I think “It’s like being a native French speaker and dropping in on a high school French class in a South Carolina public school” is a very strong claim of superiority, far beyond “I notice stuff in this domain a lot more often than most people”.
I find this helpful, and I think it’s a fair and reasonable reading that I should have ruled out.
What I meant by choosing that example in particular was that French contains a lot of sounds which English speakers literally can’t perceive at first, until they practice and build up some other background knowledge. That’s … not entirely different from a claim of superiority, but I tried to defuse the sense of superiority by noting that a lot of it comes from just relentlessly attending to the domain—”it’s not that I’m doing anything magic here, many of the people I’m hanging out with are smarter or conscientiouser, it’s just that I happen to have put in more reps is all.”
Ah, this makes sense and is helpful, and now that you’ve spelled it out I can see how it connects to other things in the post in ways I didn’t before. It also makes cases of failure much less relevant, since no one has all phenomes.
Worth noting that I noticed the kerning example seemed very different than the native speaker example, but the “native speaker in a room full of bored teenagers” claim felt so strong I resolved in that direction.
I find this helpful, and I think it’s a fair and reasonable reading that I should have ruled out.
What I meant by choosing that example in particular was that French contains a lot of sounds which English speakers literally can’t perceive at first, until they practice and build up some other background knowledge. That’s … not entirely different from a claim of superiority, but I tried to defuse the sense of superiority by noting that a lot of it comes from just relentlessly attending to the domain—”it’s not that I’m doing anything magic here, many of the people I’m hanging out with are smarter or conscientiouser, it’s just that I happen to have put in more reps is all.”
It didn’t work.
Ah, this makes sense and is helpful, and now that you’ve spelled it out I can see how it connects to other things in the post in ways I didn’t before. It also makes cases of failure much less relevant, since no one has all phenomes.
Worth noting that I noticed the kerning example seemed very different than the native speaker example, but the “native speaker in a room full of bored teenagers” claim felt so strong I resolved in that direction.