Motif coming up for me: a lot of skill ceilings are much higher than you might think, and worth investing in.
Some skills that you can be way better at:
Listening to people, and hearing what they’re actually trying to say, and gaining value from it
Noticing subtle things that are important. You can learn to notice like 5 different things happening inside you or around you, that occured in <1 second.
Being concrete, in ways that help you resolve confusion and gain momentum on solving problems.
Each stage of OODA Looping is quite deep
(i.e. “Observe”, “Orient”, “Decide”, and “Act” each have a lot of deep subskills. The depth of “Noticing” is a subset of the overall set of “Observation” skills”)
For people asking about ‘noticing 5 things happening within a second or so’, you can see at least one (fictional but representative) example in Scaffolding for “Noticing Metacognition”
Skill ceilings across humanity is quite high. I think of super genius chess players, Terry Tao, etc.
A particular individual’s skill ceiling is relatively low (compared to these maximally gifted individuals). Sure, everyone can be better at listening, but there’s a high non-zero chance you have some sort of condition or life experience that makes it more difficult to develop it (hearing disability, physical/mental illness, trauma, an environment of people who are actually not great at communicating themselves, etc).
I’m reminded of what Samo Burja calls “completeness hypothesis”:
> It is the idea that having all of the important contributing pieces makes a given effect much, much larger than having most of the pieces. Having 100% of the pieces of a car produces a very different effect than having 90% of the pieces. The four important pieces for producing mastery in a domain are good feedback mechanisms, extreme motivation, the right equipment, and sufficient time. According to the Completeness Hypothesis, people that stably have all four of these pieces will have orders-of-magnitude greater skill than people that have only two or three of the components.
This is not a fatalistic recommendation to NOT invest in skill development. Quite the opposite.
Most people do not approach anywhere near their individual skill ceiling because they lack the four things that Burja lists. As Luu points out, most people don’t care that much to develop their skills. People do not care to find good feedback loops, cultivate the motivation, or carve out sufficent time to develop skills. Certain skills may be limited by resources (equipment), but there are hacks that can lead to skill development at a sub-optimal rate (e.g. calisthenics for muscle mass development vs weighted training. Maybe you can’t afford a gym membership but push-ups are free).
As @sunwillrise mentioned, there are diminishing returns for developing a skill. The gap from 0th % → 80th % is actually quite narrow. 80th % → 98% requires work but is doable for most people, and you probably start to experience diminishing returns around this range.
98%+ results are reserved for those who can have long-term stable environments to cultivate the skill, or the extremely talented.
Feedback loops I think are the principle bottleneck in my skill development, aside from the fact that if you’re a novice you don’t even know what you should be noticing (even if you have enough awareness to be cognizant of all signs and outputs of an act).
To give an example, I’m currently trying to learn how to generate client leads through video content for Instagram. Unless someone actually tells me about a video they liked and what they liked about it, figuring out how to please the algorithm to generate more engagement is hard. The only thing that “works”—tagging other people. Nothing about the type of content, the framing of the shots, the subject matter, the audio… nope… just whether or not one or more other Instagram accounts are tagged in it. (Of course since the end objective is - ‘get commissioned’ perhaps optimizing for Instagram engagement is not even the thing I should be optimizing at all… how would I know?) Feedback loops are hard. A desirbale metaskill to have would be developing tight feedback loops.
