4 ms·

The skills that you are treating as innate may be a lot more learnable than you think. The first time I did micro-soldering (soldering things on the scale of 1

The skills that you are treating as innate may be a lot more learnable than you think. The first time I did micro-soldering (soldering things on the scale of 1 mm) when I was an EE, my hands shook a lot, and I basically just tried to figure out how to catch the soldering iron in the right place while it waved around. After doing more micro-soldering, people later complimented my "very steady hands" when soldering small things, and they were very steady. Since then, being able to aim things precisely has carried over. I walked on to the NCAA fencing team at school and was good enough to go to several meets largely because I am 6'3" and left-handed, and could accurately aim the point of an epee at small targets. I also later have been target shooting a bit, and was told I did a lot better than most new shooters. I have fantastic fine motor control thanks to piano playing, but I am very clumsy otherwise. I regularly run into doorways and have near-misses with static objects. The fencing coach found this hilarious. I assume the fine motor control comes from practice (while most people learned to not run into doors, I studied the blade). Certain aspects of this stuff are innate, but I think a lot less of it is than most people do. Those innate things do seem to include "speed at which you learn new stuff," as well as very basic parameters of your body like reflexes, bone density, and body shape.

brailsafe 2y ago
Ya, I agree, but would clarify that I was mainly exploring a few real examples to illustrate my take on it, rather than intending to state those abilities were concretely innate, which I don't think they are. The superficial difference between someone who may be "talented" and "highly skilled" seems to me to be indistinguishable without more context about how the skills came to be, and for most people who just aren't as pedantic, the term talented is just synonymous with skilled, imho. In situations where two people of the same age, interest, and approximately similar exposure, resources, and build, are compared, it would come down to progress made between start and end of engaging in an activity without prior deliberate practice that to me would indicate some innate predisposition to do whatever it is that's advantaged by it. I watched two people my age grow up skateboarding into adulthood. Both came out highly skilled and with some amateur/pro success, but one had to grind much harder and took more damage in the process, while the other took a non-zero amount of serious damage, and seemingly picked new abilities up within a few goes. I think this accumulation of prerequisites has an aggregate cost that potentially detracts at at varying rates from each subsequent opportunity to pock something else up. Something like microsoldering could teach you those skills, but if it took you 6 months to get good at it instead of 4 years, you'd have 3.5 more years at your new baseline of fine motor skills to train fencing without also impairing your academics. Doing it later for fun over an arbitrarily long time might be neat, but irrelevant, especially if you have no specific project to work on.

brailsafe 2y ago

Ya, I agree, but would clarify that I was mainly exploring a few real examples to illustrate my take on it, rather than intending to state those abilities were concretely innate, which I don't think they are. The superficial difference between someone who may be "talented" and "highly skilled" seems to me to be indistinguishable without more context about how the skills came to be, and for most people who just aren't as pedantic, the term talented is just synonymous with skilled, imho. In situations where two people of the same age, interest, and approximately similar exposure, resources, and build, are compared, it would come down to progress made between start and end of engaging in an activity without prior deliberate practice that to me would indicate some innate predisposition to do whatever it is that's advantaged by it. I watched two people my age grow up skateboarding into adulthood. Both came out highly skilled and with some amateur/pro success, but one had to grind much harder and took more damage in the process, while the other took a non-zero amount of serious damage, and seemingly picked new abilities up within a few goes. I think this accumulation of prerequisites has an aggregate cost that potentially detracts at at varying rates from each subsequent opportunity to pock something else up. Something like microsoldering could teach you those skills, but if it took you 6 months to get good at it instead of 4 years, you'd have 3.5 more years at your new baseline of fine motor skills to train fencing without also impairing your academics. Doing it later for fun over an arbitrarily long time might be neat, but irrelevant, especially if you have no specific project to work on.