There are only four skills: design, technical, management and physical
Epistemic status: Completely schizo galaxy-brained theory
Lightcone[1] operates on a “generalist” philosophy. Most of our full-time staff have the title “generalist”, and in any given year they work on a wide variety of tasks — from software development on the LessWrong codebase to fixing an overflowing toilet at Lighthaven, our 30,000 sq. ft. campus.
One of our core rules is that you should not delegate a task you don’t know how to perform yourself. This is a very intense rule and has lots of implications about how we operate, so I’ve spent a lot of time watching people learn things they didn’t previously know how to do.
My overall observation (and why we have the rule) is that smart people can learn almost anything. Across a wide range of tasks, most of the variance in performance is explained by general intelligence (foremost) and conscientiousness (secondmost), not expertise. Of course, if you compare yourself to someone who’s done a task thousands of times you’ll lag behind for a while — but people plateau surprisingly quickly. Having worked with experts across many industries, and having dabbled in the literature around skill transfer and training, there seems to be little difference within an industry between someone four years in and someone twenty years in, once you control for intelligence and conscientiousness.
But sometimes someone on my team does actually truly struggle to get better at a task, even if they are smart. Or I notice that if I were to try to get them to do something, they would have no idea how to even get started unless they spent at the very least multiple months, if not multiple years, acquiring the foundations necessary to do so.
So the question becomes: What determines whether someone is capable of relatively quickly acquiring expert-level performance in domains ranging from preparing a legal defense, to preparing an architectural plan, to physically renovating a bathroom, to programming a conference schedule app?
And my current, schizo galaxy-brained theory is that there are exactly 4 skills:
Design skills: The ability to make good frontend design decisions, writing and explaining yourself well, designing a room, writing a good legal defense, knowing how to architect a complicated software system
Technical skills: Follow and perform mathematical proofs, know how to program, make Fermi estimates, make solid analytic arguments, read and understand a paper in STEM, follow economic arguments, make a business plan, perform structural calculations for your architectural plans
Management skills: Know how to hire people, know how to give employees feedback, generally manage people, navigate difficult organizational politics
Physical skills: Be expert level at any sport, have the physical dexterity to renovate a room by yourself, know how to dance
If you are good at any task in any of those categories, you can become expert-level within 6 months at any other task in the same category.
Now why these exact 4 skills?
IDK, it kind of fits the data I’ve observed. But here is roughly how I came to believe what I believe:
First: across all tasks, performance correlates highly with general intelligence, and this dominates everything else. But clearly there’s non-trivial variance left after controlling for it.
Then, there’s an obvious divide between STEM and the humanities. Ask someone with a legal, history, or non-analytic-philosophy background to learn programming and mostly they bounce off or expect a multi-year training journey. Ask someone with a STEM degree to learn programming and it goes pretty well even if they’ve never programmed before.
Similarly, when I talk to people with a legal or humanities background and ask them about complicated frontend design decisions, they usually give surprisingly good input! They will pretty quickly jump into the fray of trying to model the user, figure out what a good product or information ontology, and have a sense of style about its presentation.
So that’s it. There are exactly two skills. “Technical skills” and “Design Skills”.
Then I tried to manage people. That… didn’t go so well. Not only that, when I tried to get people on my team to manage other people, they also sucked at it!
So I learned that if I want to predict who will be good at management, I need to pay attention to whether they’ve managed other people before, and expect many months of practice until they are decent at it. Maybe it’s a completely new cognitive domain, maybe it’s just a domain where skill transfer is very hard and feedback loops are very slow and so it just takes everyone a while to learn the basic lessons, but nevertheless, if I want to predict performance at Lightcone, I gotta model people’s management skills separately.
And then I tried to renovate a hotel.
And while the people on my team really ended up surprisingly good at a very wide range of tasks associated with construction and construction management, it also became clear that no one on my team would be able to perform the actual labor that our general contractors were able to perform. And also that they would totally smoke us in any sports competition. And that if I wanted to get someone on my team involved in the daily construction work, I sure expect that they would need many months of getting into shape and developing the right kind of physical skills.
So 4 skills it is.
Now, am I confident I have seen all skills there are in the world, such that no additional cluster will arise? Actually, yeah, kind of.
I have been walking through the world trying to keep track of what kind of career many of my acquaintances and colleagues go into for something like the last 2-3 years, and haven’t really noticed any big holes. I have also been actively trying to think about careers that currently seem off limits to someone who has basic expertise in these 4 skill domains, and I have so far not been able to find something. My guess is if there is something I am missing it will be in something less career oriented.[2]
Need someone to build a script that automates filling out some business forms?
Give your econ masters student 3 months to learn programming and he can do it.
Need someone to drive your marketing push?
Give your interior designer 2 months to figure it out.
Need someone to head your internal legal department, double check the work of your lawyers, and prepare your legal defense in a high stakes trial?
Give your very smart frontend designer 3 months and they will go toe-to-toe with your lawyers.
Want to promote an engineer who has never managed anyone before to a manager?
Well, you better strap in for a year or more of pain while they acquire this completely new skill domain and traumatize all your new interns while doing so.
Want to get your backend engineer who is not good at writing, and is not good at interior design, to start taking more charge over your frontend?
Expect them to suck for at least a year until they can start competing with the smart designers on your team.
Want to get your quant finance guy who has never worked on a big codebase to start writing maintainable code and make nice clean Pull Requests?
Well tough luck, predict many months of telling them that yes, it is actually important that anyone can read your code and figure out how to modify these abstractions you’ve created.
Want to get your philosophy grad student dropout who has never done physical labor in his life to start managing construction projects and get their hands dirty?
Expect at least a year of getting into shape and used to the work, if they don’t bounce off completely (though many subtasks of construction can be done with pretty little physical alacrity).
Give it a try yourself!
(Unhappy with any of my classifications? Fight me in the comments!)
Is there any externally validated or scientific basis for any of this?
Yes! It’s not like, total consensus in the field of psychometrics, but task performance being extremely g-loaded across a wide variety of tasks is very well supported. People can really learn a very wide range of skills if they are smart.
And then within intelligence, math tilt and verbal tilt tend to be commonly used abstractions in psychometric testing that are predictive of success in careers in STEM or humanities.[3] Math fits nicely onto the technical domain. Verbal fits nicely onto the design domain.
A generalized “physical skill” factor is also well-supported. First, enough high profile athletes have switched from being world class in one sport to being world class in another sport such that there must be substantial skill transfer for these domains to explain that outlier success.[4] Second, somewhat unsurprisingly, if you measure people’s sports skill you will find a strong “General Motor Ability” factor that explains performance across a wide range of motor skills.[5]
On management? IDK, that one I haven’t seen much support for, but it sure matches my experience. There is an emotional intelligence literature, but that construct adds extremely little on top of just general intelligence. My guess is it’s just a task that’s very important and has terrible feedback loops, so everyone needs to fail for a while before they get good at it, but who knows.
Design. Technical. Management. Physical skills. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Management Nation attacked. Only the True Generalist, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished.
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the organization I run, and which runs the website you’re reading
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If there is a missing cluster, I can imagine it being some more “relational” skillset around doing high-quality emotional labor, or maybe something genuinely associated with age and wisdom where certain skill domains are just really hard to perform well in without being at least 35+ and having the associated life experience. But I don’t currently think such a cluster exists, and that four is really the right number.
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Claude lists: “Bo Jackson (NFL All-Pro + MLB All-Star). Deion Sanders (NFL HOF + MLB). Rebecca Romero (Olympic silver in rowing, then Olympic gold in cycling four years later — different disciplines entirely). Clara Hughes (Olympic medals in both speed skating and cycling). Rugby → NFL is a well-trodden path (Jarryd Hayne, Christian Wade)”
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This research is a bit more controversial than I expected, but I don’t really understand the controversy. There are definitely some people in the field who insist on there not being a strong general motor ability factor. IMO this study also points in the direction of there being a general motor ability.
When I look at this article and ask “What is the strongest counter-example that comes into my head”, and I think something like “Being a mathematician or physicist”. I think I have the g-factor to get a math degree if I really wanted, but it’s not at all clear how I could reach the level of a working mathematician in six months, despite already being a decent programmer. There are a few replies my inner Habryka might say, and I’m curious if any of them seem accurate, and if some are very much not what you intended to say:
This advice isn’t meant for everyone. In the same way that I’m expecting people to be 140+ IQ to use this advice, I also expect them to be at least +2.5 SD of conscientiousness. If you can put in 60+ hours a week of high quality mental work into this task, you actually could achieve this—most students of mathematics do a fraction of this time. You underestimate how much progress can be made with real focus and drive paired with strong conscientiousness and smarts—it’s a multiplicative effect that adds up very quickly. Such a person really could get to that level in six months, but they’re rare enough that standard career paths can’t accommodate them, which is why society needs specialists in the first place.
When you imagine being a working mathematician, you imagine having many years of schooling that teaches you about a very broad variety of maths. This is not what I am imagining—I am imagining having the level of ability to perform a specific type of job a mathematician might do. For example, take this SLT theorist job by Timaeus. https://timaeus.co/blog/updates/2026-04-09-hiring This doesn’t require you to know everything an undergraduate maths degree holds. It requires you to know an important subset and to grasp some universal skills like writing rigorous proofs and doing mathematical research at all. Rolling your own curriculum could get you there in 6 months. Think about your own CS career—does someone need to have learned everything you learned in order to do what you do? Clearly not—if they’d aimed at your specific target from the start, they’d get there in six months.
