I’ve been learning acoustic guitar for a few months now, and strongly agree with all of this. There are a lot of resonances with rationality practice here, and it also points out some difficulties that I had not realized. Rational thought takes at minimum tens of milliseconds, which is notably less than how long you have to take actions when playing guitar. Also these actions don’t map in any way to evolved reflex loops (unlike, say, driving or juggling which also have similar reaction time requirements). This means I’ve had to explicitly figure out how to chunk and cache rational thoughts prior to playing, so as to be able to use them during play. Music also allows many opportunities to look back at something you learned and say “How could I have learned this faster”? You’ll find that many people will tell you “You just needed to practice that for hours” for things which you actually could have inferred rationally very quickly if you had stepped back and worked the issue.
I’ve been learning acoustic guitar for a few months now, and strongly agree with all of this. There are a lot of resonances with rationality practice here, and it also points out some difficulties that I had not realized. Rational thought takes at minimum tens of milliseconds, which is notably less than how long you have to take actions when playing guitar. Also these actions don’t map in any way to evolved reflex loops (unlike, say, driving or juggling which also have similar reaction time requirements). This means I’ve had to explicitly figure out how to chunk and cache rational thoughts prior to playing, so as to be able to use them during play. Music also allows many opportunities to look back at something you learned and say “How could I have learned this faster”? You’ll find that many people will tell you “You just needed to practice that for hours” for things which you actually could have inferred rationally very quickly if you had stepped back and worked the issue.