Epistemic status: Exploratory

A scaffold is a lightweight, temporary construction whose point is to make working on other buildings easier. Maybe you could live and work on a scaffold, but why would you? The point is the building. When the building is done, you can take down the scaffold, though you might put it back up if you need to do repairs. If your scaffold was shaky and unsteady, or fell over when you were halfway up, this would make it harder to work on the building.

Here's the thesis of this essay: sometimes I think skills are also scaffolds; more useful for what else they let you learn than for the skill itself.  One reason a skill might be weirdly hard to learn is you lack scaffolding skills and don't realize this. It's like trying to fix a third story window without a scaffold.

Ia.

Things that are scaffolding skills:

I'm not very good at hearing pitch. It's not quite tone deafness, but whatever it is has gotten me singled out in two different music classes. We'd all be singing, and the teacher would frown, then ask more and more people to stop until they got to me and it would turn out I was like an octave and a half off without realizing. 

The ability to hear whether you're on the note or not is a vital scaffolding skill for learning to sing. 

I've said before that being able to fall and roll is the first lesson taught in many martial arts classes. Why is that? After all, rolling isn't the most useful thing in a fight, and it's not the simplest technique. You don't get thrown that much in street fights. Why don't we start with throws? One significant reason is that it's not safe to be thrown without knowing how to roll. 

The ability to be thrown and land safely is a vital scaffolding skill for learning to fight. Same with learning how to correctly don helmets and gloves, for styles that use those.

Attaching training wheels to a bicycle takes a little bit of mechanical know-how. You want them even, you want them firmly attached, you need to know what kind of training wheels go to which bike. Of course, once you know how to ride a bike without training wheels, you don't need to know how to attach them. (At least until you have kids and need to put training wheels on their bikes.)

Learning to how to put training wheels on your bike isn't vital to learning how to ride a bike. You can learn without and just fall down more, or you can have someone else attach them for you. But it's a useful scaffold.

Ib.

Things that are not scaffolding skills:

Getting into a fencing jacket is a bit weird. The zipper is at the back and it's fairly low, not unlike zipping up a dress back but with stiff fabric restricting your movements somewhat. For competitions you have to do it while threading a wire through the sleeve and not getting it tangled.

This is not a scaffolding skill. Olympic fencers still zip their own jackets. It's not the main focus perhaps, but it's still an ongoing part of being a fencer, even if you'd never notice the lack mid-bout if some idiot savant fencer who couldn't zip their own jacket or tie their own shoes but had an assistant to do it.

You want good pencils and paper to learn to sketch. You could study and study, only attempting a practice sketch infrequently or by scraping lines in flat rocks, but that sounds much harder.

Making pencils and paper is not a scaffolding skill. Maybe it helps to know the material, and at the higher levels I'd believe artists find it worthwhile to get so precise about their paper they decide to make their own. But you can just buy a bunch in the store, it's fine. Someone needs to make it, but it doesn't need to be you.

Knowing how to pass the ball in football is useful. In pickup games, people are happier to play with you if you pass the ball a lot. 

But passing the ball isn't a scaffolding skill for football, it's just a regular skill. You keep using it in football.

Ic.

Here's a few more of short skill / scaffolding skill examples.

• Free climbing / using safety ropes
• Mental math / writing the equation out with the right symbols
• Understanding history with its proper context / using anki or flashcards
• Speaking a foreign language / Duolingo's user interface
• Playing a piece of music from memory / playing while reading the sheet music
• Public speaking skillfully / handling anxiety from messing up with an audience
• Doing yoga / using yoga blocks or straps before you're flexible enough
• Drawing from imagination or sight / tracing still images
• Skydiving / securing the straps for a tandem jump

II.

Some skills are unusually hard to learn. One reason a skill might be hard to learn is that you lack accompanying scaffolding skills and don't realize this. 

At some point, I realized I wanted to get better at running tabletop RPGs. I'd suggest a new ruleset or about wanting to do more plot twists, post about wanting to play it on social media or talk excitedly to my roommates about it, and. . . fail to get practice.

The scaffolding skill I needed was the ability to make short, compelling pitches for games. Once I had that, more people showed up to play in games, letting me practice. Also, it helped to learn to make good homemade food, not just pizza delivery. 

Some ground level skills are anti-inductive, highly variable, twisty and full of traps for the unwary. Relationships can be like this, where after a few years you might have a couple of serious relationship attempts that crashed and burned, but you don't really know what went wrong. Conflict resolution is one, where you seldom get to find out what would have happened if you'd tried something else.

And then there's the skills where if you do it sufficiently wrong you're dead, like coup attempts. 

Scaffolding skills — ways to set up safe places to stand as you work on the thing that matters — may be useful investments.

III.

What are general kinds of scaffolding skills?

Some scaffolding skills are your feedback loops, helping you learn from each attempt. It's fairly obvious in fencing whether you're getting better - are you stabbing the other bloke more than he's stabbing you - but it's not as obvious whether you're singing off key unless you can hear it. (Or cheat with an app.)

Some scaffolding skills let you try and try and try again when otherwise you'd only get a few tries. If you had a significant risk of injury every time you got thrown, or if you couldn't buy more pencils and paper in the store, then you wouldn't learn as much. 

I also think there's an important category of scaffolding skills that allow you to reach new heights you just couldn't achieve without them. I don't know enough about house construction to know if this is a good analogy, but if I imagine building a six story house then having a scaffold to stand on when putting in the fourth story windows sounds useful.

If you find your progress is slowing down on some skill you care about, consider looking if there's adjacent scaffolding you could learn to build better.