Here’s the thing though. When someone asks a vague question like “how do I learn music”, to me that means they’re not trying. Otherwise they’d have specific questions, like what’s that chord in a given song, or how to pick across strings, or how to improve timing on the kick drum. If you have no such questions, just a vague “how to get better at social”, you need to start trying and getting more specific questions, not reading ahead.
The reason I was not so specific is because my two overarching problems are themselves very wide: (1) having less than optimal impulse control resulting in sometimes making poor social decisions without prior thought and control, and (2) not possessing sufficient data on social knowledge/skills to know what to do in a variety of situations.
I am not yet at a stage where I could say exactly what it is that I need to learn, so I am looking for a wide variety of avenues to start down. Once I’ve made a solid start, I will be able to actually see the specific questions.
Well, someone who never learned music surely doesn’t have enough knowledge/skills on what to do in a band, and will perform terribly on stage. Their problems, as you say, are wide. And yet, if such a person goes around asking “where do I start learning music”, I just know that they’re not that into the whole idea. If they were, they would’ve picked up a guitar and be playing already.
Which, as a matter of fact, I have been doing. But when I started learning guitar, I did not already know to ask “what exercises can I do to strengthen my hand so I can play barre chords better”. I started with “where do I begin”, and went from there. As I played more and more, I begun to see the things I needed to know in order to improve. The same follows here.
Sure. But even then, trying looks very different from not trying. I got a saxophone, played it by myself for a few weeks, then booked a lesson with a teacher. At the start of the lesson I played a few notes and said: “Anything jump out at you? I think some notes come out flat, and the sound isn’t bright enough, anyway you see what I’m doing and any advice would be good.” Then he gave me a lot of good advice tailored to my level.
Here’s a video from Ben Finegold making the same point about learning chess:
“Is it possible to be good at chess when you start playing at 18?” Anything’s possible. But if you want to get good at chess—I’m not saying you do, but if you do—then people who say things like “what opening should I play?” and “my rating’s 1200, how do I get to 1400?” and you know, “my coach says this but I don’t want to do that”, or you know, “I lost five games in a row on chess.com so I haven’t played in a week”, those kind of things have nothing to do with getting better at chess. It’s inquisitive of you, and that’s what most people do. People who get better at chess play chess, study chess, think about chess, love chess and do chess stuff. People who don’t get better at chess spend 90 percent of their energy thinking about “how do I get better” and asking questions about it. That’s not how you get better at something. You want to get better at something, you do it and you work hard at it, and it’s not just chess, that’s your whole life.
A more charitable interpretation is that they are trying to assume less, going a little more meta and explaining the general problem, instead of focusing on specifics that they thing are important, but might not really be.
A failure mode when people don’t try to do this is the user that asks a software developer to “just add a button that allows me to autofill this form”, when maybe there’s an automation that renders the form totally unnecessary.
Here’s the thing though. When someone asks a vague question like “how do I learn music”, to me that means they’re not trying. Otherwise they’d have specific questions, like what’s that chord in a given song, or how to pick across strings, or how to improve timing on the kick drum. If you have no such questions, just a vague “how to get better at social”, you need to start trying and getting more specific questions, not reading ahead.
The reason I was not so specific is because my two overarching problems are themselves very wide: (1) having less than optimal impulse control resulting in sometimes making poor social decisions without prior thought and control, and (2) not possessing sufficient data on social knowledge/skills to know what to do in a variety of situations.
I am not yet at a stage where I could say exactly what it is that I need to learn, so I am looking for a wide variety of avenues to start down. Once I’ve made a solid start, I will be able to actually see the specific questions.
Well, someone who never learned music surely doesn’t have enough knowledge/skills on what to do in a band, and will perform terribly on stage. Their problems, as you say, are wide. And yet, if such a person goes around asking “where do I start learning music”, I just know that they’re not that into the whole idea. If they were, they would’ve picked up a guitar and be playing already.
Which, as a matter of fact, I have been doing. But when I started learning guitar, I did not already know to ask “what exercises can I do to strengthen my hand so I can play barre chords better”. I started with “where do I begin”, and went from there. As I played more and more, I begun to see the things I needed to know in order to improve. The same follows here.
You don’t “know” that they’re not into the whole idea. You assume that and are overconfident.
Or alternatively, they might be bad at more than one single narrow task within the relevant domain.
Sure. But even then, trying looks very different from not trying. I got a saxophone, played it by myself for a few weeks, then booked a lesson with a teacher. At the start of the lesson I played a few notes and said: “Anything jump out at you? I think some notes come out flat, and the sound isn’t bright enough, anyway you see what I’m doing and any advice would be good.” Then he gave me a lot of good advice tailored to my level.
Here’s a video from Ben Finegold making the same point about learning chess:
Related
A more charitable interpretation is that they are trying to assume less, going a little more meta and explaining the general problem, instead of focusing on specifics that they thing are important, but might not really be.
A failure mode when people don’t try to do this is the user that asks a software developer to “just add a button that allows me to autofill this form”, when maybe there’s an automation that renders the form totally unnecessary.