More generally, it’s easier to learn to accurately recognize successful performance of a professional skill than to achieve it yourself. At the very least, you can always taste the cookie, or check whether the program works, or read the prose, and judge how good it is. So, the process naturally starts with training a critic, by observing the successful work by others.
A critic, being a creature of human general intelligence, is able to compare more or less successful performance even at the meager levels of skill, to tell with at least some measure of correctness what choices you need to make at your own level.
This allows to guide you on the steady progression from inaptitude to expertise, every step of the way, a kind of reinforcement learning with the critic rewarding or punishing, with ever finer granularity and contextual generality in its critique.
The worst cooking I have ever had came from a person who seems to lack any sort of ability to criticize food. It’s not that she didn’t have the skill to be a good cook. She simply could not tell when her cooking was bad. Being a good critic is certainly not sufficient, but it is necessary.
More generally, it’s easier to learn to accurately recognize successful performance of a professional skill than to achieve it yourself. At the very least, you can always taste the cookie, or check whether the program works, or read the prose, and judge how good it is. So, the process naturally starts with training a critic, by observing the successful work by others.
A critic, being a creature of human general intelligence, is able to compare more or less successful performance even at the meager levels of skill, to tell with at least some measure of correctness what choices you need to make at your own level.
This allows to guide you on the steady progression from inaptitude to expertise, every step of the way, a kind of reinforcement learning with the critic rewarding or punishing, with ever finer granularity and contextual generality in its critique.
The worst cooking I have ever had came from a person who seems to lack any sort of ability to criticize food. It’s not that she didn’t have the skill to be a good cook. She simply could not tell when her cooking was bad. Being a good critic is certainly not sufficient, but it is necessary.