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:

Design skills: The ability to make good frontend design decisions, writing and explaining yourself well, designing a room, writing a good legal defense, knowing how to architect a complicated software system
Technical skills: Follow and perform mathematical proofs, know how to program, make Fermi estimates, make solid analytic arguments, read a

...

Bill Seitz

Bill Seitz