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I know this is obvious, but I think it bears repeating: the higher up you go in some skill tree, the smaller the improvements become. Which leads to some interesting observations: 1) To a novice, an expert giving feedback to the merely good will seem like nitpicking.

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I think this depends a lot on the domain, and that it's not true in e.g. creative and research domains, where unlocking fundamentally new features of the domain leads to sudden massive growth in possibilities.

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Interesting. I'd not considered this angle before, and will have to think about it for a bit. You're on to something, though — research (either mathematical or generic) does seem to have different gradations of skill.

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In general I think there's an important split that is something like... creativity vs technical skill, and what you're describing is true of technical skill and not of creativity, largely because you're focused on domains where creativity is primarily in service to skill.

Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

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@DRMacIver

Leaning into that distinction a little, I wonder if technical skill has less applicability when dealing with uncertainty. That is, if there is something fundamentally different about the 'skill' of exploring uncertainty (which involves getting lucky, developing taste, etc).

4:49 PM · Jul 13, 2022Twitter Web App

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I'm not sure. Technical skill seems super important as a foundation - it gives you access to intuition you'd otherwise lack, it gives you basic skills you need to build on to experiment, etc. There's a lot of overlap. But probably a lot of non-overlap too.