contrarianarchon | (no subject)

I saw another post on tumblr talking about how talent is a small factor in artistic skill and how you can get really good at anything if you practise enough and just ...

Doesn't anyone else think of talent as the thing that lets you practice enough? Like, talent isn't a trait which says "Gain +2 to checks with X" it's the combination of numinous factors that make practicing a thing feel good and rewarding and something you can spend a lot of your free time on even when there is an internet connection *right there*. So saying "Oh yeah, just spend hundreds or thousands of hours doing a thing and you'll be good at it" is true but also there are more psychological gating factors since if the first ten or hundred hours feel like pulling teeth (And IDK if you often get through that but certainly don't expect you to try if it's optional).

Is this model non-obvious to non-me people? Is it just wildly incongruous with what everyone else thinks of as talent?

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From:

wolffyluna

That sounds about right to me? I do find that sometimes talent manifests at being slightly better at something at low skill levels (eg being relatively coordinated when it comes to physical activity) and that can make you more able to practice, so you get better, and it becomes a feedback loop.

From:

contrarianarchon

[merging replys to both comments into one space because they're both similar in the respect I want to talk about]

From:

thedarlingone

Huh. I don't actually know how I feel about this question, so I'm going to ramble a bit and hope I end up somewhere useful.

So, to begin with, I am the only member of my (abusive) bio-family without perfect pitch. I love music, I love singing, but I was constantly bullied over it, told to shut up and stop "ruining" whatever music was happening. So I taught myself to sing according to their standards; I have to actually play a song on piano from sheet music in order to make my voice learn it, I cannot sing by ear or by sight (except Gregorian notation, interestingly) without playing it first, except sometimes when I've heard the same exact recording a *lot*. Occasionally I can bypass the "do not have a keyboard" part by ~playing~ the sheet music *without* a keyboard, on whatever surface, bypassing the first step of the sound-to-sight-to-space-to-sound translation, but I don't know what makes that work.

I don't consider myself talented at music. I am *passionate* about music, I was literally not able to just shut up and listen. I had to be participating in the music. I don't know if the years of plunking away on our old piano trying to teach my voice to associate Middle C key with Middle C sound with "vocal cords must do like this", fully unsuccessful until my youngest sister took pity on me and actually sat down and told me "Yes, that's Middle C, try to go one note up", would have been even more painful without whatever nebulous thing makes you talented. But I was able with much struggle to learn a skill I still don't think of myself as "talented" at, is kinda the short version there.

On the flip side, I'm also an excellent knitter, pretty darn close to "master craftsman" lever -- there are two more techniques I would need to learn in order to say in truth that I would be able to knit any pattern you put in front of me. (I haven't learned them because they're both two-strand techniques and my ability to match or blend colors is... extremely erratic. Colors are much like music to me in that everything looks/sounds good together and I struggle to find the aesthetic preference that will make others not bully me over it.)

Uh. What was I saying? Right. I learned to knit at age twelve in a 4-H class. I also learned cake decorating and flower arranging in similar classes. Knitting was the one that stuck. I don't know if I'm a "talented" knitter or just a bloody-minded one who enjoyed having something my eggcubator could not do, but would buy me supplies for. I do remember when I was knitting my first scarf, feeling like it was unbearably slow and convincing myself to continue by telling myself "every stitch I do now is one I don't have to do later", but I also remember being the fastest of the beginning knitters in the class (I won a little packet of two blunt-ended yarn needles for weaving in ends, which I treasured for many years as I had no way to get more, and that definitely contributed to me continuing to knit as I had everything I needed to make satisfying finished products.) And I remember carrying my knitting everywhere, such that people gave me patterns and yarn and more needles because knitters are Like That(tm). So there was a whole feedback loop of boredom and luck and maybe some talent too, that got me into knitting in a big way.

(It was also a handicraft that satisfied both Herself to see me doing a "womanly art" and me as a small transmasc tortoise to be doing something I could consider more "manly" due to the legends of sock-knitting Scotsmen. That probably contributed in a big way. But I don't know if it was talent or sheer competitive stubbornness that got me over that first hump and won me those little yarn needles.)

I'm also really good at writing. I suspect I am talented at that one. The near-photographic memory for words helps too, I can and do overanalyze how other writers produce the effects I'm looking for. Which may be a part of my talent for it, if we're defining talent as whatever nebulous thing makes the practicing less painful.

On the other hand, one of my sisters is talented at the violin, as in she was four and someone handed her a small violin and she made violin noises come out of it on the first try instead of dead cat noises. The ability to skip that first step of being absolutely horrible at the new skill is what I think of as talent. (She is not a professional concert violinist, because abusive family. Any healthy-minded parent should have said "I will get this child violin lessons stat". Herself, unable to bear to give any of us an ability she couldn't take credit for, blocked my sister from getting violin lessons until her twenties.)

Uh. Where was I? Right. To me, talent is picking up a violin for the first time and not sounding like a beginner. But maybe it should be more broadly defined to include whatever nebulous set of circumstances made me a master knitter. Or maybe that's just luck. ;-)

Edited Date: 2019-12-17 08:34 am (UTC)

From:

contrarianarchon

Okay, yeah, from what you and wolffyluna have said, I think I agree that "Getting to skip the initial first bit where you grind out terrible incompetent failures" is a big factor in spending time on a skill, esp as a small child or someone who has other stuff to do, but it's also not everything.