there’s imo probably not any (even-nearly-implementable) ceiling for basically any rich (thinking-)skill at all[1] — no cognitive system will ever be well-thought-of as getting close to a ceiling at such a skill — it’s always possible to do any rich skill very much better (I mean these things for finite minds in general, but also when restricting the scope to current humans)
(that said, (1) of course, it is common for people to become better at particular skills up to some time and to become worse later, but i think this has nothing to do with having reached some principled ceiling; (2) also, we could perhaps eg try to talk about ‘the artifact that takes at most n bits to specify (in some specification-language) which figures out x units of math the quickest (for some x sufficiently large compared to n)’, but even if we could make sense of that, it wouldn’t be right to think of it as being at some math skill ceiling to begin with, because it will probably very quickly change very much about its thinking (i.e. reprogram itself, imo plausibly indefinitely many times, including indefinitely many times in important ways, until the heat death of the universe or whatever); (3) i admit that there can be some purposes for which there is an appropriate way to measure goodness at some rich skill with a score in [0,1], and for such a purpose potential goodness at even a rich skill is of course appropriate to consider bounded and optimal performance might be rightly said to be approachable, but this somehow feels not-that-relevant in the present context)
i’ll try to get away with not being very clear about what i mean by a ‘rich (thinking-)skill’ except that it has to do with having a rich domain (the domain either effectively presenting any sufficiently rich set of mathematical questions as problems or relating richly to humans, or in particular just to yourself, usually suffices) and i would include all the examples you give
a lot of skill ceilings are much higher than you might think, and worth investing in
The former doesn’t necessarily imply the latter in general, because even if we are systematically underestimating the realistic upper bound for our skill level in these areas, we would still have to deal with diminishing marginal returns to investing in any particular one. As a result, I am much more confident of the former claim being correct for the average LW reader than of the latter. In practice, my experience tells me that you often have “phase changes” of sorts, where there’s a rather binary instead of continuous response to a skill level increase: either you’ve hit the activation energy level, and thus unlock the self-reinforcing loop of benefits that flow from the skill (once you can apply it properly and iterate on it or use it recursively), or you haven’t, in which case any measurable improvement is minimal. It’s thus often more important to get past the critical point than to make marginal improvements either before or after hitting it.
On the other hand, many of the skills you mentioned afterwards in your comment seem relatively general-purpose, so I could totally be off-base in these specific cases.
The “you need to hit a particular activation level” seems right to me. Generally when I’m trying to teach people skills, I try to get them to fluency-escape-velocity, where it is net-positive to apply the skill to their day-job.
There’s additional important bits about hitting particular thresholds allow you to build engines out of multiple skills (I’ll probably reply more to t14n’s comment about that)
The former doesn’t necessarily imply the latter in general, because even if we are systematically underestimating the realistic upper bound for our skill level in these areas, we would still have to deal with diminishing marginal returns to investing in any particular one.
On the other hand, even if what you say is true, skill headroom may still imply that it’s worth building shared arts around such skills. Shareability and build-on-ability changes the marginal returns a lot.
Motif coming up for me: a lot of skill ceilings are much higher than you might think, and worth investing in.
Some skills that you can be way better at:
Listening to people, and hearing what they’re actually trying to say, and gaining value from it
Noticing subtle things that are important. You can learn to notice like 5 different things happening inside you or around you, that occured in <1 second.
Being concrete, in ways that help you resolve confusion and gain momentum on solving problems.
Each stage of OODA Looping is quite deep
(i.e. “Observe”, “Orient”, “Decide”, and “Act” each have a lot of deep subskills. The depth of “Noticing” is a subset of the overall set of “Observation” skills”)
For people asking about ‘noticing 5 things happening within a second or so’, you can see at least one (fictional but representative) example in Scaffolding for “Noticing Metacognition”
Skill ceilings across humanity is quite high. I think of super genius chess players, Terry Tao, etc.
A particular individual’s skill ceiling is relatively low (compared to these maximally gifted individuals). Sure, everyone can be better at listening, but there’s a high non-zero chance you have some sort of condition or life experience that makes it more difficult to develop it (hearing disability, physical/mental illness, trauma, an environment of people who are actually not great at communicating themselves, etc).
I’m reminded of what Samo Burja calls “completeness hypothesis”:
> It is the idea that having all of the important contributing pieces makes a given effect much, much larger than having most of the pieces. Having 100% of the pieces of a car produces a very different effect than having 90% of the pieces. The four important pieces for producing mastery in a domain are good feedback mechanisms, extreme motivation, the right equipment, and sufficient time. According to the Completeness Hypothesis, people that stably have all four of these pieces will have orders-of-magnitude greater skill than people that have only two or three of the components.
This is not a fatalistic recommendation to NOT invest in skill development. Quite the opposite.
I recommend Dan Luu’s 95th %-tile is not that good.
