I think there may be certain traits that contribute to “talent”. Of course talent in a certain area can be a sign of a nurtured skill, but what triggers the need to explore that talent? It’s something I’ve thought of many times before, an example would be art. I don’t believe the ability to draw is based entirely on the mastering of the motor function of moving a pencil to create proportioned lines tones and shapes. There is a certain perspective that the artist has, a certain way of looking at things, that makes drawing an easier way of communicating almost, than say someone who doesn’t have this “talent”. That’s why I think there must be more of a balance between nature and nurture when it comes to talents. It’s not necessarily that the person grew up with the ability to do something, but rather the way that person’s mind works is more suitable for that particular area.
That’s why I said “rarely,” and not “never.”
Gila: It’s more suitable because they trained it to be suitable. 99% of drawing is learning how to see and there are a lot of ways to train that without actually drawing. It’s not because their eyes are superior or anything. And it’s not like they’d be able to draw without eyes either. There’s definitely a balance between nature and nurture but I think a lot of people overstate the importance of nature, and think that in order to be good at something you have to be born that way, which is 99.9999% of the time, not the case. And when it is the case, it’s usually not a significant advantage anyway. Nature plays a role, but nurture is king.
I’m not sure the most effective mode of inquiry to that issue is biology. It’s like talking about the Theory of Relativity in terms of the biological processes happening in Einstein’s brain when he thought of it. This sounds more like a matter for Anthropology, Sociology and Pedagogy. Or just Philosophy.
My personal theory is that things like intelligence, athletic ability, and so forth are very much determined by how you conduct yourself over the years. People who are continually exposed to sports from a young age, tend to be pretty athletic by their teenage years. People who are forced to read from age 3, tend to be pretty effective communicators in writing. People who play competitive video games, tend to have impressive fast-twitch reflexes and to understand “systems” readily.
Unlike many people, I don’t think you lose the ability to learn after youth. People often lose the <i>time</i>, <i>patience</i>, and <i>absorption</i> required for learning after youth. But that’s hardly inevitable.
What I’ve observed is that someone who dedicates himself to a certain sport for, say, 8 years – no matter how old he is when he begins – begins to look and act like he’s naturally suited for that sport. People who take up the study of law at age 40, end up talking and acting like lawyers by age 50. These people didn’t have the abilities necessary to succeed when they started. But, slowly, the body finds ways to adapt itself to the demands of day-to-day life. How this process works, I hardly know, but I see it everywhere.
So regarding the idea of learning someone else’s method of studying: I don’t think it would be effective in any reasonable timeframe. What works for one person, works because of how that person’s mind uniquely functions. You can’t learn to think like someone else over a week or two. But if you have a year to spare, who knows? Maybe you, too, can think like Sinistral.
—Sin—
Xwing is right on the money. Its like in relationships. When you have 2 people argue, they’ll often think “oh, if that person would just be just a little more x or just a little less y”, then everything would be fine. Well that person has this x or y trait not just out of the blue but because of other traits that person has and years upon years of experience. This makes it very difficult to change because you have to go deeper than just this x or y trait to get to the real source of why person has x or y. Gila mostly hits the note here as well by discussing how the mind learns to think and do things. This actually is as Hades says, nurture instead of nature.
Xwing again: you talk of competitive video games and you make an association. However, which one came first? What is the real cause? I disagree with your interpretation. I think what is more likely is not that competitive gameplay developed these skills, but selected for people that have these skills, such that only the people that had this way of thinking remained in the competitive video game player category. It is likely they have other traits like that which were inadvertently selected for. Its like assholes getting in med school. You aim for people that can memorize huge amounts of information through your entry requirements. This leads to your getting people that have worked all their lives and didn’t learn ways to properly interact with people. Thus what you see nowadays are tons of patients that are unhappy about the quality of their relationship with their doctor(s).
Fullmental: They could but its not instantaneous for reasons like Xwing mentioned. When I was in high school, I had good grades, but I was never the guy that the teacher always talked about how brilliant he or she was to the class or that the class kept talking about. I never got an 800 on an SAT or anything like that. I gradually started figuring out a way to make things work for me. For example, when I was in high school, people thought I’d go to med school because I was good at science and I could memorize huge amounts of stuff instantaneously in Anatomy and Physiology. Fast Forward a few years, I’m done with undergrad and in med school and my ability to memorize things actually decreased. I was no longer the same type of person that goes to med school. My experience in the rest of HS and in undergrad changed the way I did things (honestly I think its because of how I had to learn to think about research, which takes years and I had a huge positive influence from my former supervisor). MDs tend to hate scientists and vice versa because they are extremely different people with very different ways of thinking. Which fits with what I’ve been saying all along.
