When I look at this article and ask "What is the strongest counter-example that comes into my head", and I think something like "Being a mathematician or physicist". I think I have the g-factor to get a math degree if I really wanted, but it's not at all clear how I could reach the level of a working mathematician in six months, despite already being a decent programmer. There are a few replies my inner Habryka might say, and I'm curious if any of them seem accurate, and if some are very much not what you intended to say:
-
This advice isn't meant for everyone. In the same way that I'm expecting people to be 140+ IQ to use this advice, I also expect them to be at least +2.5 SD of conscientiousness. If you can put in 60+ hours a week of high quality mental work into this task, you actually could achieve this - most students of mathematics do a fraction of this time. You underestimate how much progress can be made with real focus and drive paired with strong conscientiousness and smarts - it's a multiplicative effect that adds up very quickly. Such a person really could get to that level in six months, but they're rare enough that standard career paths can't accommodate them, which i
1For the benefit of later readers, this was Scott Young's MIT challenge, doing a full CS degree in 12 months. I saw this as rather incredible the first time I saw it, but maybe the more incredible thing was having both the circumstances and the agency to attempt it in the first place. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/
I think you significantly underestimate what "expert-level" skill is. Even in my own technical field (mechanical engineering), actual experts have a volume of experience, learned heuristics, and practiced pathways that put them leagues ahead of extemely bright but inexperienced engineers. A skilled upstart will absolutely be able to complete a satisfactory, simple project in a new field with very little prep, but experts are going to solve problems that a newcomer wouldn't even recognize as existing.
Real life has a lot of foot guns and very few of them are well documented.
Note that professionals are not necessarily experts; a grounding in first principles for your field will easily let you spot the mistakes of seasoned professionals who never took the time to learn the "why." Don't neglect their experience, however; even if they have an answer for the wrong reasons, it might still be correct.
1The obvious next step to this broad theory would, I presume, be to find TWO non-trivially optimized tasks that were sampled from each skill domain...
(1) The Task With The Most Transferrable Peak: is optimized for pedagogy. Fundamentally, you just want it to transfer really really well to almost anything else in the entire skill domain, and you want late stage mastery of this transfer as well (so that the lessons don't become pointless later in the learning curve from the perspective of transfer). If you can't find ONE such peak, then several tasks like this that amount to a covering algorithm might work?
If there are really only a handful of domains, then you might be able to give every undergrad or every highschooler the "most transferable peak task" for EVERY domain and let them grind on it for as many years as needed to give them transfer powers to the full range of all skills.
If "music" is a skill domain, then I would propose learning the harp would work (its the one I picked for leveling up music anyway) because (1) plucking strings involves finger tricks, (2) playing with two hands challenges ambidexterity, (3) some rhythm, (4) very low and very high notes, (5) pedal harp requ...
Having worked with experts across many industries, and having dabbled in the literature around skill transfer and training, there seems to be little difference within an industry between someone four years in and someone twenty years in, once you control for intelligence and conscientiousness.
I basically agree with the post, but I think you're underestimating the value of experience. It's true that there's not that much value in doing the same thing for 20 years, but if a person is learning different things, 20 years of experience means that they've had the necessary 3 months of ramp-up time for 80+ different subskills. Plus the more sub-skills you've ramped up on, the easier the remaining skills are. Learning one programming language take months but learning your 20th takes hours[1]. And people with experience can know about problems you don't know you need to ramp up on.
Already knowing things is overvalued by some hiring processes, but I think you're going too far the other way by discounting it entirely.
- ^
Both programming ramp-up times are to reach the ability to write code that does what you want in that language. Becoming an actual expert on the best practices for a language ta
Classify the following:
- A guy (with genuine, good intentions) goes to a bar, and flirts well enough to get a date or at least a one night stand. He can do this reliably. Most of his past partners think he's charming and fun.
- Cold emailing someone for a job opportunity.
- Giving an impromptu informal psych study at a college.
Do these have overlap? Not sure! Closest is, like, charisma/extroversion. Closest of your categories is... management?