The kind of person who would be an actual research-grade mathematician really is a level of expertise beyond this post. It’s a level beyond, say, a solid mid-level programmer in their field, and to get to that level it really does take years even if you’re good. It would take months to get to the level of doing an easier class of problems that people would still pay you for, and that’s the level I would expect a Lightcone-level generalist to be able to get to in a different area in the same domain within six months.
Or it could be something else entirely.
It’s IMO a mixture of 1 and 3.
My current belief is that people around 2-3 SDs above average can learn everything in an undergraduate degree at a top university in around 6-9 months, if they actually spend all their time doing focused study (I remember there was a guy with the last name “Young” whose full name I don’t quite remember who did this for an MIT undergraduate education and wrote a blog about it).
And then, I do think as things go, being a research-grade mathematician is playing on one of the hardest difficulties available. That said, I remember Aubre De Gray, anti-aging guy not generally widely known for his math research, actually made a pretty serious contribution a few years back, and that felt like a good validation of a generalist world theory: https://www.quantamagazine.org/decades-old-graph-problem-yields-to-amateur-mathematician-20180417/
For the benefit of later readers, this was Scott Young’s MIT challenge, doing a full CS degree in 12 months. I saw this as rather incredible the first time I saw it, but maybe the more incredible thing was having both the circumstances and the agency to attempt it in the first place. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/
Yep, that’s it! I really love that he did that. I remembered 6-9 months because he did it in just under 12, and also didn’t do it full-time for something like the second half of it. But seems like it took a bit longer.
I did my CS undergrad in about cumulative 3 months (or maybe a bit more if you count a couple physics lectures I took before I switched to CS and optimized studying hard). (At TUM which is the best German university for CS. I didn’t optimize for good grades—final grade was 2.5 - probably slightly below median.) This was over the course of 4 years during which I spent almost all my time on AI safety research.
If the curriculum had only been exams it would’ve been even faster. I spent like an average of 10h per exam learning (where the usual expectation by the credit system is like 180h).
Although I already had a bunch of CS knowledge from autodidactic learning during highschool and I am probably >+3SD, but a lot of it actually came down to optimizing study techniques.
Have you written about your study technique optimizations anywhere? It would be useful if you could share them.
Not much, but here’s one post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aq84rfx3XRyLd9y2v/optimizing-feedback-to-learn-faster
Some things I did when learning:
i actually found friends who i could pay to tutor me for quite a lot of lectures. especially one friend was really good at that. but just looking through the slides and asking an AI whenever you have questions works quite decently too i think.
try to understand. see it as structured knowledge. don’t just accept and memorize facts—in CS things are usually at least a somewhat sensible solution to a problem.
recall after each section and each session
find practice exams where solutions exist. after doing an exercise, check immediately the solution. clearly understand mistakes. (if there aren’t sufficiently many public exams then use the homework exercises. there are usually solutions.
overall was probably roughly 50-50 split between learning and understanding the content and doing exercises. you can also skip some stuff that doesn’t seem worth learning.
take sufficient breaks. (i often did 1.5-2h tutor sessions with 1-2 5min breaks.)
also be rested sufficiently in general. non-stimulating rest is better than youtube or so. takes a while to remove such addictions though. you usually don’t want to deplete dopamine low enough that you have a too strong pull to stimulated rest. rather do some walking/hiking or whatever active recovery works for you.
and ofc obvious basics like sleep, reasonably healthy food, sports.
While still significant and hard, my intuition is that a problem ‘of that shape’ requires less front loaded theory. (while still being very smarts and math skill heavy!)
#2 deserves more attention here. In my experience, real expertise has a few key differences from shallow expertise. First, a real expert knows what’s important and what can be ignored. Shallow experts often waste quite a bit of time on things that could, theoretically, matter but in practice don’t.
Also, real experts know the limits of their techniques much better than shallow experts. They’re quicker to say no. 1% of the time this was a mistake and the shallow expert will succeed, but 99% of the time the shallow expert spends years and money pursuing paths that the real expert knew immediately couldn’t work. My first startup was a sensor company, and if we’d known to ask a certain question about market requirements before we started we’d have saved two years and a few million dollars. And the company.
I’ll also add that 6 months sounds like a reasonable time for a smart person to learn coding, but there are a lot of other technical skills in the world and many are much more complicated or inherently much slower. Designing an iPhone is not the sort of thing you can learn in six months, nor is building a fighter jet. Six months on a farm gets you one crop, typically—there’s not enough time to iterate toward expertise.
I think you significantly underestimate what “expert-level” skill is. Even in my own technical field (mechanical engineering), actual experts have a volume of experience, learned heuristics, and practiced pathways that put them leagues ahead of extemely bright but inexperienced engineers. A skilled upstart will absolutely be able to complete a satisfactory, simple project in a new field with very little prep, but experts are going to solve problems that a newcomer wouldn’t even recognize as existing.
Real life has a lot of foot guns and very few of them are well documented.
Note that professionals are not necessarily experts; a grounding in first principles for your field will easily let you spot the mistakes of seasoned professionals who never took the time to learn the “why.” Don’t neglect their experience, however; even if they have an answer for the wrong reasons, it might still be correct.
-- Review, How To Solve It, John Psmith
While crystal intelligence is a huge part of expert skill, I would also argue that vaguely mylenation-like brain circuits (i.e turning routine reasoning into hardware-accelerated brain circuits) is a huge part of the speedup. Highly skilled engineers will have enormously fast mental math, analysis, and spatial reasoning skills. These are built like any other skill (playing an instrument, football, Starcraft) with practice.
The obvious next step to this broad theory would, I presume, be to find TWO non-trivially optimized tasks that were sampled from each skill domain...
(1) The Task With The Most Transferrable Peak: is optimized for pedagogy. Fundamentally, you just want it to transfer really really well to almost anything else in the entire skill domain, and you want late stage mastery of this transfer as well (so that the lessons don’t become pointless later in the learning curve from the perspective of transfer). If you can’t find ONE such peak, then several tasks like this that amount to a covering algorithm might work?
If there are really only a handful of domains, then you might be able to give every undergrad or every highschooler the “most transferable peak task” for EVERY domain and let them grind on it for as many years as needed to give them transfer powers to the full range of all skills.
If “music” is a skill domain, then I would propose learning the harp would work (its the one I picked for leveling up music anyway) because (1) plucking strings involves finger tricks, (2) playing with two hands challenges ambidexterity, (3) some rhythm, (4) very low and very high notes, (5) pedal harp requires footwork as well, for live key shifts, (6) music theory is engaged quite a bit (like piano) and (7) directly displays the physics of the sound (with large things having lower tone) to kids, etc. I think another decent one might be the violin, because of the tactile and auditory demands of fret-less string control?
(2) Most Informative Learning Curve: is optimized for measurement during hiring. Here you want something rare (almost no one has it already) that can be picked up MUCH better or different or faster, with the difference visible in less than a week that shows large variance that actually predicts transfer! (Again you can have fallback tasks in case someone already has this.)
With a task like this, you have someone in an “assessment working period” work actually spend a week on it, and measure their hourly or daily progress to get calibrated on how fast other things “in the same domain” might take if they were added to the team in a more permanent way.
If “music” is a domain, then maybe… maybe theremin? Or perhaps the slide whistle?
((If you have several of each kind of task, over the long haul you could play with them… Suppose three different people show up with varying skills in saxophone and singing… which of of “a week of learning” (either the slide whistle or the theremin) predict the six month skill outcome in harp or violin?
ALSO… (more importantly (because it is a bigger investment)) if someone takes your advice on pedagogy and practices EITHER the harp of the violin for three years primary for the transfer benefits… which of them really transfers to “all the things” best and… does this transfer show up better or worse in theremin vs slide whistle?
Question: What are the two tasks (so eight total tasks) you would use for these purposes given your proposed (four) skill domains?
I basically agree with the post, but I think you’re underestimating the value of experience. It’s true that there’s not that much value in doing the same thing for 20 years, but if a person is learning different things, 20 years of experience means that they’ve had the necessary 3 months of ramp-up time for 80+ different subskills. Plus the more sub-skills you’ve ramped up on, the easier the remaining skills are. Learning one programming language take months but learning your 20th takes hours[1]. And people with experience can know about problems you don’t know you need to ramp up on.
Already knowing things is overvalued by some hiring processes, but I think you’re going too far the other way by discounting it entirely.
Both programming ramp-up times are to reach the ability to write code that does what you want in that language. Becoming an actual expert on the best practices for a language takes longer.
Experience is definitely worth quite a lot! And this matters for hiring.
But for any given expert you are going to hire (like an architect, or a biologist, or a specialized programmer), you probably won’t actually benefit from their diversity of experience that much, because the breadth of skills they learned aren’t that likely to actually be useful on the job most of the time. In law, for example, you have tons of legal specializations, and almost always when you want a lawyer, you will need their expertise in maybe 1-2 of those specializations, not all of them.
I agree, that’s non-trivially what this post is about!
I am a bit confused. I feel like hiring wise, this post is really very substantially about experience. I am saying that if I am hiring someone for a management position, I need them to have experience managing, otherwise training them on the job will be extremely costly. Similarly if I need someone to eventually learn programming, they better have some technical background. Indeed this post is about the limits of the generalist framework that I’ve found.
The post is substantially about experience, but to me it sounds like you’re saying:
Having some sort of experience in each of these skills is very important
Nothing else matters because you can learn any subskill in a few months
On the scale of Lightcone this might be a good heuristic, but larger companies care about subskill experience for good reasons: It’s a valuable if your software engineering team can just do things immediately and not spend 3-6 months ramping up on new (to them) technologies every time.
I think that wasn’t that clear from the post. I read it as saying that you can have a talent for each of the 4 skills, and that experience with each skill isn’t transferable. Past experience in a skill is only relevant as a proof that you have a talent for that category.