Most people do not approach anywhere near their individual skill ceiling because they lack the four things that Burja lists. As Luu points out, most people don’t care that much to develop their skills. People do not care to find good feedback loops, cultivate the motivation, or carve out sufficent time to develop skills. Certain skills may be limited by resources (equipment), but there are hacks that can lead to skill development at a sub-optimal rate (e.g. calisthenics for muscle mass development vs weighted training. Maybe you can’t afford a gym membership but push-ups are free).
As @sunwillrise mentioned, there are diminishing returns for developing a skill. The gap from 0th % → 80th % is actually quite narrow. 80th % → 98% requires work but is doable for most people, and you probably start to experience diminishing returns around this range.
98%+ results are reserved for those who can have long-term stable environments to cultivate the skill, or the extremely talented.
Feedback loops I think are the principle bottleneck in my skill development, aside from the fact that if you’re a novice you don’t even know what you should be noticing (even if you have enough awareness to be cognizant of all signs and outputs of an act).
To give an example, I’m currently trying to learn how to generate client leads through video content for Instagram. Unless someone actually tells me about a video they liked and what they liked about it, figuring out how to please the algorithm to generate more engagement is hard. The only thing that “works”—tagging other people. Nothing about the type of content, the framing of the shots, the subject matter, the audio… nope… just whether or not one or more other Instagram accounts are tagged in it. (Of course since the end objective is - ‘get commissioned’ perhaps optimizing for Instagram engagement is not even the thing I should be optimizing at all… how would I know?)
Feedback loops are hard. A desirbale metaskill to have would be developing tight feedback loops.
there’s imo probably not any (even-nearly-implementable) ceiling for basically any rich (thinking-)skill at all[1] — no cognitive system will ever be well-thought-of as getting close to a ceiling at such a skill — it’s always possible to do any rich skill very much better (I mean these things for finite minds in general, but also when restricting the scope to current humans)
(that said, (1) of course, it is common for people to become better at particular skills up to some time and to become worse later, but i think this has nothing to do with having reached some principled ceiling; (2) also, we could perhaps eg try to talk about ‘the artifact that takes at most n bits to specify (in some specification-language) which figures out x units of math the quickest (for some x sufficiently large compared to n)’, but even if we could make sense of that, it wouldn’t be right to think of it as being at some math skill ceiling to begin with, because it will probably very quickly change very much about its thinking (i.e. reprogram itself, imo plausibly indefinitely many times, including indefinitely many times in important ways, until the heat death of the universe or whatever); (3) i admit that there can be some purposes for which there is an appropriate way to measure goodness at some rich skill with a score in [0,1], and for such a purpose potential goodness at even a rich skill is of course appropriate to consider bounded and optimal performance might be rightly said to be approachable, but this somehow feels not-that-relevant in the present context)
i’ll try to get away with not being very clear about what i mean by a ‘rich (thinking-)skill’ except that it has to do with having a rich domain (the domain either effectively presenting any sufficiently rich set of mathematical questions as problems or relating richly to humans, or in particular just to yourself, usually suffices) and i would include all the examples you give
The former doesn’t necessarily imply the latter in general, because even if we are systematically underestimating the realistic upper bound for our skill level in these areas, we would still have to deal with diminishing marginal returns to investing in any particular one. As a result, I am much more confident of the former claim being correct for the average LW reader than of the latter. In practice, my experience tells me that you often have “phase changes” of sorts, where there’s a rather binary instead of continuous response to a skill level increase: either you’ve hit the activation energy level, and thus unlock the self-reinforcing loop of benefits that flow from the skill (once you can apply it properly and iterate on it or use it recursively), or you haven’t, in which case any measurable improvement is minimal. It’s thus often more important to get past the critical point than to make marginal improvements either before or after hitting it.
On the other hand, many of the skills you mentioned afterwards in your comment seem relatively general-purpose, so I could totally be off-base in these specific cases.
The “you need to hit a particular activation level” seems right to me. Generally when I’m trying to teach people skills, I try to get them to fluency-escape-velocity, where it is net-positive to apply the skill to their day-job.
There’s additional important bits about hitting particular thresholds allow you to build engines out of multiple skills (I’ll probably reply more to t14n’s comment about that)
On the other hand, even if what you say is true, skill headroom may still imply that it’s worth building shared arts around such skills. Shareability and build-on-ability changes the marginal returns a lot.