Working hard, or hardly working
Tommi:
The autopsy of talent
Today I wanted to express a few thoughts about talent. When I took a stint of teaching high school math, I noticed that the success in math is mostly a function of amount of practice and mental calmness, that is, the ability not to panic when facing new things but being able to look at and think about the problem. Minor differences in skill at the beginning of the semester grew exponentially when the successful students attempted to solve more problems than the less successful students. Typically a student who "tried but failed" was most of the time lazy and worked hard only a couple of times for a short while in a state of panic, during which he really made it clear to everybody else how hard he is working now.
When rote learning inevitably wins in a modern school (it creates results that are immediately evident and measurable) and actual practice withers, the differences in skill level depend mainly on how much the students practice outside the actual school system. The sense of superiority seemed to be a major motivator here. For this reason it would be smart to tone down the talk about mathematical talent: believe it or not, once you observe real students solving real problems, the differences in talent affected the real result only very little or not at all, when compared to amount of hard work and concentration skill.
Surely differences in talent exist and they have an effect, but the concept of talent wreaked havoc in the math class that I talk about. It hurt a lot those students who didn't succeed and it hurt a little those that did, but everyone can guess what it feels like when you finally reach the level where actual work is necessary, once you have grown into goofing around and admiring your own excellence.
The image of a mad genius that is shown in movies is undeniably natural for people who can't be bothered to visualize quantitative concepts. Natural sciences and people who study them are magicians and strange creatures who communicate with mystical hieroglyphs and who were predestined to their position from birth. But this is only a part of a larger phenomenon.
The main problem is the modern culture where everyone sells their personality. Even children are taught to turn themselves into a brand that sells. In the job market people compete as good guys, and the legalized prostitution that the mating process really is requires an ever-increasing amount of work and effort. In reality individual differences are rather small, and for every unusual or extraordinary person one could gather a group in which he would be ordinary. When viewed from the macroscopic level, competing with your personal individual attributes is about as sensible as competing with the thickness of your eyebrows.
I don't have the energy to analyse what people think about the myth of individuality inside their own personal psychology, but at least when I think about humans in their daily activities, this myth steers them towards endless zero-sum games and waste of resources. When only the absolute values should be important in reality, their relative distribution becomes important instead, regardless of how meaningless these differences happen to be.
I personally believe that the biggest reason why our society does not become less conflicted is, in addition to the religion of individuality, the fact that the sexual market is not properly understood to be a market. And especially a market that works with other markets: by gaining wealth, a man can make himself more desirable to women, and young women can earn financial benefits with their looks, to point out a few of the most obvious connections between markets.
When even the very existence of the sexual market is denied (some childish women believe that they benefits they get in this market are free), nothing really controls this market, and since no punishment follows from failing to obey your contracts (even cheating in marriage is no longer a punishable crime), this market has evolved to a state of African-style corruption and kleptocracy.
The sexual market maintains the cult of individuality, and this cult in turn maintains an economy in which massive amounts of work and effort are spent for status symbols and mating rites. For this reason all phenomena become personal, and anything is done less for (non zero-sum) results and more because it is important in building your public image.
For example, lamentably few people even think about the practical benefit of learning mathematics, whereas many more think about the way that learning mathematics improves their public talent profile. Based on nothing but immediate feelings of a few seconds, all things are divided in two categories "I am good at this, I like it" and "I am bad at this, I don't like it". Building a selling personality is mercilessly hard work which excludes everything which exudes even a small hint that it might hinder building your image. And if you don't do this, the market is full of people who are ready to put in more effort and reap the biggest rewards.
The cult of individuality has already advanced so far that classifying people based on independent attributes is considered unfair. "Acknowledging and respecting the individual needs" simply means unfortunately that a person is judged in each situation based on mostly whether his personality is pleasant or not.
As idols of a healthier worldview I could recommend Robert Fripp who, according to his own words, was not very musical as a child, but with hard work learned to play and got good results. His weak sense of rhythm is still evident in the fact that he can't dance. Another idol might be M.C. Escher, who started practicing drawing so enthusiastically simply because he was so bad in it. At some point Escher, who had multiple learning disabilities, acquired such a vast knowledge of surface-filling ornamental figures that he is mentioned even in history of mathematics.
I feel funny being like this, but I think that it's good to give a high value to people who do things instead of wimpering about whether they are good or bad people and whether their own personal talent profile suits this particular thing. In other words, people who ignore the definitions and classifications that are imposed on them by the outside world and who get to work without worrying about the effort in line of Nike's slogan "Just do it". (Perhaps it should be mentioned that the writer is the exact opposite: a lazy underachiever who was initially considered talented.)
Comments