I really like this article, and it feels very empowering and exciting. It's spawned a ton of thoughts, hence leaving two comments. It's also quite relevant to me - I've recently been asking myself, based on a job offer I'm expecting, how hard would it be for me to become an expert in compute governance? And I actually did think before reading this article that six months of dedicated full-time work could get me there, but I was thinking in a narrower domain than "all technical skills".
I'm very intrigued about the idea of there being a finite number of doma...
So I feel like I can write decently well and architect a software program, but I imagine myself totally bouncing off interior design / UI designs - it's not clear to me how to get started or how the skills transfer.
You would not be the first person I've worked with who said this, who ended up making a lot of progress here.
IMO people overestimate the aspect of design that is about pixel-pushing, and underestimate the aspect of design that is about "in what order and with what priority do I need to show the user this information?". If you can answer that question, getting from there to a clean design is often not that hard (and then yes, you will have to spend at least a few weeks getting good at pixel pushing, but I doubt it's going to be the blocker).
People also drastically overestimate how helpful something like drawing or artistic skill is for design work. I think I am a pretty good designer but I am absolutely atrocious at drawing anything, and my artistic composition abilities are very weak.
Okay, I think I understand this now. For the benefit of other people with Jay-shaped problems in this area, I'll write down what I've learned:
If I were to design a CRUD app, I would immediately begin decomposing the problem into the basic language of the specific domain of web applications. We need a front-end, a back-end, and a database. We need to connect them up in some way. We need to host the application somewhere. Okay, I know what parts are needed.
Now, what is the specific problem I want to solve with this CRUD app? What differentiates it from any generic CRUD app? What information do I need to show to the user and how in order to ensure they can easily do whatever they will want to do with this app? Now I am in "core design skills" land. However, I had to go through that first paragraph to do so, I couldn't just start here.
So, it feels like I know nothing about interior design, not because I am bad at every step of interior design but because I am bad at the very first step - I cannot yet break down room design into the various components like lighting, furniture, color schemes, and so on that are required. (Honestly, even being able to write that previous sentence with spe...
1Some examples of skills that I expect the vast majority[1] of adults at 2-3 SDs above mean intelligence plus some subskill specialization (in your ontology) to not become an expert in 2 years:
- Learning a language from a different language family than your own, for monolingual people.
- Adults learning to play chess to a professional or semi-professional level
- Chess should be really easy for your model: perfect feedback, unlimited reps, pure reasoning, no (or very limited) institutional gatekeeping, no physical component
- Yet approximately 0 people have learned c
1Anecdotally I have fairly high verbal IQ but pretty bad visual design skills, and my impression is that this is not at all uncommon among serious amateur bloggers or professional writers. I'm curious whether you disagree here.
i feel like i kind of expect "research" to be potentially separate from these? eg you can have very very technical people without good technical research taste, and i think probably the same on a lot of design type skills / research?
Research is mostly design! This is one of the big mistakes that people make IMO! Almost all of high-quality research is ontologizing new domains and thinking really hard about what are good new abstractions to think in within this domain, and that's the very central design skill!
One of the reasons why research is hard is because you need design, and usually you have technical prerequisites.
1Is there any externally validated or scientific basis for any of this?
So, there is Gygax et al's framework
- WIS (design)
- INT (technical)
- CHA (management)
- DEX_CON_STR (physical)
1
1this definitely seems like a useful model for some purposes, I expect it will live in my head now. you do say right up top that this is a galaxy-brained theory, but I still feel the need to nitpick
- I feel like this is more true the more generalist-y the stuff you're doing is to begin with
- in your quiz of examples, I perceive a trend where the technical examples are less generalist-y than the other ones, which I conjecture is because that's in fact the area that Lightcone has the most specific expertise in
- I claim that there exist lots of other kinds of tasks
1Having worked with experts across many industries, and having dabbled in the literature around skill transfer and training, there seems to be little difference within an industry between someone four years in and someone twenty years in, once you control for intelligence and conscientiousness.
I would expect that this largely depends on how strong the feedback mechanisms in the industry are. I think the average psychotherapist is probably at a similar skill level four years in as twenty years. However, if you have one that follows David Burns advise of havi...
1I think it is way more fine than just 4.
Example in STEM. Medicine and biology, by this logic, should go to the "technical" skills together with math, coding, and physics.
