Everything's A Skill By Default

Your default assumption when considering [Doing Something] should be that it's a skill which can be learned. Maybe you've spend a lot of time doing it, and you're pretty chill with the whole idea, and you've picked up some nice habits to make it easier. Maybe you've never done it before but it seems easy enough, after all, everyone manages it, right? Or maybe you've never done it before and wow, this is not going to go well, isn't it.

I see three possibly-surprising failure modes that occur specifically because we humans see a thing to do and do not think "that's a skill!". They each happen a lot. Often invisibly, except for the consequences.

  1. Accidental Amateur Arrogance. This is where you pretty much never go to the grocery store to supply the household with food, but sit at home and snark about how you would be able to shop so much more quickly and efficiently because you're not the type to get distracted. You'd just be in and out of there, no problem. You'd come home with a pound of grapes for $23 because "it was on the list", whoops. It's a skill. Your default assumption about skills you haven't learned should be that you're shit at it.
  2. Discouragement of Self. You try something that Youtube assures you takes 5 minutes and 5 dollars. It takes you 3 hours and 62 dollars. There are two important things going on here. The first is that Youtube makes shit up. The second is that of course you're not good at this skill yet, you're trying it for the very first time. Your default assumption about skills you haven't learned is that you're going to have to practice before you get good at them.
  3. Discouragement of Others. Your partner pretty much never goes to the grocery store to supply the household with food. You would like them to help out more, and hand them a grocery list. They come back two hours later with groceries. 70% of the list was covered. 20% of the list had substitutions, some of which are a little baffling. 10% of the list "just couldn't be found". Some of the items were bought at far too high a price to be reasonable. You tell your partner "wtf were you thinking, this is easy", because you forgot that grocery shopping is a skill your partner is justifiably shit at due to not practicing. Because you forgot that grocery shopping is a skill that anyone who hasn't practiced is shit at. Also - you probably forgot that teaching someone new to [skill] how to take their initial steps towards [skilling] is a skill, one which you definitely haven't practiced. Accidental amateur arrogance - surely a brief list of groceries should have been sufficient for any reasonable person to get the job done, right?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Liberty" Tasks

A "Liberty task" is a small, self-contained task, ready to pick up and just start. No dependencies or blockers. It must be useful rather than make-work, and very often it is one of many similar tasks. It should not require deep thought; it is a thing which can be done, not a thing which surely could be done after figuring out how. In a codebase this might look like a list of tech debt noted over the years, or like the dozen refactorings needed before an unwieldy component can be broken up into three clean components. At home this might look like the ten yearly maintenance jobs needed to avoid early breakage, or like writing out the ingredients needed for each recipe you intend to try soon so that a legitimate shopping list can be created.  Some years ago one of the cofounders of the company to which I sell my labor found out he had a brain tumor. He took a step back from being the CTO while he dealt with the immediate mental and physical issues, including brain surgery, but d...
Read more

Make A Bad Plan

One of my more lucrative techniques at work I call Make A Bad Plan. This is where you know  that something  has to happen, but no one really has a good idea of exactly what or exactly how to do it, and also it's a lot easier to go work on less ambiguous projects, so how do you make it happen anyway, when no one, including you, really knows what "it" is? Two common ways this comes up are when you can see that there's an important problem in a system even if you don't know how to solve it, and when you can see that there's an important piece of information that humans know that isn't baked into automated systems and if only it was then something would be better, who knows what, but clearly humans know and act on this kind of thing so we should be able to use it, right? Make A Bad Plan calls for you to make a bad plan. Think of a few " something "s, pick one or synthesize one from your (bad) options, write it up as a draft proposal with enough detai...
Read more

Creating an extra character

For Halloween, I'm running a light horror-ish RPG for some friends. We play other RPGs regularly. I had a great little game in mind called ViewScream, designed for online play. Everyone plays a character isolated on a spaceship that has Problems (TM). Each character has two life-threatening emergencies which must be solved lest they die in the end. Each character also has three technobabble solutions to help solve others' emergencies. These may or may not work; the player knows, but the other players don't know. Everyone takes turns dialoguing, telling about their emergencies, offering up solutions, seeing how they worked (or didn't). But there are 6 of us, and I didn't have a prebuilt scenario that went past 5. Characters are pretty minimal. They have a tiny personality description and a little bit of relationship info, a couple of barebones sentences explaining how they feel or think about another character. In addition they have one secret or twist or scripted mi...
Read more