Deliberacy
Was chatting with Lori a little bit recently, and she talked about someone who seemed to favor certain designs over others, based simply on time of creation. Said they couldn't articulate what was good about it.
She went on to say that if you don't know what makes good design good, then any good design work you've done, you've done by accident.
I think this is a good way to think, even if I'm not sure I can agree 100%. I think some people are just strongly intuitive, and may have poor articulation skills. Crystal is like that. The connections that need to be made to produce good results are made in her brain, such that they're pretty much repeatable, but she has no idea why she does them. I guess that's still an accident, but I just wanted to point out that it can be accidental but repeatable. e.g. I'd have a really hard time teaching you English off the top of my head, but I can speak English all day with relatively few errors.
I don't think a person who does something with good results intuitively is necessarily worse at the task than someone who does it more deliberately, but I think they're inherently less valuable. I feel bad saying this right after saying that Crystal is so intuitive, but I think it's true.
Personally, I don't feel like I really understand something until I can program something to do it for me. I think this more or less directly translates to being able to teach. Programming is just instructing a computer to do it. If you understand the domain with fine enough granularity to do that, teaching a relatively intelligent person should be fundamentally easier.
Our capacity to transfer knowledge, I think, is the biggest differentiator we have from other animals. The ability to codify it, build on it over generations, and have massive parallelization on solving problems, enabled by communication tech, is so powerful. But you can't really contribute to that if you can't articulate the things you learn: The good results that come from your learning are limited to your lifetime.
I also think that deliberacy will eventually produce better outcomes, even if it gets there more slowly. If you just intuit your way to a solution, it's very easy to fall into the trap of a local maximum. You have your way of doing things, and you don't know what it is about it that works, so you get trapped, afraid to change your approach. You can see this with genetic algorithms, and neural net simulations.
With BoxCar2D you can watch it as it evolves a system that's highly optimized for the first kind of terrain hurdles it runs into, and then fails terribly for a really long time when it's already selected strongly and can't adapt to new obstacles, like a sharp peak.
When you can articulate why you're doing any particular thing, you can make pointed corrections, or identify variables to change in isolation in attempting to find a correction. You can still get stuck, but you don't get stuck as hard, because you can document what didn't work, and guarantee progress.
I think the ramifications of this are significant. I wouldn't want to raise a child to just do things intuitively. When you hit those walls and don't have a system you can trust to guarantee you progress, it's easy to get discouraged and quit. I think it reduces a person's grit, and that reduces their potential. When things don't go their way, instead of feeling that they're in control, they feel like a victim.
I argue with Crystal sometimes about inborn talent. I don't really believe in it. I think that you might develop certain tendencies very early in your development that might give you a strong intuitive advantage in certain pursuits, but that's not something you're born with. I think that there are probably some insurmountable genetic advantages a person can have for various types of athletics, and other physical factors that may make a person particularly suited to one thing or another, but that's not talent, either.
I think Crystal is inclined to believe in talent because she's so intuitive. I'm not inclined to believe in it, because I spend a lot of time learning about learning, and am always getting better at things I decide I want to get better at.
I think that people who believe in talent take comfort in it. Like, they're off the hook for not being great at whatever they might be worse than other people at. On the other hand, I find not believing in talent to be very comforting for me. I hate the idea that there's no way that I can be good at something that I want to be good at.
I love that it's my fault that I suck at things, because it means I can put in the work to change it, and that's the most hopeful, optimistic thing I can think of.