Well, no. When I was teaching physics for medical students, I saw they prefer to rely on memory, memorizing the solution rather than understanding logic, which does not work in math. And the opposite, when I am learning anything biology-related, I have a super hard time memorising a bunch of different genes/neuromediators/whatever without any apparent internal logic. At the same time, the ...
(Skimmed but did not read post carefully, seems cool) What about:
- Being able to fluently navigate optics, the way politicians, marketers, influences, etc. do?
- Cognitive empathy?
- Self-control?
- Being able to follow rules in ambiguous circumstances? E.g. an officer of the law trying to figure out rights and obligations in some context. Is this technical? (Being a judge specifically is somewhat design-related, in that you are sorta deciding the meaning of rules and implicitly designing good rules / good interpretations of rules / good rules for interpreting rules, in order to support a good society; and kinda management-related. But I don't think that's the main skill?)
I kinda suspect you’ve developed an unconscious but accurate feeling for the sort of task a generalist can skill into in six months, and no longer ask people to tasks outside that set and so don’t get feedback from the resulting failures.
some specific tasks:
Write a native cross platform UI toolkit thats ergonomic to use from Rust
Become governor of california
Write a novel thats not cringe
And the ur example, win any contest where the other bastards get to prep for more than six months
Ok, illustrative example: it’s humanly possible to get good enough at free...
You should breakdown the Heinlein/specialization skills into your 4 buckets: change a diaper, plan an invasion, etc.
I do think there is skill at being good at caring for children. Under your taxonomy it would fit best under "management skills". However I generally expect management types are worse than average at caring for children.
The cliche is of the high-powered executive being an absentee parent. They tend to lack the patience, warmth, emotional skills, etc. to even connect with their own children.
I think you're definitely missing some kind of relational /emotional skillset here. Nannies, therapists, priests, elementary teachers, hospice care providers, etc.
Like @Kabir, I think this leaves out relationship-building skills. I understand why one might think "management skills" covers this, but imo while it might partially fall into the same category, there are aspects of management skills that do not require relationship-building and there aspects of relationship-building that are critical skills for much more than management. I suspect just being personable and emotionally intelligent is more important than anything else on the list. I think an argument could also be made for general intelligence/adaptability or agency here.
My guess is if there is something I am missing it will be in something less career oriented
Yes, I think an Emotional Intelligence/Relational Ability will be another one. For an example of someone medium-high in this, see Mr Rogers
I will also say - I think with enough intelligence - maybe 120 IQ? - and no handicaps, e.g. severe autism, adhd, etc - all of the above traits could be learnt within 6 months of intense work, with high quality feedback mechanisms and an openness to being wrong. I've seen someone with high autism learn the emotional subset skill to...
Jimi Hendrix revolutionized guitar playing.
He died from overdose at 27. Perhaps practicing for 8 hours a day wasn't so good for his psyche?
Also, 2-10% of pro musicians get focal dystonia (a neurological condition where their muscles malfunction when they start doing their thing with their instrument), probably from playing too much. For example, the famous bassist Victor Wooten got it.
Also, I read about a famous trumpet player, maybe Louis Armstrong, and he had serious problems with his lips from playing really hard and playing a lot. He had to use a ra...
there seems to be little difference within an industry between someone four years in and someone twenty years in, once you control for intelligence and conscientiousness.
Well, four years is a pretty long time—from the start of that paragraph I wouldn't have assumed this is what you meant, because by itself this would actually make it hard to run a generalist-only operation
Counterexample: you cannot become an expert in playing any musical instrument in 6 months. (unless you're a freaking genius)
Huh, that seems false to me? My sense is musicians routinely get to very high levels of skill in a new instrument quickly, if they have already mastered at least one instrument before (like enough to play in a band professionally in a new instrument).
6 months of practice is a long time!
I actually had a conversation about this exact thing with Ben (who plays guitar at an approximately professional level). I think our conversation landed on 6 months being roughly reasonable (but things would end up a bit rough because your physical muscles end up exhausted and we had some uncertainty on whether you could make up enough of the calendar time during which your muscles are recovering via learning other things, but you could definitely do it if you spread out those 6 months over a year).