Classify the following:
A guy (with genuine, good intentions) goes to a bar, and flirts well enough to get a date or at least a one night stand. He can do this reliably. Most of his past partners think he’s charming and fun.
Cold emailing someone for a job opportunity.
Giving an impromptu informal psych study at a college.
Do these have overlap? Not sure! Closest is, like, charisma/extroversion. Closest of your categories is… management?
Management, though you could probably also do this with some pretty design-loaded skills.
Not a skill? IDK, like what would it mean to spend 6 months getting expert level at “cold emailing someone”? In as much as you are talking about “getting really good results from cold emails”, it’s definitely design.
Do you mean “lecture”? Not quite sure what you mean by “study” here.
This would also basically all be design, though many people lack basic presentation skills and so would suck at this. Almost anyone with decent design skills can become good at giving presentations (including impromptu presentations) with a few weeks of practice.
This is the thing people mean when they say “Did you know you can just do things?” Some people can Just Do Things; just cold-email people. Just talk to the cute person at the bar. Just pitch to a VC you’re caught in an elevator with. Most people can’t. It’s often called ‘confidence’ but confidence is a skill you can train, or be talented at. Sam Altman is an expert at this skill; so are SBF and as many as five people not named Sam.
By study I originally meant something like: Come up with a thing to investigate, design a simple form or other testing apparatus, recruit strangers, do all the follow through. That would be design and management, yes?
Based on the classification of talk-giving and stand-up as Physical, the first and third are physical, somehow. (I disagree with this classification, because this is an absurd conclusion.)
I really like this article, and it feels very empowering and exciting. It’s spawned a ton of thoughts, hence leaving two comments. It’s also quite relevant to me—I’ve recently been asking myself, based on a job offer I’m expecting, how hard would it be for me to become an expert in compute governance? And I actually did think before reading this article that six months of dedicated full-time work could get me there, but I was thinking in a narrower domain than “all technical skills”.
I’m very intrigued about the idea of there being a finite number of domains that I could learn and then be able to train myself to do any one item from like 90% of all things—one of my not-so-secret dreams in life is to be the kind of person that refutes the Character Sheet Hypothesis, the idea that if you’re good at one thing (e.g, smart) you must be worse at some other thing. (e.g, strong, or charismatic)
That said, there are some skills you mentioned as both being in the design domain that feel very different. I’ve always thought of myself as inherently not good at several of those design-shaped skills—but I can write and design software, so according to this model, not only is this false, I already have a lot of the necessary foundations.
So I feel like I can write decently well and architect a software program, but I imagine myself totally bouncing off interior design / UI designs—it’s not clear to me how to get started or how the skills transfer. I don’t consider my writing to use the same skills that I imagine interior design / UI needs—this combination of visual creativity + aesthetic maturity to generate designs and the aesthetic taste to judge them. I envision my writing and system design as much more like a technical problem—what are the requirements I need from this piece of work and how can I create a system that achieves them.
It might be the case that I could treat internal design this same way, but I do not know how. If I were one of your employees, and you knew I could write well and perform systems architecture, so I had this design capacity, but you now needed me to design rooms at Lightcone, how would you tell me to utilise my existing design skills to more swiftly learn this new one?
You would not be the first person I’ve worked with who said this, who ended up making a lot of progress here.
IMO people overestimate the aspect of design that is about pixel-pushing, and underestimate the aspect of design that is about “in what order and with what priority do I need to show the user this information?”. If you can answer that question, getting from there to a clean design is often not that hard (and then yes, you will have to spend at least a few weeks getting good at pixel pushing, but I doubt it’s going to be the blocker).
People also drastically overestimate how helpful something like drawing or artistic skill is for design work. I think I am a pretty good designer but I am absolutely atrocious at drawing anything, and my artistic composition abilities are very weak.
Okay, I think I understand this now. For the benefit of other people with Jay-shaped problems in this area, I’ll write down what I’ve learned:
If I were to design a CRUD app, I would immediately begin decomposing the problem into the basic language of the specific domain of web applications. We need a front-end, a back-end, and a database. We need to connect them up in some way. We need to host the application somewhere. Okay, I know what parts are needed.
Now, what is the specific problem I want to solve with this CRUD app? What differentiates it from any generic CRUD app? What information do I need to show to the user and how in order to ensure they can easily do whatever they will want to do with this app? Now I am in “core design skills” land. However, I had to go through that first paragraph to do so, I couldn’t just start here.
So, it feels like I know nothing about interior design, not because I am bad at every step of interior design but because I am bad at the very first step—I cannot yet break down room design into the various components like lighting, furniture, color schemes, and so on that are required. (Honestly, even being able to write that previous sentence with specific examples indicates that I am less clueless than I originally thought of myself as) Since that’s the first step to solving the problem, all the important skills I have that would actually help with this problem are hidden behind the relatively simple ones I lack.
If I’ve got that right, that is a very powerful and new way of looking at things for me! I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be one of the most valuable posts I see this year. It reminds me of when I first picked up an economics textbook—a bunch of things I didn’t understand but were scary black boxes transformed into things where I knew how I could grow to understand them if I wanted.
I’m not sure if this is in scope, but if your design skills are uncorrelated with your drawing skills, where does drawing/artistic composition fit as a skill? It doesn’t fit in technical, management, and probably not physical. Is that an additional kind of skill that hasn’t been listed yet? Is it relevant to Lighthaven?
Drawing does seem like a physical skill to me. Habryka’s mentioned elsewhere in this comment section that playing an instrument is a physical skill and I think drawing is quite similar to this.
What makes this more complicated is that it seems feasible that a complex piece requires the design skill to configure it, then the physical skill to make it a reality.
Some examples of skills that I expect the vast majority[1] of adults at 2-3 SDs above mean intelligence plus some subskill specialization (in your ontology) to not become an expert in 2 years:
Learning a language from a different language family than your own, for monolingual people.
Adults learning to play chess to a professional or semi-professional level
Chess should be really easy for your model: perfect feedback, unlimited reps, pure reasoning, no (or very limited) institutional gatekeeping, no physical component
Yet approximately 0 people have learned chess post age 20 and gotten to GM or even IM (International Master), even people getting to IM/GM while learning it as teens are rare (and often played similar games like Go and Chinese Chess very seriously)
the only partial exception Claude can find is Rani Hamid, who peaked at WIM (Woman International Master).
This isn’t just a matter of interest; many people want to be good at chess!
Nor is it a matter of g, we don’t have great data on the intelligence of top chessplayers but what little information we do have suggest chess GMs aren’t very high in IQ-as-traditionally-measured.
radiology
much less extreme than chess but my impression is that radiology similarly has a ton of domain-specific pattern recognition that you need to load up on, requiring both specific cognitive subskills and learning time.
Piano
I think the manual dexterity alone is pretty hard, but also a bunch of accompanying skills will be difficult.
My guess is that adult prodigies are possible (unlike chess), but fairly rare and certainly randomly selected smart people won’t be it.
Starcraft and some other esports
I’m less sure about this one but my impression is that the manual dexterity and low-level cognitive requirements are too intense for most smart people (for context 250+ effective “actions per minute”, or 4+ distinct actions/second, is on the low end for professional play in Starcraft 2).
Research in pure math
already covered by other commenters. Basically I think math is a very deep field, such that to make nontrivial advancements in it requires a bunch of prior context, especially pre-AI.
I also suspect (though am less confident) >2 years is necessary for expertise in non-software forms of engineering (my impression is that software engineering is unusually g-loaded and most other subfields of engineering requires a lot more knowledge/practice/experience, and less raw smarts), as well as many non-management areas of interpersonal skills/social skills.
Note: I’m not saying this is impossible, just very difficult. My guess is that for the people where this is possible, it’s due to a knack/specific low-level cognitive skills that aren’t picked up by coarse measures of g; for example chess grandmasters might have +4 SDs of a certain type of pattern recognition and memorization.
fwiw I think piano pedagogy is exactly the kind of thing where an entrenched regime has propogated a suboptimal approach relative to most people’s goals on the instrument (and that there’s maybe only some single digit number of people in the country teaching outside of the small handful of dominant, not-especially-useful-to-most-people paradigms).
E.g., if what you want to do is play pop songs, a combination of ear training and a ‘simon says’ style app that reads midi off your keyboard and instructs you to play a ~random triad will basically get you there in ~100 hours of practice (assuming daily practice not to exceed ~3 hours/day). There are similarly straightforward training setups that I expect to be effective for other goals one may have on the instrument. I built ~all of my physical facility on the instrument in about three months of focused practice, and have similarly ‘cheated’ my way into my other capacities (I’m definitely missing things that other people 5 years into the instrument would have, but I also have a lot of things those folks don’t, and I prefer and deliberately pursued my skill profile over theirs).
I agree that few people who start playing piano as adults will ever play Rachmaninoff at competition level (but think very few people who enter into the pedagogical system designed to meet that end actually have that goal in practice).
I also (I think, although you don’t say so outright) agree that some tasks require developing wholly other senses — new channels for phenomenal sensation or new ways of comparing phenomenal sensation in an existing channel (e.g. audiation and relative pitch) — and that those aren’t well-captured in Oli’s ontology.
I would expect that you could train those pattern recognition skills a lot faster with an app that provides good and fast feedback compared to the current way those skills are trained via apprenticeship plus tons of supervised case reading.
Anecdotally I have fairly high verbal IQ but pretty bad visual design skills, and my impression is that this is not at all uncommon among serious amateur bloggers or professional writers. I’m curious whether you disagree here.
