Similarly, giving a good talk is a fundamentally different skill from anything involving lifting, carrying, or precise placement of force via tools (hammers, pliers, etc.)
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’?
Giving a TED talk — ✗ you said Management, was Design/Physical
Writing the talk is design. Delivering it well is physical (voice, stage presence, timing). High-g speakers often ace the first and flunk the second.
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.
I think this is topsy-turvy; the delivery skill is a management skill.
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.
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):
All three of the places we disagreed in your quiz were on things that I assigned to “Management” and you assigned to “Design”: “Stand Up”, “Ted Talk”, “OKRs for a Team”.
The logic I was using is that “Management” is about tracking the level of the audience, the desired behavior, the limits of the audience, and the performance that will get the most desired behavior from the audience given their level in a way that they appreciate (or at least don’t hate).
In every other case, we agreed ;-)
I’m curious if you could articulate your theory for why these are “design loaded tasks”?
Writing the talk is design, rest is mostly practice (probably benefits some from management, but not load-bearing).
Writing the set is design, rest is mostly practice (also probably benefits from management some, and if it’s long enough it might actually tax your physical stamina, but seems very unlikely to be a blocker).
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
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.
And then include several example tasks that break your assumption, within your post itself, that is a point that demands to be considered.
And I’m very sure that labeling things as “just practice” is a sign that the ontology is incomplete;
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:
Writing the talk is design, rest is mostly practice (probably benefits some from management, but not load-bearing).
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.
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
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.
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.