Is this a distinction between expert and professional? For many fields, a merely professional level is way below an expert level, and for others that difference may just be less legible.
In my own case I saw your tweet and my thought was that a fifth skill is the "aura" of a notable politician or someone with a cult of personality, but it's true that a merely "professional" politicians like a state assemblyman or city councilman may not have the same level of unreachable skills at all.
2Immediate taxonomy of subskills that came to mind:
- designing for consumers vs designing for producers
- technical breadth vs technical depth
- managing up vs managing down
- Physical strength vs physical dexterity
Dang it, now I wanna read/write posts for all of these
I think legal skills overlap the design (ie ~verbal) and technical domains, involving as they often do precise analytical reasoning of a kind many laypeople can’t do. Albeit it’s curious that lawyers tend not to be good at math. (Maybe not even finance and tax lawyers? Not sure.)
Philosophers may similarly overlap the two skill sets.
I suggest management skills be renamed ‘people skills’. As management also involves technical things like planning & budgeting, also ideally design (eg writing) skills. And of course, social skills of the kind you’re alluding to aren’t just useful in management.
Basic Q: am I a "design" or a "technical" person? Put another way, I think "go do policy" is either some blend of both skill trees, or possibly its own thing; there's some very weird sense in which most people can't make the kinds of coupled-with-just-the-right-degree-of-metaphorical-slippage work that policy analysis and writing entails.
(Many people can! Just see people who feel like excellent at either "design" or "technical" fail at this all the time.)
This is a fun article and the premise matches many of my personal experiences. I think the length of time required to skill up to "expert level" depends a lot on the percentile we define as "expert", with the level of the median professional in a field maybe only taking a year for a smart generalist to match, but the level of a top 1% performer is going to take much longer even if someone is smart enough to get there.
An Olympian in any sport can probably beat an unathletic person at any sport, which proves the overall point that physical skills transfer. W...
To play volleyball a bit with you, I offer the following skill sets that I think are needed across a design team specifically but for any team in general. My thinking is that various team members possess these skills in differing proportions as suited to their role. This is part of a long post being drafted...
- Creativity: “don’t like that idea? I got others.” Everyone can be creative problem solvers but for the owners, designers, and developers it is essential. AI remains bounded by statistical inputs and no world experience. That may change
- Taste: the abil
It's kind of depressing that the determining factor of how well you perform at seemingly disconnected fields is actually just general intelligence, which is mostly set in stone during our genetic lottery at birth. Since we don't work for it, it's unfair and underserving for people who won the lottery to have the ability to outperform in liteterally every skills.
In my experience in the technical domain (read: observing fellow college students), it seems like people need a bit of that generalist energy in them to reliably be the sort that can go between domains. I'm unsure if this is just purely g factor.
I suspect similar is true for every other domain you listed except possibly management and physical (which seem more unified).
I really like the post though - I have definitely felt this way about technical skills, had sorta intuited management and physical, but hadn't seen this cross transfer design stuff.
That's a neat concept, especially for game design purposes, but it is definitely in no way acknowledged or implemented in the educational or job hiring world.
im not entirely sure 'design skills' and 'technical skills' are distinct, or really management skills.
let's frame like this: given a problem:
- Physical skills would take the solution-as-a-concept and immanentize it as a solution-in-the-world
- Management skills would look at the universe of problems, and the universe of resources, and allocate accordingly
- Design skills will pore over the solution space and pick one that meets the problem parameters
- Technical skills... will pore over the solution space and pick one that meets the problem parameters
Ergo, d...
On management? IDK, that one I haven't seen much support for, but it sure matches my experience. There is an emotional intelligence literature, but that construct adds extremely little on top of just general intelligence. My guess is it's just a task that's very important and has terrible feedback loops, so everyone needs to fail for a while before they get good at it, but who knows.
If this is a sufficient criterion to separate managment from others, then we can expect other buckets to exist no? I think that managment is actually a part of a branch of the ...
Somewhat related: Hanson argues in Age of Em there would be hundreds of unique ems to cover all the jobs, and they would all have a lot of training. But that is for peak performance.
