I hesitated before writing this post because I don’t know what is special about languages and childrearing—I can’t think of other obvious things in the category, though there are probably some.
Maybe the skills that are best learned by immersion and just doing them are those that were useful in the ancestral environment, and so come with a lot of preinstalled “machinery” in our bodies and minds that just need to be tapped into. It’s easy to see why language acquisition and childrearing would be in this category; other examples are social skills, cooking, running, fighting. As opposed to skills like math or piano, where most people don’t start out with the basic machinery, and need to laboriously install it by solving a hundred problems or playing scales over and over.
Maybe the skills that are best learned by immersion and just doing them are those that were useful in the ancestral environment, and so come with a lot of preinstalled “machinery” in our bodies and minds that just need to be tapped into. It’s easy to see why language acquisition and childrearing would be in this category; other examples are social skills, cooking, running, fighting. As opposed to skills like math or piano, where most people don’t start out with the basic machinery, and need to laboriously install it by solving a hundred problems or playing scales over and over.