There are a handful of patterns about the mind that can be viewed through the shape of a calibration process.
- when I say “skill”, I mean very much any possible patterning of behavior that one can engage in. Beyond the artistic example, this includes speech, body kinesthetics, and mental patterns of thought. The failure modes then very explicitly include things that hold us in existing versions of those patterns. The sliding glass door effect(think of how older dogs might consider an open sliding glass door that they are not sure if it is open, but by learned behavior will wait for a human to do the miming of opening the door) being a specific example.
- for the sake of further breaking out the definition (and because i use a concrete/physical skill in later examples, which might reinforce a more limited definition of “skill”), being able to engage with other human beings is a skill. In conversation, at an empathetic level. Being able to be unblocked and put your defenses down to get close to someone is a skill. Introspection is a skill, or battery of skills. Navigating your own feelings and being able to concretize them even to just yourself, is a skill.
- Being able to feel the inside of your body is a skill. Being able to notice changes in the nervous system as they happen is a skill.
- Everything you do, LITERALLY, is skillable. Now let’s move on.
We are constantly self-assessing. Whether that is in relation to other people, our environment, or our own history
- There are many failure modes and normal ways this process operates
I use double quotes throughout here because these are value judgements that I ultimately think are not useful in the ways that people use them and consider them. I believe that in any skill development, the more useful framing is not “success/failure” but rather “satisfactory/improvable”.
- engaging with a non-job skill should always be framed as an act of play. Like I said earlier in the doc, “success/failure” is a bad dichotomy. I’m gonna elaborate on that. You only have to have grit (cyclical passion and consistent discipline) in a situation where you feel friction. If you do not have issue churning out 100 pages of shoddy drawings, then grit isn’t required. You’re betraying the fact that the friction you encounter in doing something like Casual drawing is beyond your grit capacity. In a sense, you’re also saying that it is something you feel you can fail at. Even though it is fundamentally more of an infinite game (game theoretic sense), which necessarily cannot be won.
- Let’s start with what I can somewhat identify as the ‘base case’ of this process.
- You engage with something, let’s say figure drawing. In the first attempt, you fail. In some sense this is a “failure” because you are comparing yourself to other figure drawings you’ve seen. The reality is there are multiple possible judgements going on at once. Does your drawing look coherent to you? does the drawing look similar to another person’s drawings? in general, does your drawing cohere to the images you have of figure drawings?
- at this point, you assess. This is the first step of calibrating yourself to the feedback of your own output.
- The most obvious failure mode is that of the person who never tries figure drawing again, because their first effort was so “bad” that they feel there is an effectively infinite distance between them and something “good”
- This brings me to a sort of summary of the first failure mode
- for any given activity you have never engaged in, the calibration defaults are set to “infinitely hard” and “infinitely easy” prior to any engagement. The majority of my own anecdotal evidence points to people tending “infinitely hard”. There are certainly people who tend “infinitely easy”. Discussion on how the two come to be follows
- Many people who refuse to try new things are in some capacity, avoiding of failure.
- to me this has the mental sensation of friction. I would describe the majority of my younger ADHD moments as this friction being far too great to overcome.
- People who view many things as infinitely easy, have an inner confidence.
- for me, personally, I try to catch this on face, but I have engaged and dabbled with so many things at this point in my life, that my perspective tells me the hardest thing about engaging in many facets of life, is stepping up to the table and the next hardest part is listening to people who have gone before, for a few minutes. The errata of skilling I have begun to cover in How to do things, and this current document will likely become a preface section.
- There’s kind of this funny thing people ID as a pride issue, which I may actually say is a fear issue that comes out as a pride issue, that is the effect of a “infinitely hard” mindset. When engaging with a skill, learning shortcuts or insights without earning them, if done too quickly, feels “cheap” or “wrong”, and people will actively ignore good advice in favor of floundering. Not infrequently, this is to a committed degree, and they will flounder in a skill while ignoring obvious resources indefinitely. TO me, when I have done this, it’s because in part, the insight felt like going and jumping off a cliff to trust someone.
- and if I examine that further, suddenly formalized education being basically the same thing as insight inculcation but somehow feeling better makes sense.
- Floundering takes a lot of energy, it’s a very inefficient method. Eventually, you either luck out and figure out how to swim, or you sink into the water from all your “failures”. Many people sink into the water, and give up on certain skills until they find the energy to try again, if ever, in the future. There’s a learned helplessness against the very reality they perceive here.
- Improper calibration leads to all manner of mental pathologies, and can often self-reinforce.
- It is only by unfolding existing calibrations that one can re-assess in some cases, and this takes a lot of effort, and sometimes happenstance.
As a person continues to engage with a skill, their level of granularity of assessment changes.
- consider that at the beginning, a figure drawing is “good” or “bad”, based on what is effectively a vibe judgement. Later, a novice may gain insight to basic blocking techniques, and realize they can judge on those metrics. The granularity of their range of assessment has gone from “infinite bad/good” in vibes to “does this follow coherent, expected patterning” which is the first step in setting up proper bounding on the calibration scale.
- Technical prowess begets critiquing ability. Then comes the inevitable step climbing, the Ira Glass speech on taste comes into play. The skiller will begin an ongoing process of finer and finer calibration, where successive levels are a gain in insight, practice on that insight, and plateauing until new insight is generated or imbibed. Self assessment will continue to have a vibe aspect beyond the technical. This is maybe, some sense of a higher level of possibility, yet unexplored. I say that, because one can be highly technically proficient, and still look at their work and feel there is yet more to be done, but unable to identify that ‘more’.
the failure mode of “I see that people have an intuition on this, and I clearly don’t have that”. You actually can learn art the way that an adult would learn art.
BUT the point isn’t the specifics of figure drawing, because actually most of this thought has come up around handling emotions and navigating the human experience. Questions like “why are some people more open than others” and “why does this tendency pop up in people to quit early?” and “why do midway practitioners get stuck at medium quality for years?”