My current model is that you could get good at the relevant skill but this would take a while (like on the order of months). Like there clearly is a skill around developing visual taste, but I’ve seen people make pretty decent progress on that if they are good at writing and conceptual work.
Thanks! Hmm maybe I can make some progress after a while, especially if I’m agentic about it and make it my full-time job (or at minimum my most important hobby), I “go hard” on deliberate practice, and I have good feedback from competent people in Berkeley and elsewhere. Still, it’s a live hypothesis for me.
Some other reasons I’m skeptical:
When I think about impressive writers as a cohort, they’re not typically known for good visual design skills.
This is also true in the other direction: if design is strongly predictive of writing ability, we’d expect a higher crop of great designers to become great writers. Instead great writers with non-traditional backgrounds seem to come from ~all walks of life (biased towards the highly educated), either people who already knew they were a good writer in youth before they took on their day jobs, or people who discovered over the years that they like and have the knack for abstraction and expressing themselves in writing. Designers don’t seem obviously overrepresented here (and indeed I have trouble thinking of any ex-designer who’s known for being a good writer on a subject other than design, whereas I can easily name multiple people from specific other professions )
When I try to decompose the most important skills in a good writer, I roughly get something like a) what I call the “technical” craft of writing (what words are good where), b) advanced theory of mind/cognitive empathy (at minimum you should have good ToM of your readers, in fiction/portraits often of your characters, in nonfiction arguments of whoever hold positions that you criticize), c) insight/abstraction ability/having something novel to say.
Of these things, only cognitive empathy (what you call “model the user”) seems centrally important to visual design. Insight and abstraction ability is important in visual design but imo much less so. And visual design likely has technical analogs that’s very different from the technical skills in writing.
In contrast, my guess is that the top 3-5 skillsets of visual design includes things like “aesthetic taste” (which is important in writing but imo not top 3 and maybe not top 5), and hard constraint satisfaction (not top five in writing and unclear if even top 10).
Now of course what skillsets seem most salient from the inside doesn’t necessarily predict interpersonal variation. But it is imo indicative.
I’d guess that verbal IQ is probably the subcomponent of IQ that most clearly (and directly!) predict writing ability, and visual-spacial skills to predict visual design skills. My impression from the psychometrics literature is that the correlation between the two is actually fairly low for randomly selected IQ subcomponents, either 0 or negative after controlling for g. Whereas a model that has “design” as a high-level group after controlling for IQ would suggest a moderately strong positive residual correlation.
i feel like i kind of expect “research” to be potentially separate from these? eg you can have very very technical people without good technical research taste, and i think probably the same on a lot of design type skills / research?
Research is mostly design! This is one of the big mistakes that people make IMO! Almost all of high-quality research is ontologizing new domains and thinking really hard about what are good new abstractions to think in within this domain, and that’s the very central design skill!
One of the reasons why research is hard is because you need design, and usually you have technical prerequisites.
Are you asserting that on average, ‘humanities and law’ people are better at “ontologizing new domains and thinking really hard about what are good new abstractions to think in within this domain” than those in STEM? If so, why? ” that’s the very central design skill” I’d argue that it’s a discovery skill, because people usually do not design the abstractions. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that Maxwell or Faraday ‘designed’ the concept of an electromagnetic field or electromagnetic radiation.
No, absolutely not on average! Average intelligence in humanities and law is substantially below average intelligence in STEM, and as I said a few times in the post, general intelligence dominates. So mostly, if you give the same ontologization task to someone in STEM and in humanities, the STEM person will smoke the other person.
But yes, if you control for intelligence, and have someone do a bunch of good and solid humanities and law work, especially writing, research and conceptual work, then I expect them to outperform the STEM person.
I do think it’s reasonable to say that. Indeed, I think it’s obvious that Maxwell and Faraday had a way of interfacing with their respective fields that most other scientists lacked, and I think being both good at the technical work and clearly world class at design in this ontology was one of those (of course they also had many other differences).
That may be the case, but, in the service of ‘fighting’ you in the comment section, can you provide evidence that it’s the case, particularly in the domain of verbal abilities, since you implied they are part of ‘design’, or at least correlated. I was under the impression that Lawyers in particular were highly intelligent, though I could be wrong and don’t know exact measures.
I agree...
Then I don’t think you’re using the word design to mean what it is usually taken to mean.
The concept of an electromagnetic field existed before people conceived of it.
Lawyers are on average a bit less smart than physicists, but yeah, both are quite smart.
The best evidence I can provide here is all the evidence about verbal intelligence being a meaningful sub-factor of g, and that lawyers do score substantially higher on that than physicists, after controlling for g.
And then I don’t quite know how I would best show that “verbal” skill is related to research skill and ontologization skill. We measure the skill by measuring vocabulary and ability to make and follow clear arguments, which I think point vaguely in this direction.
It obviously would be hella confusing to use the word as I am using it here without defining it. But I am literally using the phrase “design (in this ontology)” in the quoted passage. Like, I say right there that I mean “design” as I have defined it for the purpose of this post.
“The best evidence I can provide here is all the evidence about verbal intelligence being a meaningful sub-factor of g, and that lawyers do score substantially higher on that than physicists, after controlling for g.” I don’t have any data of my own so I’ll take your word.
“We measure the skill by measuring vocabulary and ability to make and follow clear arguments, which I think point vaguely in this direction.” I’ve never heard of a verbal reasoning test involving making and interpreting/understanding arguments. I am actually curious about this, as it seems hard to measure directly; I thought verbal IQ tests used things like simple analogical reasoning tests. How would such a test work?
“It obviously would be hella confusing to use the word as I am using it here without defining it. But I am literally using the phrase “design (in this ontology)” in the quoted passage.” This one: “ontologizing new domains and thinking really hard about what are good new abstractions to think in within this domain”?
So, there is Gygax et al’s framework
WIS (design)
INT (technical)
CHA (management)
DEX_CON_STR (physical)
this definitely seems like a useful model for some purposes, I expect it will live in my head now. you do say right up top that this is a galaxy-brained theory, but I still feel the need to nitpick
I feel like this is more true the more generalist-y the stuff you’re doing is to begin with
in your quiz of examples, I perceive a trend where the technical examples are less generalist-y than the other ones, which I conjecture is because that’s in fact the area that Lightcone has the most specific expertise in
I claim that there exist lots of other kinds of tasks that are similarly specific in non-(purely-)technical directions, that it seems possible Lightcone has less visibility over
my personal experience is that many of my strengths are “the more technical side of design”, e.g. music theory and language learning and poetry translation, as distinct from more purely-creative design; I guess this is not so much a nitpick as perhaps something like “if you have sufficient combination of Design and Technical then you can combine them in useful ways”?
except I definitely know people who are quite good at some kinds of Design and way better than me at more central kinds of Technical, who are less good than me at the kind of technical-design I do
relatedly I was surprised you put “legal” squarely in Design, it seems v much a Design-Technical hybrid
there are also three- and four-way skill-combination tasks! e.g. directing a choir is all four—you need the design sense to decide how you want the piece to sound; the technical music chops to track all the parts and notice and pinpoint mistakes; the management skill to manage the group’s energy and attention; and the physical dexterity to wave your arms comprehensibly
and—I notice I disbelieve that someone who is good at, say, interior design and programming and people managing and climbing, would be able to become a proficient choir director quickly with no prior practice in music specifically
(I do think their management skill would transfer; their physical skill may or may not (it would if they were a dancer); but I do not think interior design transfers that well to music-design nor programming to music-technicals)
(possibly you would not put any of music under Technical? I might disagree with that though, or at least I definitely think there are more and less technical parts of music)
relatedly I do think people can have much more granular skill-spikiness
as you mentioned in another comment physical skills differ from each other really quite a lot, I think there’s any correlation between like “running skill” and “guitar skill” but really pretty little
my Things are “music” and “languages” and things that are in those fields are just for some reason way easier for me than most things that aren’t
I’ve known a lot of people who are really good at Design around words and really bad at Design around spaces, or really good at Design around spaces but couldn’t carry a tune, etc.
there are skills that benefit greatly from learning them early in life and/or just take a great deal of time to learn
additionally I do think this tetrachotomy is not exhaustive
executive function/time management/conscientiousness/whatever is probably worth tracking as a separate skill
“management” is sort of a subset of “social”, which is another important skill area in many professional and other pursuits
emotional skills are also an important thing but they kind of pervade other stuff rather than being a well-defined cluster in themselves usually
rationality also seems kind of separate tbh. like, calibration, careful reasoning, paying attention to the actual things people say rather than the vague vibes of those things, etc.
or maybe it also kinda straddles the Technical/Design divide
(I expect there’s other stuff I’m not thinking of, also)
To go full speed it would take a good setup in order to have a choir that you can practice with multiple times per week—perhaps you could find a youth summer program that does daily practice that you can work with—but once you’re at that point then if you’ve got a regular ability to attempt it, you’d be able to get fast feedback on what the problems are and what’s working.
If you’ve trained as a classical singer, I expect you can learn the basics of conducting in a week, and become passable/competent in a few more weeks of practice.
If you’ve trained as an instrumentalist but not a singer, then you’re going to need to learn a bit more about breathing and volume production and various details to be able to deal with everything that’s coming up (e.g. you’re going to need to be able to figure out for yourself where your singers are going to breathe, and what’s reasonable to ask of them). My guess is you’re going to want perhaps a few weeks focused on singing at the front, and continue to practice and develop that skill as you begin to conduct.
If you’ve never learned an instrument then there are a lot of basics missing (e.g. reading sheet music, keeping a beat, understanding harmony, arc of a melody, more) which is where I think you start taking 6 months, though I think 4 months to becoming passable might be doable.
