My sense is musicians routinely get to very high levels of skill in a new instrument quickly, if they have already mastered a bunch of instruments before (like enough to play in a band professionally in a new instrument).
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.
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.
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.