Klez: I think you’re right there are some weird disorders that can give you an advantage at something. However, its not because someone has this advantage that not having this advantage disables you from achieving. Also, it is not clear what the genetic basis is of these problems beyond a probable predisopostion which is not a guarantee of the trait.
I want to live in a van down by the river.
You never lose the ability to learn, but the willingess to learn seems to be something that is very difficult for people to acquire when they aren’t born with it or taught it at a very young age. I still don’t think “a strong will” can be acquired; or if it can, it can only be gotten through extraordinary experience such as trauma.
Quite frankly, whether or not you do learn from your mistakes and/or develop a strong will seems to have a lot to do with luck. Some people are forced into experiences, when they’re young, that teach them that they are responsible for developing themselves as they see fit. Most people don’t have an experience that teaches them this; or they have an experience that could teach them, but they fail at it.
Another way of saying it: everyone has one really fucking painful experience when they’re young. You either run from it or fight through it. Many people run from theirs. But if you fight through it, you learn how to develop a strong will and how to adapt yourself to win no matter the cost.
Course, I’m also a hopeless elitist arrogant jackass, so I tend to model my opinions around that.
—Sin—
People are forced into experiences all the time, whether its when they’re young or old. I would say the experiences from when you’re young are key to how you will develop. Although I could still argue do you react a certain way when you’re young because of example? Because of your genes? Both? Was the person strong before the event or as a result of the event? I don’t know. I think its a matter of choice. Often time, once you’ve managed to overcome a tough experience, you’re able to do it again. It becomes easier over time.
I’m a bit confused about what position you’re taking. You agree that ability to do Y often relies on ability to do X, which was “nurtured” over the years. This supports the idea that playing sports for years leads to increased athletic capacity: the “general-application” skills you acquire playing soccer (e.g. running efficiently and making sudden lateral movements) are useful in football and track. It also develops the muscles and reflexes relevant to those skills. Arguably, some people are more naturally apt to develop those muscles and reflexes. However, my experience has been that the “skill difference” between the unpracticed and the practiced is much bigger than the “skill difference” between those with natural aptitude and those without. In other words, the effect of training vastly exceeds that of natural aptitude, especially if it’s applied over many years.
Studying law for years would have the same effect: you develop skill in distilling “rules” from sets of cases and arguing that they should apply in future cases. What once required long, meticulous thinking to work out, is now handled by many ingrained “fast connections” in your mind. In other words, the <i>process</i> is hard-wired in. Natural intelligence may make it easier to form those “fast connections,” and maybe it makes for faster “fast connections.” But I think the main reason some lawyers learn faster and argue better is that they’ve trained their minds more diligently, over many years of all sorts of intellectual activity. I.e. that book-reading and message-board debating you’ve done over the last 15 years is more important than what brain you were born with.
So it’s fair to assume that video games are the same way. You play something like Final Fantasy for long enough, and you become able to think more systematically about how to reach an optimal output (of damage) given a set of variables (strength, magic power, hp) under certain conditions (ATB, possibility of dying). Play Guild Wars or World of Warcraft against other humans, and you get the same thing only intensified. While playing Magic: the Gathering, I became much better at holding a complex system in my head all at once and visualizing how I could optimize it. I’ve noticed the same improvement with regard to, say, 2d platformers and quick reflexes.
What this seems to be driving at is a scheme of initial ability versus maximum potential. So what I’m arguing is that the range of variation in initial abilities is much smaller than the average difference between maximum potential and initial ability. In other words, anyone can improve many times beyond anyone else’s <i>starting</i> point.
So to your question, “Which one came first? What is the real cause?” my answer is this: Natural ability comes first. Maybe it’s the reason you became <i>interested</i> in an activity. But even if you lack natural ability, enough training will leave you incredibly skilled – if not, perhaps, among the <i>very best</i>.
—Sin—
I’m throwing the arguments around to generate discussion. I’ll refine this response later because the topic of the discussion is not precise enough and we’re comparing apples and oranges a bit.
Sin: As someone who never took biology, your tendency to devolve everything into biology and evolution is a bit off-putting for me. You don’t see me trying to turn everything into a programming exercise, though I probably could.
