By just saying “most humans can compensate for X degree of clumsiness. This person has Y degree of clumsiness. Y is greater than X”.
Of course, your ability to determine those two factors isn’t perfect, so you will get it wrong sometimes, especially in borderline cases, but you can certainly do better than chance.
Better than chance is a low bar. If you have some problem in your life, how do you determine whether and to what extent it is solvable, when to carry on and when to give up? Where the problem is, for example, akrasia, clumsiness, social anxiety, despair at the magnitude of the ills of the world, being a refugee in a flimsy boat in the Mediterranean, or acne.
It is easy to invent examples in the imagination where it is clear that you can solve it or clear that you can’t. There are fewer easy answers for the problems that life throws at you, which are not selected for solvability or unsolvability.
Going back to an ancestor comment:
Someone who is clumsy because of a neurological disorder cannot do anything which prevents himself from being clumsy. Someone who is “normally” clumsy can.
Again, it’s not always easy to tell. I’ve seen people with severe cerebral palsy who it was clear were never going to walk or speak with a clear voice. I’ve also seen beginners in the taiko class who are competent at the ordinary movements of day to day life, but make a complete hash of what seem to me like the very simplest actions. I wonder if they are ever going to get it, and recognise that I don’t know. So I point them toward the correct movements, see them do the wrong thing again, and repeat. When I first took up tai chi, maybe the teacher thought the same thing about me. Eventually I learned, but I’ve seen other people go on for years without advancing. Could they, with different instruction? I can’t tell.
“Better than chance” is just another way to say “sometimes it actually works”. It doesn’t need to work every single time for it to be something useful.
By just saying “most humans can compensate for X degree of clumsiness. This person has Y degree of clumsiness. Y is greater than X”.
Of course, your ability to determine those two factors isn’t perfect, so you will get it wrong sometimes, especially in borderline cases, but you can certainly do better than chance.
Better than chance is a low bar. If you have some problem in your life, how do you determine whether and to what extent it is solvable, when to carry on and when to give up? Where the problem is, for example, akrasia, clumsiness, social anxiety, despair at the magnitude of the ills of the world, being a refugee in a flimsy boat in the Mediterranean, or acne.
It is easy to invent examples in the imagination where it is clear that you can solve it or clear that you can’t. There are fewer easy answers for the problems that life throws at you, which are not selected for solvability or unsolvability.
Going back to an ancestor comment:
Again, it’s not always easy to tell. I’ve seen people with severe cerebral palsy who it was clear were never going to walk or speak with a clear voice. I’ve also seen beginners in the taiko class who are competent at the ordinary movements of day to day life, but make a complete hash of what seem to me like the very simplest actions. I wonder if they are ever going to get it, and recognise that I don’t know. So I point them toward the correct movements, see them do the wrong thing again, and repeat. When I first took up tai chi, maybe the teacher thought the same thing about me. Eventually I learned, but I’ve seen other people go on for years without advancing. Could they, with different instruction? I can’t tell.
“Better than chance” is just another way to say “sometimes it actually works”. It doesn’t need to work every single time for it to be something useful.