[Bloody Obvious Position]: innate ability might matter, but that even the most innate abilityed person needs effort to fulfill her potential. If someone were to believe that success were 100% due to fixed innate ability and had nothing to do with practice, then they wouldn’t bother practicing, and they would fall behind. [...]
[pollid:860]
[Somewhat Controversial Position]: The more children believe effort matters, and the less they believe innate ability matters, the more successful they will be. This is because every iota of belief they have in effort gives them more incentive to practice. A child who believes innate ability and effort both explain part of the story might think “Well, if I practice I’ll become a little better, but I’ll never be as good as Mozart. So I’ll practice a little but not get my hopes up.” A child who believes only effort matters, and innate ability doesn’t matter at all, might think “If I practice enough, I can become exactly as good as Mozart.” Then she will practice a truly ridiculous amount to try to achieve fame and fortune. This is why growth mindset works.
[pollid:861]
[Very Controversial Position]: Belief in the importance of ability directly saps a child’s good qualities in some complicated psychological way. It is worse than merely believing that success is based on luck, or success is based on skin color, or that success is based on whatever other thing that isn’t effort. It shifts children into a mode where they must protect their claim to genius at all costs, whether that requires lying, cheating, self-sabotaging, or just avoiding intellectual effort entirely. When a fixed mindset child doesn’t practice as much, it’s not because they’ve made a rational calculation about the utility of practice towards achieving success, it’s because they’ve partly or entirely abandoned success as a goal in favor of the goal of trying to convince other people that they’re Smart.
The Bloody Obvious Position is bloody obviously incorrect when applied to things which actually do depend 100% on innate ability (breathing, for instance).
So insteead of “breathing” use “ordinary breathing”. Or “breathing sufficient to survive”.
Breathing is an extreme example, but the statement fails on any hypothetical where practice is not needed. I was hoping that nobody would bother trying to fight the hypotehtical, but alas.
So insteead of “breathing” use “ordinary breathing”. Or “breathing sufficient to survive”.
That’s a bit like saying “Playing chess requires no skill at all.” You just have to memorize a fairly trivial set of rules of how pieces move. Even if you violate the chess rules you likely still survive the experience, so playing chess is completely about innate ability.
A lot of people simply breath poorly because they don’t practice breathing well. It’s actually a quite good example of how the growth mindset where you are aware that you can improve breathing through practice actually allows you to improve while you wouldn’t otherwise.
Playing chess requires skill. Playing chess poorly doesn’t require a lot of skill.
When making statements about X, X is permitted to be a clause which includes both a noun and qualifiers. X does not have to be a single word. If I assert that there is at least one X such that X requires no skill, X can be “breathing sufficient to survive” or “chess played poorly” or some other phrase which contains a qualifier, and still legitimately demonstrate the truth of the assertion.
People do die as the result of poor breathing so “sufficient” isn’t that clear either.
“chess played poorly”
That’s no description of an ability. We don’t take about whether Alice or Bob are better at “chess played poorly”.
When we talk about abilities we generally do take about things that aren’t binary.
That’s a bit like saying “Playing chess requires no skill at all.” You just have to memorize a fairly trivial set of rules of how pieces move. Even if you violate the chess rules you likely still survive the experience, so playing chess is completely about innate ability.
That quote clearly is an attempt by you to contrast skill with ability, and to equate “requires no skill” with “is about innate ability”. You can’t mean for skill and ability to be synonymous in that.
[Bloody Obvious Position]: innate ability might matter, but that even the most innate abilityed person needs effort to fulfill her potential. If someone were to believe that success were 100% due to fixed innate ability and had nothing to do with practice, then they wouldn’t bother practicing, and they would fall behind. [...]
[pollid:860]
[Somewhat Controversial Position]: The more children believe effort matters, and the less they believe innate ability matters, the more successful they will be. This is because every iota of belief they have in effort gives them more incentive to practice. A child who believes innate ability and effort both explain part of the story might think “Well, if I practice I’ll become a little better, but I’ll never be as good as Mozart. So I’ll practice a little but not get my hopes up.” A child who believes only effort matters, and innate ability doesn’t matter at all, might think “If I practice enough, I can become exactly as good as Mozart.” Then she will practice a truly ridiculous amount to try to achieve fame and fortune. This is why growth mindset works.
[pollid:861]
[Very Controversial Position]: Belief in the importance of ability directly saps a child’s good qualities in some complicated psychological way. It is worse than merely believing that success is based on luck, or success is based on skin color, or that success is based on whatever other thing that isn’t effort. It shifts children into a mode where they must protect their claim to genius at all costs, whether that requires lying, cheating, self-sabotaging, or just avoiding intellectual effort entirely. When a fixed mindset child doesn’t practice as much, it’s not because they’ve made a rational calculation about the utility of practice towards achieving success, it’s because they’ve partly or entirely abandoned success as a goal in favor of the goal of trying to convince other people that they’re Smart.
[pollid:862]
The Bloody Obvious Position is bloody obviously incorrect when applied to things which actually do depend 100% on innate ability (breathing, for instance).
There are different ways to breath and training can make the way people breath more efficient.
So insteead of “breathing” use “ordinary breathing”. Or “breathing sufficient to survive”.
Breathing is an extreme example, but the statement fails on any hypothetical where practice is not needed. I was hoping that nobody would bother trying to fight the hypotehtical, but alas.
That’s a bit like saying “Playing chess requires no skill at all.” You just have to memorize a fairly trivial set of rules of how pieces move. Even if you violate the chess rules you likely still survive the experience, so playing chess is completely about innate ability.
A lot of people simply breath poorly because they don’t practice breathing well. It’s actually a quite good example of how the growth mindset where you are aware that you can improve breathing through practice actually allows you to improve while you wouldn’t otherwise.
Playing chess requires skill. Playing chess poorly doesn’t require a lot of skill.
When making statements about X, X is permitted to be a clause which includes both a noun and qualifiers. X does not have to be a single word. If I assert that there is at least one X such that X requires no skill, X can be “breathing sufficient to survive” or “chess played poorly” or some other phrase which contains a qualifier, and still legitimately demonstrate the truth of the assertion.
People do die as the result of poor breathing so “sufficient” isn’t that clear either.
That’s no description of an ability. We don’t take about whether Alice or Bob are better at “chess played poorly”. When we talk about abilities we generally do take about things that aren’t binary.
I’ve never heard of anyone dying as a result of poor breathing related to lack of skill in breathing.
I think you’re trying to fight the hypothetical. Do you seriously think there is no X such that I can say that X doesn’t require any skill?
I think the word ability is pretty synonymous with skill.
That quote clearly is an attempt by you to contrast skill with ability, and to equate “requires no skill” with “is about innate ability”. You can’t mean for skill and ability to be synonymous in that.