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.
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.