(I can sketch, not well, but tolerably. I can make the pencil make the shapes, if the shapes are geometrically comprehensible (I cannot make the pencil make the shapes, if they're meant to be humans.). But I do it once a year, so I'm never going to get better. I even actively consider myself to be a good writer (for some nebulous value of good that still doesn't ultimately measure up to "Produces written content" but I still don't do it often enough for it to matter)

I am reminded of someone asking the scott alexander when he finds time to write (with him being a medical student on residences at the time, so it is surprising that he's also a moderately prolific author), and he said that he finds time to write like a heroine addict finds money for heroine. The point he was making was that there's this sense that some things are just easy or automatic. You can find time and energy and resources to do them in a way that you can't for other stuff. And having that for a legibly productive skill (Like art or music or chess or whatever) rather than e.g. reading, which is the closest I have, seems to me to be a big factor as to who seems to be "talented". That's the thing that lets you become great at something. I can think of it as a very Gold/aspect thing in CMWGE terms, but that's probably not legible to you guys?

Ultimately, I don't have a good handle on this and I think there are probably a whole lot of factors that contribute but ultimately I think the core point here is "There are non-voluntary factors which determine which skills one can be really good at"

(Also wow your family sounds bad. This I assume is now well-known to you but I wanted to say that it was noticed and sympathy happened.)

From:

potofsoup

I definitely agree with you that talent is something that makes the lower-levels of something a bit easier to get through. That said, there's power in the faith that practice plays a much larger part. I would say that I have some talent with drawing -- I'm a pretty visual person and shapes and silhouettes make a lot of intuitive sense to me. That said, colors make a lot less intuitive sense, so it's something that I have to keep pushing myself to practice if I want to be good at it. On the other hand, words, especially fictional writing, isn't very intuitive to me. Every time I try to write fic, I just feel like I'm hitting my head against a wall. Repeatedly. But I still do it, because I know the only way that I can get good at it is to keep doing it, and I feel like that's what that message is for.

I also think that certain skills are interpreted by society/culture to require more natural talent, versus other skills. As someone who likes art, it's always frustrating for me to hear someone say "wow, I can't ever draw" with the implication that they are lacking some inborn talent and therefore will not ever try. This may be sampling bias, but I very rarely hear that in regards to writing. It's often "I'm bad at writing" or "I'm trying to get better at writing." As someone who draws comics non-professionally, I encounter a lot of authors who are looking for an artist to help them realize their magnum opus, and I'm always like "but you can draw it yourself" and they're always like "but I can't ever art" and I want to say to them "but surely you didn't start out knowing how to write stories."

So yes, totally agree with you, but also different skills have different perceptions of "must have this much talent to attempt."

From:

contrarianarchon

>So yes, totally agree with you, but also different skills have different perceptions of "must have this much talent to attempt."

This is valid; I still think your writing massively understates the size of the effect that my brain registers as "talent" - on some level, I register talent as being the thing which decides what your hobby is - I can't really understand the idea that you'd do an activity for reasons other than having a note in your heart which says "This Is A Thing You Do", as least as far as hobbies go. No amount of lecturing me about how it only takes practice to get good at art is ever going to make me good at art, because I lack the spark that makes it *easy to set aside time to spend on art*. Which means I will never practice drawing. Whereas I will practice e.g. TTRPGS or reading or writing because I spend time doing and thinking about and talking about those. I'm specifically rebelling against the lesson that you can just get good at a thing by trying a lot, because "having the ability to try a lot" is not something everyone has for every skill. This is ... maybe a little bit of one of those cases where you have multiple different lessons that need to be taught to different people at different stages of their life; you need to be reminded that the hard bits get better if you keep going but I want to remind people that it's also kinda wrong to imply that the only reason people aren't all good artists is some mix of ignorance and sloth (which is how those reminders start to feel when they're the only art advice that you, a non-artist, ever see).

From:

potofsoup

Hm.... well, by your definition, my hobby isn't drawing or writing, it's "storytelling", since that is the Thing that I want to do in my spare time, which currently translates to some combination of art (which I have more natural intuition for) and writing (in which every word feels hard). Not to mention roleplaying, which I used to have time for and hope to have time for again. So what is it that ultimately drives my hobby? And how much did talent feed into my pursuit of this hobby?

What sort of advice would you, a non-artist, like to see re: art and natural talent? I'm thinking back to being 16 and having grown up in a family environment where art was just not something that people did because it was frivolous and pointless. I saw a friend draw something and thought "I can do that, too," so I went to the library to check out a book about drawing, and then bought a sketchbook that I hid from my parents and started filling it.... What advice would I have given my past self? "Hey you have talent in this so keep doing it"? "Hey if you keep doing it you'll be able to tell the stories that you want to tell"? "Hey, it's going to be hard because no one is going to take you seriously but it's worth it"?

From:

contrarianarchon

I think trying to depict someone as having a single ultimate hobby is unnecessarily reductive; people are complex and will do many things, some of which they are doing because their heart is asking it of them, and some of which they're doing for messy practical reasons, and probably there are other reasons for doing things that doesn't fit into that dichotomy.

As far as advice-i'd-like-to-see. Hmm. I'm obviously not the person who this advice is aimed at since I will for self-described reasons, probably never act on it. Probably I'd like to see more people provide practical advice or sources for practical advice with their moralizing about hard work and practice are all you need; you can also save a lot of time if you use X program and follow these tutorials, etc. Esp focusing on stuff that lowers the barrier to entry in a practical way, rather than a social way.

(The last one of those three sounds like the piece of advice I'd like most to hear about a new hobby from my future self, but I maybe wouldn't trust anyone else to give it? The first one is, according to my model of talent meaningless; talent is the thing that makes keeping doing it happen even though the world is turned against you. The second one depends on your internal state more than I know to answer.)