Epistemic status in footnote.[1]
Epistemic status: I’ve never conducted a choir. It’s been a decade since I was in schooling, but I’ve spent over 100 hours in choirs, over 300 hours in classical instrumental ensembles, and had maybe like ~20 hours of singing training. My guess is I could be wrong on some of the numbers, though surprised if more than like 2x off on any particular bit.
Thanks for thinking through this in more detail! I think I roughly agree with you for the cases where someone is already good at singing and/or playing an instrument; I do think musical skill generalizes fairly well. (And thanks for spelling out the scenario of “you can actually practice this hands-on intensively for weeks or months in a row as your primary activity”; my default felt sense of weeks/months necessary to do something does not by default involve total primary focus.)
I don’t think I expect non-musicians to be reliably able to skill up in 6 focused months, though! Some would, if they have a good ear and, say, facility in learning languages or similar (to get really used to sheet music). But some would not be able to pick up basic pitch manipulation fast enough, and some might get stuck on becoming fluent in sheet music, and some might have trouble with the kind of vertical listening needed to evaluate harmonies & pick up mistakes.
Though to be fair, the part of that I’m most confident of is that it’s very hard to get from “tone-deaf” to “proficient with sufficient ease to scaffold additional complexity”; I might be more willing to believe that if you already have that kind of proficiency you can often skill up significantly in 6 months if you focus fully on it.
I agree that I’ve met people who are tone deaf or seem rhythmically impaired, though I do think that there’s a notable difference between people who try to learn a language at school, and people who just move to a country where everyone learns it. Perfect pitch is learnable. I suspect that many people who are incompetent on these axis would learn it if they throw themselves at it and immerse themselves.
Like, my Dad does that thing where, when he sings, he is typically not quite singing the melody. He’s singing like a third above, or a fifth, or something else. He’s typically in the same key, and the rhythms are right, but otherwise he is reliably off by some interval, and if you poke him to get it right, he doesn’t really know how to. He’s 60+ years old and never got over that. I can imagine someone might hear him sing and say “lost cause” as a singer, but also, my Dad is a perfectly passable fingerpicking guitarist. Plays a few tunes nicely, great rhythm, clearly picking out and hearing the melodies, listens to tons of guitar music. I bet with some focused work for a few weeks, he’d start singing the right notes too, and I think he could get to being actually competent with months of focused work (barring deterioration in breathing from all his smoking).
Also we’re not talking all non-musicians, we’re discussing 120+ IQ people who have already learned something physical to an expert level, like if you’re a paid professional who does drywall or fencing or swimming, and also a paid professional in design such as public speaking or sculpture or fiction-writing. So I think a lot of ways that people would fail have been selected against.
(All that said I admit overall that physical/motor skills have more “randomly can’t do it” per person than others.)
I would expect that this largely depends on how strong the feedback mechanisms in the industry are. I think the average psychotherapist is probably at a similar skill level four years in as twenty years. However, if you have one that follows David Burns advise of having his clients fill out a page after every session to have feedback to self-improve I would expect someone who operates that way for twenty years to have a higher skill level than the person that’s four years in.
I think it is way more fine than just 4.
Example in STEM. Medicine and biology, by this logic, should go to the “technical” skills together with math, coding, and physics.
Well, no. When I was teaching physics for medical students, I saw they prefer to rely on memory, memorizing the solution rather than understanding logic, which does not work in math. And the opposite, when I am learning anything biology-related, I have a super hard time memorising a bunch of different genes/neuromediators/whatever without any apparent internal logic. At the same time, the writing (part of the design by your classification) is also hard, but it has internal logic and structure, so in a sense it is easier. So here I would feel memorization is a separate skill from seeing the structure and logic.
Physical. It is also divided into a few pretty remote. If you can type extremely fast I don’t think it will help you to run very fast as well, and visa versa. I don’t see any reason why cardio should transfer to dexterity.
(Skimmed but did not read post carefully, seems cool) What about:
Being able to fluently navigate optics, the way politicians, marketers, influences, etc. do?
Cognitive empathy?
Self-control?
Being able to follow rules in ambiguous circumstances? E.g. an officer of the law trying to figure out rights and obligations in some context. Is this technical? (Being a judge specifically is somewhat design-related, in that you are sorta deciding the meaning of rules and implicitly designing good rules / good interpretations of rules / good rules for interpreting rules, in order to support a good society; and kinda management-related. But I don’t think that’s the main skill?)
Re: cognitive empathy, yeah my general take was ‘I feel like there’s a sphere of social skills missing?’
Right now, it feels to me like design is maybe merging two different subskills: goal-oriented understand of others, and also something like ‘how does laying out different objects --> goal-achievement.’
I guess I’m wondering, where would something like a coach or therapist go in this taxonomy? Some hybrid of management and design?
I kinda suspect you’ve developed an unconscious but accurate feeling for the sort of task a generalist can skill into in six months, and no longer ask people to tasks outside that set and so don’t get feedback from the resulting failures.
some specific tasks:
Write a native cross platform UI toolkit thats ergonomic to use from Rust
Become governor of california
Write a novel thats not cringe
And the ur example, win any contest where the other bastards get to prep for more than six months
Ok, illustrative example: it’s humanly possible to get good enough at free throws to make thousands of them consecutively, but NBA players, who have insane skill at the extremely nearby skill of basketball and who are plenty conscientious and motivated, don’t have the capacity to ever learn this skill, or don’t have the time to learn this skill, so they regularly miss free throws.
You should breakdown the Heinlein/specialization skills into your 4 buckets: change a diaper, plan an invasion, etc.
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/SpecializationIsForInsects
I can try this:
A human being should be able to: change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts , build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and lastly die gallantly.
Change a diaper—Physical
Plan an invasion—Design
Butcher a hog—Physical
Conn a ship—Physical
Design a building—Design
Write a sonnet—Design
Balance accounts—Technical
Build a wall—Physical. Design if you also need to plan it.
Set a bone—Physical
Comfort the dying—Does not fit (DNF) or maaaaybe Management
Take orders—DNF
Give orders—Management
Cooperate—Management
Act alone—DNF
Solve equations—Technical
Analyze a new problem—Design
Program a computer—Technical
Cook a tasty meal—Physical
Fight efficiently—Physical
Die gallantly—DNF
The ones that don’t fit are generally quite broad cross-domain soft skills (Take orders, act alone) or social/philosophical ones (Comfort the dying, die gallantly) but for the most part, these items can fit pretty well.
I do think there is skill at being good at caring for children. Under your taxonomy it would fit best under “management skills”. However I generally expect management types are worse than average at caring for children.
The cliche is of the high-powered executive being an absentee parent. They tend to lack the patience, warmth, emotional skills, etc. to even connect with their own children.
I think you’re definitely missing some kind of relational /emotional skillset here. Nannies, therapists, priests, elementary teachers, hospice care providers, etc.
Not just emotional, but “sales” skills in general. Management means organizing within a system you can control. For sales (and sales can also mean selling yourself in the romantic market etc.) it’s about influencing external decisions you can’t directly control. That’s quite a different skill set and neither management nor design. Marketing is design, but if you directly communicate with someone to sell something that’s something different.
“Emotional” sounds too fuzzy, too much like EQ. Either calling it “relational” or “strategic” (because it depends on you being able to think from the other’s POV to adjust your behavior to achieve your goals, even when it’s just a toddler screaming)
Like @Kabir, I think this leaves out relationship-building skills. I understand why one might think “management skills” covers this, but imo while it might partially fall into the same category, there are aspects of management skills that do not require relationship-building and there aspects of relationship-building that are critical skills for much more than management. I suspect just being personable and emotionally intelligent is more important than anything else on the list. I think an argument could also be made for general intelligence/adaptability or agency here.
According to my model of what’s going on:
(i) all of this is downstream of general intelligence.
(ii) according to Ollie’s galaxy-brained categorisation, people who are good at management will pick up relationship-building skills very quickly if they need them, whereas people who are good at design will be similarly bad at management and relationship-building for a year or so if they need to pick it up.
I think these categories allow two things to exist within them that have disjoint characteristics (as you say relationship-building and management are different—the crux is whether these skills end up correlated in people, and whether learning many of these disjoint skills helps with the rest.
Slightly agreed—however, I think there are some who have blockers in emotional intelligence/deep relating, but not so much for others. And not just worldview/trauma based blockers, but genuine brain based stuff, like how some people are left handed, ambidexterous, etc. And there are some who are the opposite—who are very naturally talented in this.
in here cos idk if its too braggy/egoy
E.g. I’ve had ~60 people tell me I’m better than any therapist they’ve had, including a caller who I talked with while working at a tescos call center. With skills I picked up in ~6 months.
I’ve met 7 other people who could do stuff like that, 2 of whom are relatives.
Could be argued that this is a mix of management and design, but I’d say there’s a subtle, important thing being missed there.
Yes, I think an Emotional Intelligence/Relational Ability will be another one. For an example of someone medium-high in this, see Mr Rogers
I will also say—I think with enough intelligence—maybe 120 IQ? - and no handicaps, e.g. severe autism, adhd, etc—all of the above traits could be learnt within 6 months of intense work, with high quality feedback mechanisms and an openness to being wrong. I’ve seen someone with high autism learn the emotional subset skill to a decent degree, for example—though it took them a few years.
With the drawback that for the physical it may be best if they’re in their 20s or teens. Though, even people older can get pretty good, quite fast—e.g. my mum, historically wasn’t very physically active and mostly did management and marketing, as the head of her business, but in the last couple years has started running and now does marathons regularly—she’s in her 50s.
