I think people get hung up on "keeping score." Things like GitHub Activity graphs, where people write scripts, to game theirs, or pumping out mountains of really bad code, in order to jack up their LoC scores.
And, of course, there's money. If you don't generate money for silly rich people, then what you do is worthless.
https://www.theregister.com https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/get-me-out-of-data-hell/