In any case, trying to pinhole this discussion into “talent” is disingenuous. The main reason that dreams often fail has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with luck and circumstances. There are only so many big movie stars out there; deciding you’re going to be one of them is almost certain to meet with failure. There are only so many NHL pros out there; deciding you’re going to be one of them is very likely to meet with failure, and if you’re naturally klutzy it’s (again) almost a certainty. Becoming a bestselling author requires a mind that thinks a particular way - in particular, often an unusual way - and no matter how much you sacrifice it’s unlikely you’ll get there.
—Sin—
Xwing: I thought of something when I posted what I said and I can’t remember what the hell it was I was thinking. I’ll come back to it when I remember. It was actually defensible. I was going on a tangent too…
“Did the community of these people form first and did that play any role in the way they became competitive gamers? what other variables are involved?” I’m trying to branch out the debate as much as I can to maximize the influence of the environment people are found in and the way it influences their development and how irrelevant differences in biology ultimately are to success. Its also completely possible I didn’t even read what I read right and I had no clue what the hell I was reading because I had JUST woken up. I can’t remember what the hell I was thinking.
“What this seems to be driving at is a scheme of initial ability versus maximum potential. So what I’m arguing is that the range of variation in initial abilities is much smaller than the average difference between maximum potential and initial ability. In other words, anyone can improve many times beyond anyone else’s starting point.” - I agree completely.
Cid:I explain things in the mechanisms I think about. You’ll notice the debates I prefer to get involved in are the ones that pertain to or involve biology in some way and since we’re talking about dreams and the feasibility of dreams, then it is perfectly acceptable to discuss this in biological terms for the simple reason that people can achieve things or not achieve things because or despite their biology. Discussing programming here would be utterly useless. Or if it is, I’d be more than happy to hear about it. It could be interesting. Evolution is a fascinating topic and also perfectly appropriate since evolution is the core of biology. Forget this apes turning into people stuff. Think of it in terms I try to present: parents and their resulting children.
If you have a problem with what I say then say what is wrong with precisely it instead of making a vague and useless reference that I can’t begin to answer. If you don’t understand something I said, it means I failed at explaining it and you should ask me about it. If you DISAGREE about my comparison and its relevance, then by all means challenge me on it. Otherwise, my points stand, because whining provides no answers.
FURTHERMORE, you’re the one that decided to bring up the fact that people are good at things because they are naturally better at something. To be naturally better at something means you were born with it and the only thing you’re born with is your biology. Then you complain I bring up biology. Erm yeah…
The only post I talked about any of this extensively was at the request of TrkJak after I stopped myself from explaining further into stuff I knew you and others weren’t interested in reading and therefore would be irrelevant to the general discussion.
Life is not just about luck. Life is what you make of it. If you just sit around and wait for life to hand you everything, you’re going to have nothing and you’re going to be exactly what I talked about earlier: someone who’s unhappy at having been promised everything by society and received nothing and bitter about having been lied about living with a silver spoon in your mouth. If you want something, its up to you to make it happen, to go out there and do what’s necessary. You research your field, you talk to people, you make connections, you get experience and fulfill requirements. You work your way up. Not everyone’s a big star because their uncle is Steven Spielberg.
How would you best implement recursion to simulate evolution!?
Sometimes I think the most important thing for success is choosing the right goal. That is, successful people don’t have extraodinary willpower, they just have extraordinary wisdom, having selected early on the right goal for their temperament and abilities. Of course, to do so, you not only need wisdom but great self-insight.
Its sort of like that old saying, “A leader is a man who sees a line about to form and gets to the head of it first.”
There’s been alot of talk about the impact of society creating the image of infinite possibility of one’s future and the relations to biology, self-will, and upbringing. The issue of Support Systems still needs to be addressed. Cid point on luck seems pretty large in this, at least initially (first 10-ish years of one’s life) when schools, sports, and other activities are decided by parental figures. Relationships formed in these situations can lead to strong bonds and support systems even before a person decides his/her own activities. It’s also very likely that personal will power or motivation to pursue a dream on one’s own would be more relavent later in life when further self-assessment occurs and decescions regarding a person’s future are made. Therefore it seems that both the Support Systems provided by Parents, Peers, and Mentors due to luck of the draw in parents or equivalent and those created due to individual action, and the encouragement, feedback, and assistance from them are major factors within this argument. Thoughts?
