[lsc]

>My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than not.

Maybe that's correct, but is it more useful than the nurture view?

It's a debate; I mean, clearly, you don't want to spend a lot of time trying to get better at things you will never get better at, but sometimes it's not easy to tell you will be good at a thing until you spend a lot of time on prerequisites.

This is the argument that even if it's true that nature is more important than nurture, it is sometimes more useful to believe that nurture is more important, and that you can learn things.

I think there are a fair number of studies showing that people with a 'growth mindset' as they say, who believe it's about hard work and not just innate ability, tend to do better than people who believe it's fixed.[1]

I mean, in the usual case, of course, people who are smarter are more likely to think than anyone can learn things, 'cause their experience is that learning things is easier, and the way work and education is segmented, quite often people are put near others of their ability. but... I think a lot of these studies control for that.

[1]https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/dweck-020707.h...

[lsc]

My own personal view is that some attributes are mostly fixed, and some are not, and it's pretty hard to tell which is which.

Sometimes you need to struggle for a long time through stuff you aren't any good at to get to something you are good at. I love reading and read very quickly, with above average, but less impressive compared to speed, comprehension.

But it took me longer than usual to learn to read. I assume because I'm terrible at memorization; and to learn to read, you need to memorize enough words that you can start puzzling out the words you don't know from context. I would not have done well if I had given up on reading because I was inherently bad at one of the prerequisites.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of time trying to run a business... and that turned out to be something I didn't get good at after a decade of trying; so yeah, sometimes it's best to give up early, but it can be really hard to predict which side of that equation a particular problem is on.

[lsc]

A better comparison to reading is writing. My handwriting is terrible. Like not doctor-terrible; there's at least dignity in that. It's a grade-schooler's block letters. It's terrible. And I spent so much wasted time and effort on it.

I mean, I've had access to a computer since the mid-80s, so I could write, I just couldn't hand write. And it turns out? nobody cares about my handwriting anymore. It's not that useful when you have portable computers. (In the mid '90s I took a tandy TRS-80 model 100 to high school. Such a nice keyboard)

I argued and fought with my parents who made me practice handwriting, arguing even in the early '90s that it was an obsolete skill; but they sat with me for hours a day, making me copy letters. Just like they did earlier, when they were making me learn how to read.

But reading, well, it went from a struggle to make me practice to the thing I got in trouble for doing when I was supposed to be doing other things almost overnight. It was like I finally memorized enough of the words to figure out young adult fiction, and a whole new world opened up to me.

Handwriting never got to that point, even though there was a lot more struggle involved. To this day, I can't write coherently with a pencil and paper for more than a sentence or two; it takes too much focus to make the letters, and the thoughts about the sentence or paragraph evaporate.

How much of this is my own motivation? I do remember arguing that handwriting was useless 'cause I could type, and that was better. If I had access to a state of the art screen reader (they existed at the time, and I think were okay?) I maybe would have made the same arguments about reading. Would that have made it harder for me to actually learn to read?