Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training • Hacker News Board

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#51

Post by mkl » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 1:31 AM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #43

ryandrake wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like the old sports coach’s expression: “You don’t need talent in order to practice!” Outside of super-rare outliers, I don’t personally believe that anyone is born with natural talent for anything. When someone is highly skilled at something, I will assume that they spent tons of obsessive time learning and practicing rather than that they tried it one day and found they were magically good at it.

There's a huge spectrum of natural athletic ability in children; you could see it in plain sight you just played sports as a kid.

There's a huge spectrum in the amount of each type of athletic play children have done.

I think most of that "natural" ability is still down to practice. Tiny innate differences and advantages push people in certain directions, which means they practice those more (through play, to start with), and pretty quickly there are big apparent differences.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#52

Post by sillysaurus3 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 1:34 AM UTC

hobolord wrote: post #49

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's remarkable how similar this is to learning programming. Anyone remember the lightbulb moment of grokking pointers? And there you were writing C for an arbitrary amount of time t for 0 React devs probably have a moment when react suddenly makes sense. In all four cases (bicycling, music, pointers, react) what makes the difference is dogged persistence. One day you'll wake up and things will seem simple -- and the…

how long does it take for react to make sense?

A friend of mine is a far better webdev than I could hope to be. She knows CSS inside and out, and seems to make it a point of pride to know every little detail. She did it in three years of focused effort, with no prior programming experience. It was one of the most amazing transformations I've seen, but it was only because she worked so hard.

She mentioned the other day that she's a bit sad she can't find any aspect of React she doesn't know. But now she's been banging her head against react native for the past few months, so there's no shortage of challenges. She's the primary architect of a startup's frontend webapp (and now their mobile app). I keep trying to push her to write and post her stuff, but she still feels like she doesn't know anything. But that feeling seems like the main reason she knows so much now, several years later.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#53

Post by _xlr2 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 1:46 AM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #47

jancsika wrote: post #45

I think the article makes "epiphany" sound rather extraordinary. But in the normal course of learning music there are plenty of them which we tend to ignore for some reason. For example: if you learned to ride a bike as a kid, you'll remember a moment where your balance just "locked in" and there you were riding for an arbitrary amount of time. Now take twelve-bar blues on the piano: say you spend some weeks or month…

It's remarkable how similar this is to learning programming. Anyone remember the lightbulb moment of grokking pointers? And there you were writing C for an arbitrary amount of time t for 0 React devs probably have a moment when react suddenly makes sense. In all four cases (bicycling, music, pointers, react) what makes the difference is dogged persistence. One day you'll wake up and things will seem simple -- and the…

Funnily enough, this happened to me just today! After almost two years of studying 6502 assembly in my spare time, the whole mindspace required to be an efficient and productive assembly programmer clicked for me this afternoon.

It wasn't literally sudden, more so a realization over the course of an hour after the usual reading and re-reading of various tutorials and documentation that I had already been doing. I'd say a few hours into programmer flow was when it all came together.

I liken it to when I first grokked Lisp back in high school. A shedding of mental fog leading to a sort of "now I finally get how somebody could program a game in this without being some hack-the-planet-level computer whiz."

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#54

Post by GuiA » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 2:10 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #45

I think the article makes "epiphany" sound rather extraordinary. But in the normal course of learning music there are plenty of them which we tend to ignore for some reason. For example: if you learned to ride a bike as a kid, you'll remember a moment where your balance just "locked in" and there you were riding for an arbitrary amount of time. Now take twelve-bar blues on the piano: say you spend some weeks or month…

Indeed. I taught myself how to juggle recently, because I am fairly clumsy and thought this was something I’d never be able to do, but I wanted to see how far I’d go.

For a month or so, I’d spend 10 minutes a day doing various throwing/catching exercises with 1, then 2, then 3 balls (went on YouTube for resources).

And then at some point - much like you described for playing the blues - all the separate motions all came together and I was juggling.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#55

Post by SamReidHughes » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 2:14 AM UTC

mkl wrote: post #51

SamReidHughes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge spectrum of natural athletic ability in children; you could see it in plain sight you just played sports as a kid.

There's a huge spectrum in the amount of each type of athletic play children have done. I think most of that "natural" ability is still down to practice. Tiny innate differences and advantages push people in certain directions, which means they practice those more (through play, to start with), and pretty quickly there are big apparent differences.

The science has a clear cut answer to this, not only with twin studies but also with different genes having been tied to specific body features that directly affect athletic ability.

If genetics didn't play a meaningful role in athleticism, we wouldn't have evolved it. But even if that was true at some point in history, that would only be temporary, because without selective pressure, genetic drift would move the population to some point where there was selective pressure.

Obviously environment plays a role, with climate giving kids in California more practice time, or the annual cut-off date in team sports affecting who's in what age group.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#56

Post by jancsika » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 2:19 AM UTC

peterlk wrote: post #36

jancsika wrote: post #11

Is there a control group of people who spend an equal amount of time and fervor investigating a new musical or artistic path without first having the "epiphany?" I had a friend in college with no prior musical training who decided his second year to become a classical guitarist. We kind of teased him at first because he clearly had no sudden music-related epiphanies nor any idea of the time involved to master an inst…

I think most people underestimate the amount of discipline that it takes to get good at something, and overestimate the amount of time it takes. I learned WAY more in one summer of programming 16 hours a day than I did in a year of classes where I was supposedly immersing myself in learning. When I say that I was programming 16 hours a day, I was. That was _all_ I did. But I came out the other side with a much better…

> The thing that's intriguing to me is the sudden onset of a compulsion to do one particular thing.

