Some things increase linearly with effort and some things increase exponentially. Some use that to make silly claims.
I take great issue with people who write pithy quotes about percentage changes leading to order of magnitude improvements. Maybe that works for money, but not for self improvement. How are you planning to find a 1% improvement in something you've increased by an order of magnitude? Skill development in all fields hits rapid diminishing returns on effort, not linear.
Forget about that. You want bang for your buck?
Focus on things with thresholds, where the benefits suddenly jump up.
If a threshold is close, you can get large gains with relatively little effort. Conversely, a herculean effort for a seemingly small improvement may be worth it to get over a threshold.
I spent several hours shortening pants hems the other day. An inch in the length doesn't make a difference to the functionality or aesthetics of these particular pants.
But, in thin shoes when going up stairs, the back of the hem catches on the edge of the heel. Taking an inch off stops that. Don't have to remember not to wear those shoes with those pants, or to tug up the legs slightly, or habitually flick the pants away before setting down a foot. All those little efforts I never realized I was making, gone. That's a threshold worth hours of one-off labor.
There's plenty of physical thresholds like that. That's the principle behind nothing should be full. Full happens to be a threshold where things suddenly become significantly more difficult.
What about knowledge or skills?
The first major threshold for anything is awareness. If you know of something, even if you know nothing about it, you have an on-ramp to learn about it when needed. When you hit a problem related to it, you aren't stuck because you have a direction to follow. This is why you should have a general education, not because you'll remember it entirely, but because you'll remember that you learned about it once when you need it. The end goal isn't memorization or even understanding, but to know the shape of the things which you can come back to. It's defined by perpetual forgetting as much as knowledge.
The second major threshold is capability. Having the bare minimum ability to get by, and keeping it. Once you know enough to ask meaningful questions, when you know enough to increase your knowledge with long gaps between without restarting, that's capability. Any amount of improvement over time, however slowly it may be, is a massive gain from learning the same topic repeatedly.
Beyond there, skill. There's no general rule for where skill lies, it entirely depends what you're doing. Any skill can be broken down into many pieces of awareness and capability, but it misses the bigger picture.
There's a threshold to become a chef who makes things as they please, rather than a cook who can only follow recipes. Listing things out like "which seasonings do what" or "how to dice vegetables" will only get you so far in defining it. Cooking from scratch without guidance is a capacity that encapsulates innumerable others. A formal curriculum will try, but any teacher can tell you that classroom learning is insufficient to learn a trade. The successful students are always the ones who keep exploring on their own.
You cannot be taught it directly, as you cannot teach insight or good taste. You can be taught the components and the scaffold, but must make the leap to the whole on your own. That's skill.
Skill is where the magic lies, and I'm willing to spend exorbitant effort to get there. Awareness by definition includes everything you know, capability is a step up from scraping by, but you can't cheat skill. When you hit true skill, almost everything contributes to growth. Inefficiency and tangents develop into style and expertise.
I suppose expertise is the final threshold. Taking skill and combining it with narrow domain knowledge. You can tell when someone knows what they're talking about, has spent much time nurturing that skill. It taints the framing of everything they do, leaks out in the tiniest details. They can't stop making divergent choices in everything they do, and it feels natural to them because it is.
Style is simply endless details, aligned a certain way. No wonder you can't force it, only develop it.
There's beauty in that.
Isn't that a better target than hypothetical exponentials?
- Rew
Nightly Notes
I already disagree with this division and I wrote it minutes ago. These are thoughts I could not put into words before attempting to write them. Take it as an interesting set of ideas to play with, not as an iron-clad framework. That's true for all ideas of this kind, really.
There's another set of drafts bouncing around about whether one develops style or discovers what was already there, how the leap to skill occurs, when to pursue it and when to let go. I'm not ready to write them yet. It'll be vacumning technique or some such tomorrow.
Anyway.
This is a byproduct of thinking about education, growth, and what I want to pursue in my life.
It's also the byproduct of seeing a world filled with AI. Perhaps AI has been conspicuously absent here, a blog from a tech-adjacent person interested in changing the way you live. I can't tell what the consensus is anymore, I'm in too many conflicting bubbles.
This isn't about that, I would have come to the same conclusions in a world without AI. This is the kind of person I am.
I value expertise for its own sake.
I wish to see things made by people who care deeply, who have a specific perspective and a lifetime of experience to defend it.
I wish to drink of a world of people who never stop dreaming about different futures.
I wish to be capable of shaping the world that little bit one day, in my own way.
Not to be witnessed, not to have finished, but to be there.
Lived experience is all we have. Recollection and sharing are experiences, but they are not the experience themselves. The only way to retain an experience is to constantly live it.
Is it any wonder I keep trying to change mine?
I'm throwing skills at the wall big and small, hoping for a hint to the shape of the leap up. I want to know what's on top of that infinite hill where expertise becomes a way of life. I don't know that there's anything else worth doing.
I hear other people wish to spend their lives helping others, achieving the impossible, or simply being happy. I'm glad they're here, glad they make the world shine in their own ways.
But that's not me.
That alone will tell you why I am so hesitant when AI enters the conversation. You can fill in the rest of the argument, I won't bother writing it out. It's tedious. There is a world in which AI is a part of that vision.
I'm not so sure it's this one.
I have better things to do than throw ethics and time and money into the chipper to find out.
- Rew