I know several people, mostly of my parents' generation, who despite years of effort struggle to type at 75 wpm, and are better at physical tasks of all kinds than I am. I am very poor at physical tasks and never learned to touch-type properly and I still write at >90 wpm from sheer practice. I don't think it fits in this ontology at all.
Similarly, giving a good talk [EDIT: When this was written the quiz classed this and the lower-mentioned tasks as design/physical tasks] is a fundamentally different skill from anything involving lifting, carrying, or p...
I think this might slightly break down on higher echelons of larger organizations with deeper hierarchy levels. The general logic of carrier progression in such places follows this pattern:
- You start doing the grunt work (e.g, junior developer or analyst).
- You gain enough expertise to be able to juggle mental models of the workflow easily.
- You can now jump up on the higher hierarchy level (e.g. senior dev, manager, project manager), where you coordinate work of people doing the grunt work.
- Repeat #2 for this level
- Repeat #3 for this level
- End so on until the to
This isn't meant to be a devastating criticism, but what justifies dividing and classifying skills into the 4 classes mentioned in this post, as opposed to the infinite variety of other possible ways of doing this?
Epistemic status: Completely schizo galaxy-brained theory
Lightcone[1] operates on a "generalist" philosophy. Most of our full-time staff have the title "generalist", and in any given year they work on a wide variety of tasks — from software development on the LessWrong codebase to fixing an overflowing toilet at Lighthaven, our 30,000 sq. ft. campus.
One of our core rules is that you should not delegate a task you don't know how to perform yourself. This is a very intense rule and has lots of implications about how we operate, so I've spent a lot of time watching people learn things they didn't previously know how to do.
My overall observation (and why we have the rule) is that smart people can learn almost anything. Across a wide range of tasks, most of the variance in performance is explained by general intelligence (foremost) and conscientiousness (secondmost), not expertise. Of course, if you compare yourself to someone who's done a task thousands of times you'll lag behind for a while — but people plateau surprisingly quickly. Having worked with experts across many industries, and having dabbled in the literature around skill transfer and training, there seems to be little difference within an industry between someone four years in and someone twenty years in, once you control for intelligence and conscientiousness.
But sometimes someone on my team does actually truly struggle to get better at a task, even if they are smart. Or I notice that if I were to try to get them to do something, they would have no idea how to even get started unless they spent at the very least multiple months, if not multiple years, acquiring the foundations necessary to do so.
So the question becomes: What determines whether someone is capable of relatively quickly acquiring expert-level performance in domains ranging from preparing a legal defense, to preparing an architectural plan, to physically renovating a bathroom, to programming a conference schedule app?
And my current, schizo galaxy-brained theory is that there are exactly 4 skills:
If you are good at any task in any of those categories, you can become expert-level within 6 months at any other task in the same category.
Now why these exact 4 skills?
IDK, it kind of fits the data I've observed. But here is roughly how I came to believe what I believe:
First: across all tasks, performance correlates highly with general intelligence, and this dominates everything else. But clearly there's non-trivial variance left after controlling for it.
Then, there's an obvious divide between STEM and the humanities. Ask someone with a legal, history, or non-analytic-philosophy background to learn programming and mostly they bounce off or expect a multi-year training journey. Ask someone with a STEM degree to learn programming and it goes pretty well even if they've never programmed before.
Similarly, when I talk to people with a legal or humanities background and ask them about complicated frontend design decisions, they usually give surprisingly good input! They will pretty quickly jump into the fray of trying to model the user, figure out what a good product or information ontology, and have a sense of style about its presentation.
So that's it. There are exactly two skills. "Technical skills" and "Design Skills".
Then I tried to manage people. That... didn't go so well. Not only that, when I tried to get people on my team to manage other people, they also sucked at it!
So I learned that if I want to predict who will be good at management, I need to pay attention to whether they've managed other people before, and expect many months of practice until they are decent at it. Maybe it's a completely new cognitive domain, maybe it's just a domain where skill transfer is very hard and feedback loops are very slow and so it just takes everyone a while to learn the basic lessons, but nevertheless, if I want to predict performance at Lightcone, I gotta model people's management skills separately.
And then I tried to renovate a hotel.
