nunchuck
Moontower Munchies #155
Friends,
This Rob Henderson tweet caught my eye because while it rings true, it feels incomplete in an interesting way.
First, here’s the tweet in its entirety.
Adam Carolla was on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Here I’ll paraphrase one of Carolla’s most important points from this discussion:
“I realized that you have a skill set. Like martial arts. You know it, you’re comfortable with it, you’re secure in it. You know your abilities there, just like you know your abilities as a comedian or as an archer.
For me, I’m a carpenter. I have a skill, a trade. There are things I know well, so I don’t feel insecure. I know what I’m good at, and I’m grounded in that.
But a lot of people don’t have that. They don’t have a trade or a skill or anything they can honestly call expertise. If you asked them, ‘What are you an expert at?’ they wouldn’t have an answer. You could name several — UFC, mixed martial arts, jiu-jitsu, podcasting, standup, whatever it is.
You could learn another language or master an instrument. But so many people never find that thing. They never develop a skill they can own. And because of that, they walk around in this heightened state of insecurity.”
This is an insightful point: once you start getting good at something, and it can be almost anything, you can build from there. You now have something to talk about, something you know more about than most people. And if you can make it even mildly interesting, you can speak about it at length.
But many people spend their free time on social media or binge-watching TV. It is strange now: if you talk to younger guys and ask what they’re interested in, they’ll tell you about a Netflix show, or getting high, ordering Uber Eats, binge-watching, and maybe sports gambling.
If your life is dull and uneventful, and most of your free time is spent scrolling social media, it will be hard to hold anyone’s interest.
I think Henderson and Corolla are broadly correct. You start with some kind of actual skill but I think it’s important to match well to the skill so it is compatible with your talents. Then you can be more than an enthusiast. I play guitar and bass, but I’m not a talented musician. These are hobbies. They bring me joy. They are among the things I think about and do when I have free time. But I don’t really feel that any of the skills I have in them make me more confident. If anything, they are a source of insecurity. I’ve been playing for decades and routinely see 14-year-olds who are better (and guitar is rarely started as young as say piano).
Again, if the goal is to build confidence through competence then the word “skill” needs to meet standards that go beyond hobbyist. Having hobbies is great, I just doubt they directly address insecurity. It might be a nit-pick, but in a time where comparison and competition furnish all the insecurity one could bear, I find it a bit of a stretch to put Joe Rogan’s passion for archery, which I have no doubt is sacred soulcraft, on par with the skills that get him paid.
Of course, there are a lot of ways to express skill that don’t necessarily lead to getting paid, while still building confidence. But I suspect they have something in common… they make people’s lives better. Skills that only nourish ourselves might be satisfying, meditative, or rejuvenating. They might be necessary for our well-being. But unless they rise to the standard of helping others, it’s unlikely they will address insecurity since insecurity is entangled with our social selves. Status through usefulness.
The ability to fight might seem like an exception since one of its primary payoffs is a sense of security. But this ability is addressing the most literal form of insecurity — “a lack of safety” rather than security as self-worth. The ability to protect one’s loved ones, however, does scale the ability to a broader sense of security.
Survival skills are an interesting case whereby one can achieve an empowering sense of self-reliance with a decent but not all-consuming commitment. An Eagle Scout might not be special forces, but proving to yourself that you can persevere through a long-term challenge is a key ingredient in affirming self-efficacy.
In a similar vein, I wonder if running a marathon or other hard-earned achievement scales one’s sense of self-worth or does that sense remain siloed in the domain which it was accomplished, since, unlike survival skills, the task itself is, in pragmatic terms, useless.
Anyway, the tweet caught my eye because I do believe that the cure for insecurity is usefulness, but usefulness and skill aren’t equal (being great at Madden football vs being able to cook for your family).
I’m totally being pedantic, but this comes from wanting to understand insecurity better. Relieving insecurity is a giant lever for reducing hate and suffering. How much trash behavior, people rooting against one another, and destructive envy trace back to wounded pride and social fears.
Reducing insecurity by telling people that they are enough doesn’t cut it versus offering every reasonably healthy person a path to mutual benefit, which is a more stable requirement of nature than some faith-based notion of equality. If you try earnestly to be useful, regardless of your ability, I believe that’s enough to project a dignity that can be reflected back to you.
Napoleon Dynamite thought nunchuck skills would get him the babes. Corolla would say it’s a start and I’d like to believe it, but insecurity is such a glaring source of anguish amongst our kind that its remedy demands more than skills.
🔗 You Nerds are Still Hiring for Experience! | 3 min read
Jon Matzner argues that “MUST have 3+ years of [weird industry software]” was always lazy thinking but it used to at least be safe. He claims six months from now you can replace that software with a cheap agent such that the experienced hire is starting from scratch alongside the smart-hungry-coachable kid you passed on, except the kid would’ve taught themselves the new tool Saturday morning for fun.
I don’t know enough about software development and the pace of AI to judge this, it certainly sounds presumptuous for the better developers out there. But as we expand time to see this as the intersection of opposing curves where skills expire faster, while attributes compound, it seems feasible. Speculation aside, I appreciate the sentiment that I have shared even before these AI days:
You can’t teach curious, resourceful, or gives-a-shit.
It’s like the train problem from the SATs. It might start the journey later, but at the speed it’s traveling, it won’t take long to overtake the uninspired plodder.
Another pair of related reads
🔗Agency is for sociopaths | 3 min read
Cate Hall has a book coming out called “you can just do things” and I appreciate this short essay which serves as a preemptive strike that needed to be written since I’ve noticed the same things she has.
Yes, many bad people are high in agency, and a lot of the people most obsessed with agency kind of suck. In fact, stop for a moment and call to mind the worst person you can think of. Odds are, they’re the kind of person liable to embrace the mantra “you can just do things.”
This correlation makes sense if, like me, you think of agency as the capacity to see and act on options that others overlook. It’s a combination of inventiveness and courage that most people lack, very often due to social conformity. Bad people don’t feel social conformity as strongly, given that they don’t view the welfare or opinions of others as important. This frees them to indulge in vicious creativity.
It would be a mistake, however, to draw from this a conclusion that agency itself is the problem. It’s more accurate to think of agency as a general-purpose, morally neutral tool, like physical strength or intelligence. And it’s a tool we should be very wary of warning people off of developing, just because there’s some population-level correlation between agency and Dark Triad traits.
🔗 How to walk through walls | 9 min read
The difference between Bloobiebla & MrGrunz and me is not, primarily, that they are faster than I. It is, Gwern points out, that they see the game differently. When I played Zelda, I saw “villages” and “hen.” But they have a hacker mindset, so they know that there aren’t actually any villages and hens…
Most systems can be viewed at multiple levels. There is a superficial system which pretends to be made of one thing (walls, hens). But actually, it is really made of something else (bits, memory allocations). And if you learn to understand that underlying system, you can find ways to use the lower-level details to steer the system in a way that looks incomprehensible to those who only see the more superficial system.
Robert Rodriguez’s classmates must have experienced a bewilderment of this kind when they saw him go down to Mexico with $7,000 dollars and return with a film showing in cinemas across the US. That was not a move that was part of how they’d been told the game that is the film industry works; but it was a move that was perfectly compatible with the facts of cameras, lights, and Hollywood deal-making if you understood them at a deep enough level.
Rodriguez could speedrun a film career, walking through proverbial walls, because he saw through the game to its underlying mechanics. He had the hacker mindset. He was willing to get his hands dirty and learn the practical realities. He saw that a lot of what the other film students took for reality were just fictions they’d been taught at school.
This is a bit vague. Let me give some concrete examples…
Stay groovy
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