Oh, I think something generally missing from this is willpower—I think the daw determination to do a thing, stick to doing it, push through tedium, difficulty, etc is actually very powerful, second only to intelligence.
He died from overdose at 27. Perhaps practicing for 8 hours a day wasn’t so good for his psyche?
Also, 2-10% of pro musicians get focal dystonia (a neurological condition where their muscles malfunction when they start doing their thing with their instrument), probably from playing too much. For example, the famous bassist Victor Wooten got it.
Also, I read about a famous trumpet player, maybe Louis Armstrong, and he had serious problems with his lips from playing really hard and playing a lot. He had to use a razor to cut scar tissue from his lips every day before concert to keep playing.
Also, maybe it’s possible for these weirdos (not in a bad sense) but not for a typical human, even a very smart human. At least I don’t find it possible for myself. I get tired, my muscles get tired, my ears get tired, my brain gets tired.
Also, novices at an instrument will have even more problems with unadjusted muscles and thus risk of overuse trauma, etc.
Who are you quoting/responding to?
(A comment deleted by its author)
A comment by cousin_it that was deleted after I had made my reply.
Well, four years is a pretty long time—from the start of that paragraph I wouldn’t have assumed this is what you meant, because by itself this would actually make it hard to run a generalist-only operation
Ah, this was just supposed to establish the general point that intelligence tends to dominate performance and that performance levels of relatively quickly. Almost no one who got into a profession actually tried learning things at close to their maximum speed.
I then think if you do that, you can get that number to something more like 6 months until you are comparably good (you will lack some breath, but will be similarly good as professionals at any narrower skill you were trying to learn), and 12 months until you have a shot at being in the top performers of the domain.
Counterexample: you cannot become an expert in playing any musical instrument in 6 months. (unless you’re a freaking genius)
Huh, that seems false to me? My sense is musicians routinely get to very high levels of skill in a new instrument quickly, if they have already mastered at least one instrument before (like enough to play in a band professionally in a new instrument).
6 months of practice is a long time!
I actually had a conversation about this exact thing with Ben (who plays guitar at an approximately professional level). I think our conversation landed on 6 months being roughly reasonable (but things would end up a bit rough because your physical muscles end up exhausted and we had some uncertainty on whether you could make up enough of the calendar time during which your muscles are recovering via learning other things, but you could definitely do it if you spread out those 6 months over a year).
Is this a distinction between expert and professional? For many fields, a merely professional level is way below an expert level, and for others that difference may just be less legible.
In my own case I saw your tweet and my thought was that a fifth skill is the “aura” of a notable politician or someone with a cult of personality, but it’s true that a merely “professional” politicians like a state assemblyman or city councilman may not have the same level of unreachable skills at all.
Oh, I wasn’t super planning to make a strong distinction here. My current belief here is something like: If you have achieved expert level performance (as you define here) at one task then you can reach expert level performance in 6 months at another task in the same domain. If you’ve only achieved professional-level performance, then you can reach professional-level performance in a bit less than 6 months (but not much less)
But don’t expect pushing the frontier of that skill category to be as fast as learning a new task to the level you’ve already achieved somewhere else!
And then, to be clear, these things are very intelligence loaded. If you are in a domain that is so competitive that the experts are 4 SDs above average in intelligence, then don’t expect you can get there if you are not at least that smart! I am not saying there is a magic “become expert in any domain independently of your intelligence” button, merely that skill acquisition doesn’t take that long if you have learned related skills.
I agree with the rest of your comment (6 months is a long time!) but this part seems to be moving the goal posts. A professional musician being able to learn an additional instrument quickly is not evidence that a non-musician designer[1] can.
Or is musician a subclass of athlete?
Playing an instrument is definitely a physical skill! (In my model, whose epistemic status, to be clear is “schizo galaxy-brain model”)
Also, unfortunately I do think skills in the physical domain transfers somewhat less than in other domains (though my guess is still a decent amount, even between something like hockey and playing guitar). It’s not the domain I care the most about, so I didn’t go into details but clearly there is some muscle memory that will be kind of tricky to transfer (but again, I do actually expect really quite a bit of transfer).
There also a very important mental skill too. It’s not just learning to move your muscles precisely, correctly and in time. It’s also learning to hear and understand what you hear, to quickly identify what notes/chords/scales you’re hearing, what comes next, quickly generating a potentially good sounding melody and quickly understandibg of what notes it consists, what techniques need to be used to play it, where all its notes are on your instrument. Although this latter part probably cross-trains very very well between different instruments, but for a non-musician I expect it cannot be learned in 6 months.
Oh, but then you’re making a 5th category for “everything music related” :)
Ok, MAYBE someone who has already become an expert in a musical instrument and in music in general can become an expert in another musical instrument in 6 months if studying that full time, but am not at all sure about this.
So far I’ve been learning one musical instrument for 3 years, another for a year and another for a year. And I quite far from becoming an expert in any of them. Also, I doubt that you can productively practice it full time or even 4-5 hours a day because in my experience more practice per day gives diminishing returns—whether it’s because of muscles getting tired or because of brain capacity or because of boredom I don’t know.
Well, ok what I am sure of if that you have no experience in music, then becoming an expert in 6 months in any single instrument is impossible unless you’re born as a genius. This is how it is in my experience and this is what observe among musicians around me—nobody gets good quickly.
I think the greatest skill transfer to music will be expert level performance at any other physical skill, but as I say here, I do think muscle memory is going to transfer less well than other things.
I would be very surprised if you are anywhere close to 6 months of full-time deliberate practice in those 3 years? Also, do you have expert level performance in any other physical skill?
Perhaps related: I suspect there’s also a skill transfer from music to computer programming. Specifically, I’ve observed a few musicians to have a much easier time learning programming than I expected for an adult with no prior programming experience.
This might have something to do with —
Comfort with patterns, iteration, and structure. If this is the thing, I would expect knitters and fiber artists to have some of the same advantage; I don’t know if they do.
Comfort with deliberate practice itself. Many new programmers get frustrated with the amount of practice and heedfulness it actually requires to get good. Trained musicians are accustomed to acquiring skills and methods through deliberate practice.
A nexus between music, programming, and math. (One of the musicians I’m thinking of also was a math major.)
Nope
So, a year has 255 working days. So half a year is 255⁄2 times 8 = 1020 hours of working time if we assume 8 hours per day. Yes, I probably do have approximately that amount of practice under my belt, maybe a little more. Also I’m not sure that 8 hours of deliberate practice per day for half a year in music learning is possible and is good for you.
A year has at least 300 working days, and a day has at least 10 working hours (more like 11), at the time investment level I am talking about here. The 6 months is meant as a lower bound if you tried really hard, not as the thing that you would get if you worked a normal 9-5 and took two weekend days on this. So the right number I was anchoring on is more like 1800.
Oh, god, sorry, I also just remembered. You might be thinking of “professional level” or “expert level” as the kind of absurd thing that people aspire to when they want to be orchestral musicians. Like, get a job for nothing else but their musical skill.
I think in the case of musical instruments the skill thresholds are much higher than I was thinking here.
Because there are so few jobs for being a professional concert musicians, I think the lengths people have to go to to reach that level are much higher than what I meant here for “professional”. Like, I was thinking of the level of “professional” as “went to a top university for an undergraduate degree in a specialization and then ~2 years of work experience” not what I think is standard for professional music careers, which I think tends to be “start at the age of 5, practice as a half-time job almost all the way through your teens, and engage in deliberate practice all-throughout, then transition to full-time in your early 20s, all-throughout with extreme training regimes”.
I don’t actually quite know how this world works, but my model is definitely because supply for full-time musicians so vastly outstrips demand, that the competition here is much harsher, and the usual terms will be confusing.
Then my model definitely doesn’t predict you would reach expert-level performance in 6 months of deliberate practice! That’s like the whole point of the model!
By “cannot … any” do you mean “there are no instruments you can” or “there are instruments you cannot”? The former seems completely wrong to me, you definitely can become an expert in playing the kazoo or the triangle in 6 months. (Even if you mean the latter, I think there are very few instruments you can’t become an expert in in 6 months, if you have no other job and no children and can spend 80 hours a week on it.)
I mean for most instruments you cannot, with exceptions like the triangle. About kazoo—isn’t basically vocals with an extra sound effect? So its difficulty would be bounder from below by the difficulty of learning to sing.
You could totally learn to play a brass instrument in 6 months if it was your full-time job. I’m less sure you could competently play violin in that time period, although 6 months is a lot of practice time if it’s actually your main priority.
Immediate taxonomy of subskills that came to mind:
designing for consumers vs designing for producers
technical breadth vs technical depth
managing up vs managing down
Physical strength vs physical dexterity
Dang it, now I wanna read/write posts for all of these
I think legal skills overlap the design (ie ~verbal) and technical domains, involving as they often do precise analytical reasoning of a kind many laypeople can’t do. Albeit it’s curious that lawyers tend not to be good at math. (Maybe not even finance and tax lawyers? Not sure.)
Philosophers may similarly overlap the two skill sets.
I suggest management skills be renamed ‘people skills’. As management also involves technical things like planning & budgeting, also ideally design (eg writing) skills. And of course, social skills of the kind you’re alluding to aren’t just useful in management.
Basic Q: am I a “design” or a “technical” person? Put another way, I think “go do policy” is either some blend of both skill trees, or possibly its own thing; there’s some very weird sense in which most people can’t make the kinds of coupled-with-just-the-right-degree-of-metaphorical-slippage work that policy analysis and writing entails.
(Many people can! Just see people who feel like excellent at either “design” or “technical” fail at this all the time.)