And while the people on my team really ended up surprisingly good at a very wide range of tasks associated with construction and construction management, it also became clear that no one on my team would be able to perform the actual labor that our general contractors were able to perform. And also that they would totally smoke us in any sports competition. And that if I wanted to get someone on my team involved in the daily construction work, I sure expect that they would need many months of getting into shape and developing the right kind of physical skills.
So 4 skills it is.
Now, am I confident I have seen all skills there are in the world, such that no additional cluster will arise? Actually, yeah, kind of.
I have been walking through the world trying to keep track of what kind of career many of my acquaintances and colleagues go into for something like the last 2-3 years, and haven't really noticed any big holes. I have also been actively trying to think about careers that currently seem off limits to someone who has basic expertise in these 4 skill domains, and I have so far not been able to find something. My guess is if there is something I am missing it will be in something less career oriented.[2]
Need someone to build a script that automates filling out some business forms?
Give your econ masters student 3 months to learn programming and he can do it.
Need someone to drive your marketing push?
Give your interior designer 2 months to figure it out.
Need someone to head your internal legal department, double check the work of your lawyers, and prepare your legal defense in a high stakes trial?
Give your very smart frontend designer 3 months and they will go toe-to-toe with your lawyers.
Want to promote an engineer who has never managed anyone before to a manager?
Well, you better strap in for a year or more of pain while they acquire this completely new skill domain and traumatize all your new interns while doing so.
Want to get your backend engineer who is not good at writing, and is not good at interior design, to start taking more charge over your frontend?
Expect them to suck for at least a year until they can start competing with the smart designers on your team.
Want to get your quant finance guy who has never worked on a big codebase to start writing maintainable code and make nice clean Pull Requests?
Well tough luck, predict many months of telling them that yes, it is actually important that anyone can read your code and figure out how to modify these abstractions you've created.
Want to get your philosophy grad student dropout who has never done physical labor in his life to start managing construction projects and get their hands dirty?
Expect at least a year of getting into shape and used to the work, if they don't bounce off completely (though many subtasks of construction can be done with pretty little physical alacrity).
Give it a try yourself!
(Unhappy with any of my classifications? Fight me in the comments!)
Is there any externally validated or scientific basis for any of this?
Yes! It's not like, total consensus in the field of psychometrics, but task performance being extremely g-loaded across a wide variety of tasks is very well supported. People can really learn a very wide range of skills if they are smart.
And then within intelligence, math tilt and verbal tilt tend to be commonly used abstractions in psychometric testing that are predictive of success in careers in STEM or humanities.[3] Math fits nicely onto the technical domain. Verbal fits nicely onto the design domain.
A generalized "physical skill" factor is also well-supported. First, enough high profile athletes have switched from being world class in one sport to being world class in another sport such that there must be substantial skill transfer for these domains to explain that outlier success.[4] Second, somewhat unsurprisingly, if you measure people's sports skill you will find a strong "General Motor Ability" factor that explains performance across a wide range of motor skills.[5]
On management? IDK, that one I haven't seen much support for, but it sure matches my experience. There is an emotional intelligence literature, but that construct adds extremely little on top of just general intelligence. My guess is it's just a task that's very important and has terrible feedback loops, so everyone needs to fail for a while before they get good at it, but who knows.
Design. Technical. Management. Physical skills. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Management Nation attacked. Only the True Generalist, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished.
the organization I run, and which runs the website you're reading
If there is a missing cluster, I can imagine it being some more "relational" skillset around doing high-quality emotional labor, or maybe something genuinely associated with age and wisdom where certain skill domains are just really hard to perform well in without being at least 35+ and having the associated life experience. But I don't currently think such a cluster exists, and that four is really the right number.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886924004860
Claude lists: "Bo Jackson (NFL All-Pro + MLB All-Star). Deion Sanders (NFL HOF + MLB). Rebecca Romero (Olympic silver in rowing, then Olympic gold in cycling four years later — different disciplines entirely). Clara Hughes (Olympic medals in both speed skating and cycling). Rugby → NFL is a well-trodden path (Jarryd Hayne, Christian Wade)"
This research is a bit more controversial than I expected, but I don't really understand the controversy. There are definitely some people in the field who insist on there not being a strong general motor ability factor. IMO this study also points in the direction of there being a general motor ability.