Nebagram’s Scrabble rewiring through to XWing’s and Sin’s Discussion. -> The Circle seems Complete regarding the talent vs. training aspect of the discussion.
I’ve never heard this saying. --But would this make an opportunist or leader?
I think the point is that leaders are opportunists. They see a trend, and make sure to get the credit for it.
There are only so many NHL pros out there; deciding you’re going to be one of them is very likely to meet with failure
But it won’t be because of natural talent or luck. It’ll be because you chose an unreasonable goal or you already pre-emptively chose to fail. The NHL door is only open for so long. That doesn’t mean the opportunity was never there for most people just because they were talentless or unlucky.
We’re comparing individuals here. NO ONE can choose to join the NHL when they’re 25 and have never played a game in their life. That’s why it’s an unreasonable goal. Because it’s guaranteed failure across the board. It’s not like some people could do it and some people couldn’t. In order to get into the NHL you have to be young and you have to be trained. And those things are 100% dependent on timing and effort, which are both controlled by YOU. Just because you can’t do it now doesn’t mean the option was never available to you.
And I think the idea that you can do anything if you try hard enough is understood only to be true if you’ve seen someone else do it. No one ever mentions that part, but obviously we’re talking about things that are already known to be possible. The saying is there to remind you that if something is humanly possible, you, as a human, should be able to do it.
That’s pretty much my point. Reasonable dreams are fine. Someone wants to publish their book, they’ll probably get it published some way. If someone wants to climb a mountain, they’ll probably manage to climb it. It’s when dreams become unreasonable - and the sort of dreams that do depend very much on luck - when the line “you can do anything you want to” starts to become dangerous.
Sin: I don’t have time at the moment to dig through all your posts (I will at some point), but are you saying that there’s absolutely no such thing as natural talent, and that absolutely anything can be learned? So if I wanted to be a great sports player, despite having two left feet and being clumsy as an ox, I could still do it? If I wanted to be a great mathematician, despite having previously had great difficulty with math, I could still do it? Are these goals reasonable and reachable?
No, that wasn’t your point. Your argument so far has been that success is based on luck, circumstance, and talent, and that no matter how hard you try, it won’t matter if you’re not lucky or born with an advantage.
Which of course you’re only using as an excuse to justify your own failures, probably.
So if I wanted to be a great sports player, despite having two left feet and being clumsy as an ox, I could still do it? If I wanted to be a great mathematician, despite having previously had great difficulty with math, I could still do it? Are these goals reasonable and reachable?
That’s exactly what he’s saying, or at least it’s what I am. Everyone has two left feet until they train themselves not to. Everyone sucks at math until they learn it. Of course doors are opening and closing all the time, but no mathematician ever became a mathematician because they were born with an intuitive understanding of math (with the exception of Einstein and his physically deformed brain). They were taught, or taught themselves, one way or another. No sports player flew out of the womb on two skates, throwing touchdowns, either. Success in these areas is almost 100% based on variables you can control.
Well, actually not so much with at least a couple of those examples Hades. You have to remember that if you want to train to get into the NHL, chances are you have to start at a very young age. Say, when your parents still basically have control of most of your activities. I think that is where the luck element comes into it, basically, will the people around you help you out when you need it, like buying you gear, giving you a ride to trainings, paying for training, all that. Sometimes these things just don’t happen.
To a certain extent, I would argue that this extends to teachers who can’t motivate people leading to people being poor at certain subjects (or hell, just shitty teachers). These things are outside your control for most of your life. And while you can decide you want to do well in those things, these aspects are going to make it a hell of a lot harder for you than for someone whose parents bring them to trianing, play with them at home, send them to schools with teachers who are able to do their jobs.
Apart from that though, I would agree with the main thrust of your argument.
—Cid—
Natural talent is synonymous with biological advantage. I’ll repeat my key points for conciseness: it is true that out there is variability and we don’t all start at the same baseline. However, this diversity does not mean that your goals are unattainable because with enough work, you learn to do something right. Ultimately, the learning process eventually will have a greater importance than the base biological variability because if the biological differences were so gigantic as to render people incapable of doing a given task, what our society looks like and how it works would be radically different (that is the belgian blue bull / malaria example).
The summary of my monkey psychology example and what Xwing and I have been talking about is that we the difference that may appear to be innate talent can simply be a misinterpretation of what constitutes as natural talent. Its not because 2 people are doing math at the same time that they are doing it in the same way; how they think as they go through the problem has nothing to do with aptitude but how they learned to do the problems. How you think about things is something you learn, its not something you’re born with. How you learn to think to resolve problems that you deal with is something takes years to do.