Not Habryka, but it seems like according to this article policy creation is pretty solidly a design skill, whereas the art of getting people to get on board with your proposed policy is a management skill. Sometimes policy creation also has technical prerequisites if you’re writing stuff in technical domains that need to engage with specific facts on the ground like FLOP counts and such.
I think producing a policy document is very close to producing a law document, and law is explicitly called out as a design skill.
Yep, policy writing is a very central example of design, this also includes “getting people on board with your proposed policy”, if you are doing that via writing reports. Management would come in if you are managing lots of personal relationships.
Thanks! If so, then I strongly object to the claim that good design generalists should be expected to do good policy within ~6 months.
This is a fun article and the premise matches many of my personal experiences. I think the length of time required to skill up to “expert level” depends a lot on the percentile we define as “expert”, with the level of the median professional in a field maybe only taking a year for a smart generalist to match, but the level of a top 1% performer is going to take much longer even if someone is smart enough to get there.
An Olympian in any sport can probably beat an unathletic person at any sport, which proves the overall point that physical skills transfer. Within experts, I think there are meaningful subcategories across which transfer is relatively limited. Off the cuff I’d guess the three biggest ones are:
Sports where peak power matters (football, baseball, powerlifting, sprinting, rugby, throwing). To first order, I’d guess vertical jump or 40yd dash are good general predictors or this ability.
Sports where sustained power/kg of bodyweight matters (running, cycling, rowing, xc skiing, mountaineering). To first order I’d guess vo2 max is a good predictor here.
Sports/activities where fine motor control is the limiter (golf, bowling, curling, violin, etc). I’m not sure what the general predictor here is, and it seems more conscientiousness loaded.
All the examples in the article of transfer are within peak-power or within sustained power/kg categories. There are of course people who have done multiple categories of sport at a high level, but I suspect this took many years or people stayed at the advanced recreational level rather than being world class in both at once.
To play volleyball a bit with you, I offer the following skill sets that I think are needed across a design team specifically but for any team in general. My thinking is that various team members possess these skills in differing proportions as suited to their role. This is part of a long post being drafted...
Creativity: “don’t like that idea? I got others.” Everyone can be creative problem solvers but for the owners, designers, and developers it is essential. AI remains bounded by statistical inputs and no world experience. That may change
Taste: the ability to discern excellence. Out of a raft of creative ideas, an owner and creative director must have this talent. It is a large component of stylistic convention and probably results from positive reinforcement. Even AI disavows having this skill.
Judgement: Team members need to know “what’s right” within a given context. For instance “Reading the room” is a skill young designers learn the hard way. Time and budget viability is often the PM’s role to manage efficiently.
Speed: at least in terms of generating options, digesting documents etc. AI excels. Potentially, if trusted, this frees up time for more iteration if results are not sloppy.
Verbosity: think of this as the ability to communicate effectively through words, drawings, models, data. It is an obvious AI strength, but live sketching in a pitch has won me jobs.
Reliability: in humans it is showing up on time and finishing to the deadline with good work. For AI, reliability means non-hallucinatory, checkable, and aligned to goals.
Yes, a smart person can learn to replace a toilet in a day. But to become more than a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, goes back to the 10,000 reps or more. So I think you’ve oversimplified as some of the comments below point out as well. Cheers
It’s kind of depressing that the determining factor of how well you perform at seemingly disconnected fields is actually just general intelligence, which is mostly set in stone during our genetic lottery at birth. Since we don’t work for it, it’s unfair and underserving for people who won the lottery to have the ability to outperform in liteterally every skills.
There are substantial genetic components but don’t underestimate the non-genetic components. It’s a bit tricky but things like the Flynn effect demonstrate a pretty substantial environmental component to intelligence. I do think there are ways to get smarter! (but it is quite hard and tricky)
I have heard skepticism of the Flynn effect. I have not taken the time to evaluate the arguments in detail. My understand of the basic argument rests on something called measurement invariance.
As a simpler example: imagine that athletic ability at various sports all strongly correlate (+ other evidence), thus leading you to think there’s a general ‘physical skills’ latent factor. Now, suppose I take a great basketball player, and then damage his arms enough that he’ll no longer be great. Potentially he could still be relatively good at, say, soccer. That is, I’ve broken the correlation between basketball performance and underlying latent athleticism.
Measurement noninvariance is when a measurement (e.g. an IQ test) doesn’t measure the same latent variable in two different populations. For example, an LLM (especially the earlier ones) that does great on the general knowledge part of an IQ test is less likely to be good at the fluid intelligence stuff. As another example, this may be what leads to those with ADHD testing lower on IQ tests, and supposedly also makes it hard to compare educational outcomes across countries or times (e.g. I’ve heard it said that PISA score fluctuations in the US aren’t really indications of the underlying factors).
The claim is that the Flynn effect has the same problem. The gains aren’t really increases in g.
Links:
Cremieux: The demise of the Flynn effect
scidirect: Flynn effects are biased by differential item functioning over time: A test using overlapping items in Wechsler scales
scidirect: Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect
abdicating agency does not escape responsibility.
In my experience in the technical domain (read: observing fellow college students), it seems like people need a bit of that generalist energy in them to reliably be the sort that can go between domains. I’m unsure if this is just purely g factor.
I suspect similar is true for every other domain you listed except possibly management and physical (which seem more unified).
I really like the post though—I have definitely felt this way about technical skills, had sorta intuited management and physical, but hadn’t seen this cross transfer design stuff.
Oh yeah, being willing to learn new skills is rare! It’s definitely not just g. My guess is it’s substantially cultural and can be transmitted, but it’s definitely not the default.
im not entirely sure ‘design skills’ and ‘technical skills’ are distinct, or really management skills.
let’s frame like this: given a problem:
- Physical skills would take the solution-as-a-concept and immanentize it as a solution-in-the-world
- Management skills would look at the universe of problems, and the universe of resources, and allocate accordingly
- Design skills will pore over the solution space and pick one that meets the problem parameters
- Technical skills… will pore over the solution space and pick one that meets the problem parameters
Ergo, design skills and technical skills are the same.
Perhaps you are missing the Problem-refiner skill: who will make very clear what the problem is, what are the things that need to remain as-they-are, what can be changed, and then feed it to the other skills. (One might argue that this is the Management skill; and I would agree—I’d just say the Management skill is allowed to invoke the other skills, whereas the problem-refiner skill is not.)
I noticed that Skill 13
Setting quarterly OKRs for a team
was classified as Design, not Management, which I put. I’m not trying to argue here (I had to look up what it means), but could you explain why[1]?
Unless this is just an error, and it was supposed to be Management.
I am pretty sure it’s design! Management is indeed centrally about the relational aspect of management.
I haven’t actually ever set OKRs for an organization, so I might be wrong here, but my model is that the skillset necessary for that is very centrally the same as the general skillset of writing good internal memos, which is one of the most central examples of design.
If this is a sufficient criterion to separate managment from others, then we can expect other buckets to exist no? I think that managment is actually a part of a branch of the design group + social skills. managment is top down but working with others in general is a skillset which relys on a range of things, getting things from people you are not working for you is also a set of skills which falls in this bucket.
Somewhat related: Hanson argues in Age of Em there would be hundreds of unique ems to cover all the jobs, and they would all have a lot of training. But that is for peak performance.
I know several people, mostly of my parents’ generation, who despite years of effort struggle to type at 75 wpm, and are better at physical tasks of all kinds than I am. I am very poor at physical tasks and never learned to touch-type properly and I still write at >90 wpm from sheer practice. I don’t think it fits in this ontology at all.
Similarly, giving a good talk [EDIT: When this was written the quiz classed this and the lower-mentioned tasks as design/physical tasks] is a fundamentally different skill from anything involving lifting, carrying, or precise placement of force via tools (hammers, pliers, etc.) I am quite good at the former; when I put real effort into practicing it (so, also exercising my design skills), which I have only done a couple times, extremely good. I’m still shit at the latter, and all physical skills. It is just not a physical skill, even though the delivery is in the physical world and requires your attention on your body language. In this ontology it is a management skill. Performance and management are the same thing.
This is also what makes for good Dungeon Mastering. (I’ve done okay at that, too, but it strains my ability to improv.) And stand-up comedy is a Management skill for the same reason; both reading the room and reacting to it are management.
I would also argue some of the interactive parts of programming (good commit messages, good review) are as much management as design, but I’m less confident in that; most things in my head that involve other people are thoroughly mixed between management and design.
Yes, giving a good talk is design, not physical skill. You do also have to practice, but it’s definitely a design/writing skill! If you write a good talk and practice delivering it a bunch of times, you will give a great talk, in definitely much much less than multiple months of full-time practice.
But you marked giving a talk as physical in the ‘quiz’?
I think this is topsy-turvy; the delivery skill is a management skill.
Oops, that’s a mistake. I’ll fix it. It accepted design as the answer so it didn’t get noticed by my review when I made sure that all the answers have the right grading after Claude made the widget.
Definitely not management in my model of the problem. Like, quite far away from those competencies.
And same for stand-up? The thing about managing people is it’s primarily about controlling appearances and making sure they’re (honest but also) satisfying to the people managed.
Yep, same error, both are fixed! (I also didn’t like the answer for “conducting an orchestra” and just removed that one completely)
Maybe I should have re-loaded the page before reading and taking the test?
I composed this just now and them noticed that made I should ^F[Ted Talk] and found this comment sequence down here (but I don’t remember when I last reloaded the page):
Okay, now these say
And I think that “the rest is mostly practice” is inherently never the right answer. Learning to juggle three balls is mostly practice. I’m pretty shit at physical skills, but I can (once did) learn to juggle three balls for thirty seconds or so in fifty hours or so. Still, just about anyone can get it to last five seconds in under an hour. Someone who’s good at physical skills can get up to thirty seconds in five hours or less, though, an OOM faster than me, because it’s part of that skill category and their practice is an OOM more effective than me. So it is with everything; to a first approximation there is nothing that is “just practice.” Useful practice is a matter of skill.
