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I've become convinced of the idea that everything on some level is a matter of practice, and that effortless practice comes from enjoyment. Maybe your neighbor

I've become convinced of the idea that everything on some level is a matter of practice, and that effortless practice comes from enjoyment. Maybe your neighbor can visualize graphs because he practiced visualizing graphs a lot. And he did that because he found an odd joy in it that others didn't. Bill Clinton knew he wanted to be in politics at a very early age by all accounts. And considering he didn't exactly come from a powerful political family with a clear path forward, it's likely he decided to practice remembering people and by the time anyone could comment on it, he'd had decades of practice. But honestly maybe he just had fun seeing what he could remember about the people he met and that turned it into a fun game for him that paid off big. When I was young, I played a game where I would count the letters in the words people were saying to determine whether the total sentence was divisible by three. So for a time in my life I was unusually good at doing modulo division on people's conversation. I've since lost that ability (not much use to it), but I wasn't some savant. My mother worked early shifts at the hospital and would drive me and my siblings to my grandmother's house, and the fog and dew would cling to the windshield regardless of whether it was raining so the windshield wipers would be on. And I would sync the voices on the AM radio to the three positions of the wipers, left, middle, right, left, middle, right. It was a game to pass the time because I couldn't fall back asleep after being woken up. By the time I could do it as a party trick, I'd had hundred of hours of practice.

brookst 2y ago
I think you underestimate the role that hardware acceleration plays. Take the Clinton example — about 2% of the population has prosopagnosia (“face blindness”), where no amount of practice will improve recognition because of defects in the fusiform gyrus. But! Just like some percentage don’t have the neurons to be great at recognizing people, there are “super recognizers” where the fusiform gyrus overperforms. fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area. Some skills, like your letter counting, probably do not have an evolved area of the brain and are purely cognitive, so perhaps more amenable to training. But even then there may be aspects that are hardware accelerated with some intrinsic genetic predisposition to be good / bad at.
- emseetech 2y ago
  Sure, maybe. Some people might have some level of cognitive multiplier, but most of us aren't Ramanujan, most of us are some gradient of normal. Putting emphasis on practice and hard work and finding joy in getting good at something would pay greater dividends generally than trying to pinpoint a perfectly quantifiable intelligence.
  - brookst 2y ago
    I don’t disagree, with the caveat that setting expectations that anyone can be a [notably exceptional person] with practice and hard work is a recipe for creating unhappiness. A face blind person will never have eidetic memory for someone they met 30 years ago, an average person will never be Ramanujan, and there are mediocre athletes who work harder than Jordan ever did. We excel when we align hard work to areas where we won the genetic lottery.
    - emseetech 2y ago
      Famously, Michael Jordan was cut from his sophomore high school team. I won't deny there are people who have disabilities or genetic advantages. But we overestimate the necessity of innate talent and severely underestimate the potential of practice, hard work and mentorship (and raw obsession if we're being honest) in most people, outliers notwithstanding.
      - brookst 2y ago
        Yeah, I think “outlier” is the key word there. Within the realm of typical physiology, typical genetics, typical nurture (say within two standard deviations for all of those), there’s huge opportunity for hard work and growth.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  > fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area. Neuroscience is paradoxically a poor indicator for how the brain works in response to stimuli. The reason is that what you do literally reshapes your brain and how you respond to things. For a common example a chess master and a chess amateur use different parts of then brain when analyzing positions. Here [1] is some random study on it - there's a bunch. It's well known and not controversial. But the thing is, that chess master was also once a chess amateur. And so practice literally changes how your brain responds to various stimuli to the point of complete shifting the area used for processing. So showing that [people of this group] have [this distinct brain activity] in response to [whatever] doesn't really say anything at all, which it makes for endless easy mode studies for now. Hence people exposed to [video games, porn, gender dysmorphia, etc] all 'change the brain' and/or have 'different brains than normal.' Well duh, now so do you after reading this paragraph. That said, I obviously would not dispute that people are inherently different, but I think the most obvious ways to try to demonstrate that are irreparably flawed. [1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-study-shows-grandma/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-study-shows...

brookst 2y ago

I think you underestimate the role that hardware acceleration plays. Take the Clinton example — about 2% of the population has prosopagnosia (“face blindness”), where no amount of practice will improve recognition because of defects in the fusiform gyrus. But! Just like some percentage don’t have the neurons to be great at recognizing people, there are “super recognizers” where the fusiform gyrus overperforms. fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area. Some skills, like your letter counting, probably do not have an evolved area of the brain and are purely cognitive, so perhaps more amenable to training. But even then there may be aspects that are hardware accelerated with some intrinsic genetic predisposition to be good / bad at.

emseetech 2y ago
Sure, maybe. Some people might have some level of cognitive multiplier, but most of us aren't Ramanujan, most of us are some gradient of normal. Putting emphasis on practice and hard work and finding joy in getting good at something would pay greater dividends generally than trying to pinpoint a perfectly quantifiable intelligence.
- brookst 2y ago
  I don’t disagree, with the caveat that setting expectations that anyone can be a [notably exceptional person] with practice and hard work is a recipe for creating unhappiness. A face blind person will never have eidetic memory for someone they met 30 years ago, an average person will never be Ramanujan, and there are mediocre athletes who work harder than Jordan ever did. We excel when we align hard work to areas where we won the genetic lottery.
  - emseetech 2y ago
    Famously, Michael Jordan was cut from his sophomore high school team. I won't deny there are people who have disabilities or genetic advantages. But we overestimate the necessity of innate talent and severely underestimate the potential of practice, hard work and mentorship (and raw obsession if we're being honest) in most people, outliers notwithstanding.
    - brookst 2y ago
      Yeah, I think “outlier” is the key word there. Within the realm of typical physiology, typical genetics, typical nurture (say within two standard deviations for all of those), there’s huge opportunity for hard work and growth.
somenameforme 2y ago
> fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area. Neuroscience is paradoxically a poor indicator for how the brain works in response to stimuli. The reason is that what you do literally reshapes your brain and how you respond to things. For a common example a chess master and a chess amateur use different parts of then brain when analyzing positions. Here [1] is some random study on it - there's a bunch. It's well known and not controversial. But the thing is, that chess master was also once a chess amateur. And so practice literally changes how your brain responds to various stimuli to the point of complete shifting the area used for processing. So showing that [people of this group] have [this distinct brain activity] in response to [whatever] doesn't really say anything at all, which it makes for endless easy mode studies for now. Hence people exposed to [video games, porn, gender dysmorphia, etc] all 'change the brain' and/or have 'different brains than normal.' Well duh, now so do you after reading this paragraph. That said, I obviously would not dispute that people are inherently different, but I think the most obvious ways to try to demonstrate that are irreparably flawed. [1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-study-shows-grandma/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-study-shows...