The article suggests something different than a compulsion, something like a sudden awareness of music (or art or whatever) that the person didn't have before.

For example, I have a kind of involuntary hobby of cataloging 3rd inversion seventh chords in music. Tchaikovsky likes to use them in descending chromatic sequences. Brian Wilson has a funny one in "God Only Knows" where the bass idiosyncratically resolves up. Etc.

I didn't have an obsession to learn about harmony and then catalog what I learned in the music I hear. I had an awareness of harmony before I took music lessons, then I learned the notation and went, "Oh, that's what it's called."

I think that's one of the most frustrating parts of learning something that's really new to you. Suppose I had no initial awareness of harmony and tried to learn to identify those 3rd inversion seventh chords by obsessively cataloging them. Perhaps I do some work studying pop and classical music, and after lots of effort I come up with the Tchaikovsky and Beach Boys examples. Then some musician with an awareness of harmony walks in and starts effortlessly adding more: there's one arpeggiated when Link falls in a hole in Ocarina of Time, in the theme to Back to the Future, a famous one in the transition of the last movement of Beethoven's Fifth, a string of them in a chromatic sequence in the Shepherd's Tune from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, etc. "Oh, and isn't the verse of Tom Petty's 'Here Come's My Girl' just a famous alternation between a triad and a 3rd inversion seventh chord built on the first scale degree of a Lydian scale?" In that case I would start to wonder whether I really want to continue with my project.

Of course one can actually learn and improve that awareness with enough practice. But it requires perseverance to keep at it in the face of people who naturally have those same abilities (and often don't seem to value them).

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#57

Post by itronitron » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 2:25 AM UTC

peterlk wrote: post #36

jancsika wrote: post #11

Is there a control group of people who spend an equal amount of time and fervor investigating a new musical or artistic path without first having the "epiphany?" I had a friend in college with no prior musical training who decided his second year to become a classical guitarist. We kind of teased him at first because he clearly had no sudden music-related epiphanies nor any idea of the time involved to master an inst…

I think most people underestimate the amount of discipline that it takes to get good at something, and overestimate the amount of time it takes. I learned WAY more in one summer of programming 16 hours a day than I did in a year of classes where I was supposedly immersing myself in learning. When I say that I was programming 16 hours a day, I was. That was _all_ I did. But I came out the other side with a much better…

There is a certain level of starting knowledge that can be very beneficial or even necessary before dedicated immersion. Your year of classes likely provided sufficient overview to make the start of your summer more productive than it would have been otherwise.

I mention this only because if you take up painting then I recommend studying up on the materials and processes first (how to mix paints on the palette and also on the canvas).

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#58

Post by itronitron » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 2:30 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #56

peterlk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people underestimate the amount of discipline that it takes to get good at something, and overestimate the amount of time it takes. I learned WAY more in one summer of programming 16 hours a day than I did in a year of classes where I was supposedly immersing myself in learning. When I say that I was programming 16 hours a day, I was. That was _all_ I did. But I came out the other side with a much better…

> The thing that's intriguing to me is the sudden onset of a compulsion to do one particular thing. The article suggests something different than a compulsion, something like a sudden awareness of music (or art or whatever) that the person didn't have before. For example, I have a kind of involuntary hobby of cataloging 3rd inversion seventh chords in music. Tchaikovsky likes to use them in descending chromatic seque…

>> "Oh, that's what it's called."

I think what defines great teachers is their ability to illustrate new concepts through familiar and relatable examples.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#59

Post by itronitron » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 2:36 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #11

Is there a control group of people who spend an equal amount of time and fervor investigating a new musical or artistic path without first having the "epiphany?" I had a friend in college with no prior musical training who decided his second year to become a classical guitarist. We kind of teased him at first because he clearly had no sudden music-related epiphanies nor any idea of the time involved to master an inst…

Something worth mentioning as well is that in order to sustain that level of discipline a person needs to both be observant of their work/practice while also withholding judgment of their ability, otherwise they will wear themselves out fairly quickly.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#60

Post by torstenvl » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 2:37 AM UTC

peterlk wrote: post #36

jancsika wrote: post #11

Is there a control group of people who spend an equal amount of time and fervor investigating a new musical or artistic path without first having the "epiphany?" I had a friend in college with no prior musical training who decided his second year to become a classical guitarist. We kind of teased him at first because he clearly had no sudden music-related epiphanies nor any idea of the time involved to master an inst…

I think most people underestimate the amount of discipline that it takes to get good at something, and overestimate the amount of time it takes. I learned WAY more in one summer of programming 16 hours a day than I did in a year of classes where I was supposedly immersing myself in learning. When I say that I was programming 16 hours a day, I was. That was _all_ I did. But I came out the other side with a much better…

I think most people underestimate the amount of discipline that it takes to get good at something, and overestimate the amount of time it takes.

Truer words have never been spoken, across all kinds of domains. When I was a fat desk nerd and decided to become a Marine, I was surprised at how quickly I was able to transform my body and gain the required physical skills - once I found the motivation and discipline. Ditto for language study, programming, etc.