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I agree mostly with what Sin and Hades are saying, but I do think that it’s hard to ignore a person’s natural talent. There are some people, in my experience, that are just BETTER at some things than others, and not in the way Hades said, where someone is accidentally better…I mean like, their ability to learn something quicker and more efficiently. For example, as far as motor skills go, I’m a damn retard. The only things I do with proper physical technique are things that I’ve practiced for a very, very long time. On the other hand, there are plenty of things in like, mostly related to music, that I just get way easier than other people.
Still, Sin and Hades are right: There’s virtually nothing, if anything, that can’t be rectified by plain-old hard work. That’s definitely something to never forget.
As for my dream…up until a year or so ago, I was sure I wanted to be a music composer for video games. Now, I’m not entirely sure. It’s not that I don’t want to write music for video games; rather, it’s more like…I’ve been ‘sure’ about my career choice since I was young enough to give it serious thought, but now that I’ve got my feet wet in other things, and my tastes have expanded, it feels like there are more things that I want to do, too.
Beyond writing music for video games, I would also love to be be a planner for video games. I suppose if I want to go into game development, I’ll really have to learn some programming, which I dread, but if I want it bad enough, I’m sure I will. Still, I’d much rather have a director/producer type role in the development of a game. Fat chance leaping into that seat with no experience, huh? Also, I’d love to get into video game-related journalism. Video game journalists need more snakes; every reviewer has the same opinion of every game. We need more reviewers that take a really angry, holier-than-though, ‘Roger Ebert’ approach to video games.
So yeah, one of those three things. There’s also plenty of other things I could be really happy doing, too. I think if I were doing just about anything involving music, I’d be set for life. But, my big dreams that I’m aiming for are the three above.
Which of course you’re only using as an excuse to justify your own failures, probably.
That was a cheap shot.
Are these people faster learners due to <i>natural</i> ability, or to skills they’ve developed over the years that make them faster learners? It’s hard to tell, because so many skills operate invisibly. For example, two people spend an hour studying a passage on how to play baseball. Afterward, Person A can essentially follow baseball games: the 9-inning structure, the base running, force outs, tag outs, fly outs, singles/doubles/triples, home runs, base-stealing, etc. In contrast, Person B can only vaguely remember that there are innings, that people have to run after they hit the ball, and that you score by making it around the bases. This <i>looks</i> like a pure learning test, where A has proven to learn information more quickly than B. But let’s add another fact: A reads sophisticated literature daily, while B is an avid artist and musician who hasn’t read a book in ten years. A read the passage 30 times in an hour, while B read it 5 times. Is it still fair to say A learns more quickly? The problem is that tests for measuring how quickly people learn (i.e. aptitude tests) invariably rely on mental mechanisms <i>that can be trained</i>. B’s lack of experience with <i>reading</i> would lead us (unfairly) to conclude that he <i>learns</i> slowly – two very different things.
But you’re interested in music. So, as it happens, I’ve played a <i>whole</i> lot of Dance Dance Revolution and In the Groove. When Guitar Hero came out, my roommates played it continually for days, and told me I had to try it. After about an hour of playing with them, I was beating them. My roommate said, “Apparently, Mark has some aptitude for this that we don’t.” Wrong. The truth is that, from the moment I started playing, reading the notes on the screen was laughably easy. It was just like DDR. All I had to think about was positioning my fingers instead of my feet. Meanwhile, my roommates were devoting the bulk of their attention to following the barrage of notes on the screen.
You mentioned motor techniques. It’s the same issue. Japanese students have an incredibly easy time learning to write neatly in Western characters. They’ve generally learned how to write several thousand complex (and very similar) kanji, distinctly enough so that they can be picked out from one another. So learning and neatly writing 26 very simple characters is easy. Westerners learning to write in Japanese, on the other hand, essentially start off as slowly as young Japanese children. The average Westerner’s fine motor skills and character-memorization skills are only developed as much as our script requires. (Not very much.) So if you set a Japanese and American student side by side and tell them to memorize 10 kanji, then write them neatly, it’s almost a given that the Japanese student will finish first.
The point of this bloated post is that, for almost every “natural aptitude” we notice, there’s an invisible, underlying set of skills that have been highly developed by past training.