Dan Luu’s 95%-ile isn’t that good makes the point that it’s actually quite easy to reach what amounts to baseline competence, at least if your meta-strats about how to learn are decent enough; practice a decent amount and try to find someone who’s good enough at the given skill to point out your mistakes.

That being said, just because it’s not insurmountably difficult does not mean we have to treat people who haven’t Gotten Over It like shit.

Getting ‘lost in the sauce’ at something, being good at something to the point that you’re speaking in tongues to laypeople, is both easy and hard.

Easy and Hard

There are many reasons it’s easy for some people to pick up a skill, here’s a few:

  • natural talent: people are all wired differently; computers definitely come to me a lot more readily than, say, dancing would.

  • motivation: a lot of things motivate people, and all motivations produce different outcomes; it’s oft-believed that “for money!” tends to produce less “pure” programmers than “for the love of the game”, but certainly having no motivation makes it quite difficult.

  • background knowledge: knowledge is a web, after all, and e.g. knowing how to program in C on PCs will aid you in embedded programming.

  • mentors (or just people to talk to): it helps to have friends and communities who are motivated, and moreso people who know their stuff and can guide you through the learning process. “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a joke and a fiction.

But there’s a lot of structural Stuff that makes having these advantages difficult.

Formative experiences

I have dysgraphia; my handwriting’s no good and I’ve suffered for it. It turns out that a dysgraphic student will have very little fun in art class when said art involves doing things with their hands! It is no joke to say that I’ve felt broken as an artist as a result. At around age 8, I should point out.

There are many people for which their formative experiences with things are colored by a Something they’ve had. Maybe you, dear reader, know someone who “hates math”; someone who does not see the beauty or at least utility of math, and worse still, feels fear or pain whenever they are faced with a situation for which math would equip them with more effective mental tooling. Maybe it’s disability. Maybe it’s bad teachers. Bad systems. But it wasn’t nothing.

There are genuinely people who hated when “math got letters added to it”. Say what you want, but that’s a feeling they have and one that must be unwound before they’ll engage with the subject as we do.

Where do you find these things?

Background knowledge is hard to find if you don’t know where to find yourself in the ‘world’. Consider that a lot of formal educations (probably not very good ones, but many experience them) tend to introduce subjects ex nihilo; there is often little explicit connectivity between topics.

The one I’m currently experiencing introduces the component parts of C in a very ‘dead’, piecemeal manner. Here’s arrays, here’s functions, here’s pass-by-reference; and I’ve heard quite often that students don’t get these until they have to put them in some kind of context, maybe during their working years.

Having people in your life helps too, but how do you find said people? I only got this far by stumbling onto a YouTube channel’s Discord; all of this is just luck, all of this is just trying, and while there’s a lot of value in trying, that’s also a genuinely difficult process. And that’s just online, where the borders are a lot lower compared to IRL; depending on where you are, the real world can and does disadvantage queer people. There’s a whole lot of back-and-forth possible on that topic.

Sometimes it’s just not a focus.

I feel that (tech) elitism runs on the base assumption that everyone can, should, and must care about everything the elitist cares about. While, it’s probably a good idea to know things, it’s also just not in the cards for a lot of people. Time, will, energy: those are all limited resources and people are free to choose what they focus on. Of course, everyone is entitled to caring about things, but it is surely not within our rights to demand that everyone care.

This “style” of advocacy, where we simply demand things out of people, instead of trying to meet people where they are, isn’t good for us. I have no love for the FSF1 for this reason; in its 40 years, why has it not advocated for broader-scope things like digital literacy, education, UI/UX, and so on? While software freedom is one piece of the puzzle, it’s silly to only think about software freedom while ignoring all the other dimensions of the problem.

There is such a thing as skill, but there is also such a thing as chilling out.

Skill is absolutely a real phenomenon. Watching people be good at things is a sight to behold; people watch sports for this reason, right?

But, how you measure, quantify, hold onto skill is a destructive process; usually this is through the medium of competition. While, yes, feeling good about being competitive is good, someone has to lose for there to be a competition. And yes, maybe I’m outing myself as a sensitive person, but I don’t feel good either way. Someone else had to lose or I had to lose.

Competition is ingrained into how we, as people in modern (Western?) society, think about ourselves, to the point that I feel that many people don’t know when to turn it off. I ramble to my friends a lot2 about things that are definitely intellectual in nature, but I don’t intend it as a brag. Rambling is a love language3 to me; there is not a competition in me rambling. I turned it off.

So what are we doing?

Ultimately, are we going to judge people for being bad at things, when you could just chill out and let them be? Is that the thing we’re going to do as people? Maybe if money’s changing hands we’d have a different conversation, but, like, there’s a lot of metrics out there and a lot of strengths and weaknesses.

I do believe in the power of people. People have all sorts of different strengths and weaknesses and to be laser-focused on just one dimension of this many-dimensional space is to doom yourself, I feel. It is to say that people only matter if they’re useful to you specifically, and… I’m sorry, that’s a shitty thing to put onto people.

Footnotes

  1. Richard Stallman is someone with a highly dubious track record with respect to women and children, to be clear, so maybe the ineffectual RMS we got is better than a hypothetical effective RMS, but… man. It’s sad. ↩

  2. If you are one of those friends, hi! ↩

  3. We do not talk about the origins of ‘love language’, it’s a nightmare. ↩