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.
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.