In particular, the thing you are practicing is not ‘deliver it perfectly.’ That’s not a thing, there is no perfectly. You are practicing ‘How does this actually come out? How will people perceive this?’ ‘How will that affect them? Is that the effect I want?’ Performance is a skill, delivery is a skill, and it’s very centrally the skill that managers and politicians possess, not one that UX designers and poets and contract lawyers share. The same subskills you use to predict the aggregate response of an audience are used in predicting how to manage firing someone in a way that is humane. Crowd dynamics are somewhat different from single people; a single person you know well can be predicted nearly flawlessly, if you’re really really good, and a crowd you can even at best predict the average aggregate and narrow your intuitive distribution (usually fairly small error bars but fat-tailed) for how likely it is to land far from that. But that’s less different than poetry is from a legal defense or good commit messages.
And the case for DMing a game is even stronger. You have six people to track and manage, or less (unless you have made some unwise decisions). That’s few enough people that a talented manager can model their individual likes and dislikes and what will keep them interested, motivated, and inclined to stay on task, without resorting to aggregates. It is a very small, intimate performance, and performance is a skill closely tied into management. You can’t manage without at least 20% of the performer’s skillset, and someone who can perform (and isn’t a diva) has a far, far easier time learning to manage people than someone whose background is in biology or construction, and somewhat easier than a poet. Because it’s about people and their perceptions and reading the room.
You seem insistent on applying ontologies to this domain that are quite far from my own. I am not like opposed to this, as I said this whole post is under the banner “Schizo galaxy-brained theory”, but I feel like you are insisting that my categories map to things I really don’t intend them to map to.
Like, why choose “UX designers, poets and contract lawyers”? The central example of a high-IQ verbal-intelligence profession is just a lawyer, and verbal argument is a pretty core part of that education and skillset. Poets are less highly selected for intelligence (though of course widely known poets are), but there too oral argument and presentation is pretty strongly correlated with membership in that class. And then I invite you to go to Google or any other tech company and compare the presentation skills of the UX department to the presentation skills of the programming department, and I am sure there too you will find very strong correlations.
Perhaps your ontology is right, but I don’t understand what the management ontology is, if it doesn’t include this; none of your examples at the end cover it, and you haven’t said in the comments either AFAICT.
And I’m very sure that labeling things as “just practice” is a sign that the ontology is incomplete; maybe the category I’m describing is separate from management, but there is a category, a shared skill that applies at least as much as the categories you’re drawing here. When you say
And then include several example tasks that break your assumption, within your post itself, that is a point that demands to be considered.
Sorry, the operationalized prediction is that any other skill requires less than six months of practice to achieve professional-level performance, if you have achieved professional-level performance in another skill in the domain. I am definitely expecting a lot of practice to be involved in tons of situations, reality has a ton of detail and all that.
If the current version of the task description was also written by an LLM and didn’t get your review, then I apologize for hammering on it. But it says:
And by making this claim, I interpret you as predicting that there’s no shared domain between performing a stand-up set that someone else wrote for you, and giving a TED talk that someone else wrote, and GMing an adventure that someone else wrote. Between doing these three tasks, factoring out the Design cluster entirely. And that seems obviously false; there is a generalized skill domain of performance and stage presence and reading the room, possessed by politicians and actors and singers.
There is design; that is done by the speechwriters and script-writers and song-writers. And there is delivery; that is done by the guy on the spot with the mouth. Many times they are combined; singer-songwriters exist, most standup artists write their own routines, many(/most) politicians are involved in their speechwriting process. But they are separate skills. Max Martin tried to make it as a musician and mostly failed; as a songwriter he is probably the most successful there has ever been. There are many, many pop stars who couldn’t write a song to save their life and put some on their records anyway, which bombed. Politicians who are good at speechwriting are rare. On the other hand, actors who are good at politics are rare only in that very few try; the hit rate is very high.
If you believe this is not a fifth domain, why not? What is the alternate explanation?
The reason I initially insisted these were part of Management is that the initial AI categorization classed it as Physical, but that was clearly bogus, and your confidence that you hadn’t missed anything else meant I assumed you’d noticed it, but miscategorized it, rather than missed that it existed. If it’s one of these four, well, it’s clearly in the ‘people skills’ cluster, and so is Management. So assuming you weren’t missing anything, and with a large vague spot in (what I can see of) the ontology for what the Management domain contains, that’s the obvious place to argue you should have categorized it. I’m not attached to that claim; I don’t care whether this is combined with management or split out into the fifth domain. But I’m sure it’s a domain with cross-applicability.
No, there are of course shared skills between many tasks. If you know how to program C, you will have an easier time learning how to program javascript compared to someone who has an econ degree. Of course there is lots of shared structure between skills.
The claim I am making is that there are no major gaps between skills that cannot be overcome with a few months of practice, the way there are major gaps between the skills I am pointing to in this post.
I think this might slightly break down on higher echelons of larger organizations with deeper hierarchy levels. The general logic of carrier progression in such places follows this pattern:
You start doing the grunt work (e.g, junior developer or analyst).
You gain enough expertise to be able to juggle mental models of the workflow easily.
You can now jump up on the higher hierarchy level (e.g. senior dev, manager, project manager), where you coordinate work of people doing the grunt work.
Repeat #2 for this level
Repeat #3 for this level
End so on until the top.
The single 1->3 cycle is probably what you can teach in your proposed timeframe of couple of months, but each level in the hierarchy might take the same (in line with the “do not delegate something you cannot perform” principle) . So training someone to be the head of the a large organization, such as an Army General or a CEO might take multiple years.
This theory is probably incomplete and might be a special case of a broader, better theory just like the already mentioned mathematician case by Jay Baily earlier.
This isn’t meant to be a devastating criticism, but what justifies dividing and classifying skills into the 4 classes mentioned in this post, as opposed to the infinite variety of other possible ways of doing this?
The empirical observations that have caused me to make the post! Most importantly that someone who has reached a high level of skill at anything in one skill cluster can with a few months of effort get really quite good at another skill in the same cluster, but not at a skill in a different cluster. In as much as that empirical observation holds up I think it clearly justifies having these 4 clusters.
I sort of doubt that this is the case. Could a high-level theoretical computer scientist become , within a few months, good at string theory? It seems possible to me, but unlikely.
Yes, that seems pretty likely to me. I mean, String theory is (I think) maybe the technically deepest part of physics, so it’s going to be a bit on the longer side of usual variance here, but yes, it seems clear to me that is possible.
If your claim is just that if you take the best person in the world within any field then they can probably learn almost any other within a few months, then I don’t think it’s particularly controversial/new (no offence intended) . However, if you just took a reasonably good theoretical computer scientist, I absolutely don’t think they could do this easily. What probability would you assign to, for example, a theoretical computer scientist at 2+1/2 SD above the mean in intelligence and conscientiousness being able to do this?
Wait, I think this is a highly controversial take! Indeed I think when I present it to professionals in most fields they bark at this pretty frequently.
The thing I am saying is that if you took a reasonably good theoretical computer scientist, then they could become a reasonably good mathematician, or engineer, or software developer, within 6 months if they try really hard. They wouldn’t be a better mathematician than they were a computer scientist, I am not proposing there is some magical “get the best in any field” button. Does that clarify? I wasn’t quite sure whether you were objecting to the “skill transfer within domains” thing, vs. the “expert level skill” thing.
“Wait, I think this is a highly controversial take! Indeed I think when I present it to professionals in most fields they bark at this pretty frequently.” I would actually like to weaken the claim to refer to the best person in any reasonably broad field, so that they can’t be, for example, the best person in the world at approximating solutions to differential equations of the form y‴- cube root(x’-z) / log(yz) = 9 . And by field, I meant what you described as a STEM/ mathematical -intelligence-requiring field.
“The thing I am saying is that if you took a reasonably good theoretical computer scientist, then they could become a reasonably good mathematician, or engineer, or software developer, within 6 months if they try really hard. They wouldn’t be a better mathematician than they were a computer scientist, I am not proposing there is some magical “get the best in any field” button.” I think it would depend a lot on the area into which they chose to specialize. For example, if they chose some computer science adjacent area of set theore, then I find the claim more plausible, although I am still unsure. If they chose differential geometry, I would seriously doubt the claim. I would also doubt that they could become good at designing batteries.
I mean, sure, then you disagree with the post! I think they could totally start making contributions to differential geometry at roughly the level where they made contributions in computer science.
I don’t think they could become good at designing batteries, at least if you mean “make a battery design from scratch”, because unsurprisingly in my ontology that skill is “design” and a CS degree does not usually transfer any design skill.
“I think they could totally start making contributions to differential geometry at roughly the level where they made contributions in computer science” If this was true, I would expect there to be more modern Von Neumanns. If you are a +4 SD computer scientist, and you do the same for several disparate areas of mathematics, as well as physics, and chemistry, and biology, in a few years or decades, you become comparable to Terence Tao almost in mathematics, just with less quality in your individual contributions, but you can in some sense compensate by contributing to all the other areas. Why is this so incredibly rare?
“I don’t think they could become good at designing batteries, at least if you mean “make a battery design from scratch”, because unsurprisingly in my ontology that skill is “design” and a CS degree does not usually transfer any design skill.” I see, I think I was imagining that in your ontology this skill was needed in research: you mentioned in another comment that a lot of research skill is ‘design’.