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by shadowfoxx 1080 days ago
I'm also not a much fan of 'creative' as a noun for much of the same reasons. I feel this way about how we commonly use 'talent' to mean - "They are magically gifted in ways that are innate", as if they rolled 18's in all their stats, and not "This person has achieved a level of skill that is remarkable."
1 comments
kashunstva 1080 days ago
> about how we commonly use 'talent'

I think the Anders Ericsson “10,000 hour” theoreticians would agree with you. And yet there are studies that point to a smaller effect of practice than Ericsson proposed. (Rather, practice may explain a smaller amount of the difference between cohorts that are divided by some measure of ability.) Very likely it’s a nature _and_ nurture phenomenon, particularly at the highest levels of certain fields of pursuit.

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shadowfoxx 1080 days ago
Sure, while I'm skeptical I'm not going to act like there isn't some unknown secret sauce that bends a person's abilities in a direction. But as far as I know, there is no baby that has ever been known to pick up a paint brush and give us the Mona Lisa. I think when we start the "Talented" conversation with the premise being, "if they rolled different stats at birth, they wouldn't be capable of this ability" we're flattening a lifetime of not only focus on a craft (10k) but their home life, did they have community, did they have supportive people in their life, proper nutrition, socioeconomic status, the technology at the time (I mean, more skilled peoples exist today than have probably ever existed), the education they were able to receive, were they born standard, etc etc.

If talent was decided in a way where talking about 'something innate', as in we could go so far as to say... 30%? 40% 50% nature accounts for aptitude.. wouldn't we actually have reason for a caste system? Is it specific - This person is wired to code - what does that even mean? There are so many skills and subskills.

I'm sure it exists, its just funny/frustrating that the word is used to describe what appears to me as the minority factor instead of the majority.

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