Suddenly reminded of all the slop artists who justified it not for productivity or efficiency reasons, but because they would "never" be able to create visual art otherwise.
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@SymTrkl I get exactly the same with math, computers, being a girl...
Like, yes, there is such a thing as natural talent. Some people's brains are wired more for one thing than another. But most people's actual plateau is far higher than their giving up point.
@faithisleaping Honestly, I think that most of what we view as "natural talent" is just the level of interest in, and willingness to, keep practicing and improving. The rest is just aptitude, which isn't a skill level so much as a multiplier on learning speed.
And I like that you mentioned math and computers, because "creativity" in this context is more than just things like visual art. I can all but guarantee that I don't have the background to follow your work. I might even write it off as being way over my head, because it is. But at the end of the day, one of us got a doctorate and spent years doing Faith's job, and one of us didn't; it's not a matter of "can't," but of "haven't."
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Suddenly reminded of all the slop artists who justified it not for productivity or efficiency reasons, but because they would "never" be able to create visual art otherwise.
Imagine looking at someone who studied and practiced for years to hone a skill, and seeing an injustice. Assuming that you are owed the results of hard work you haven't done.
The fun thing is, this isn't new. This is the fallacy of natural talent. The uncomfortable minimization of our work as "you're so talented, I could never..."
Like we just woke up and started drawing good. Spoiler alert: Everyone can draw.¹ The only thing "talent" gets you is speed of acquisition, because visual art is 100% a learned skill. And this holds true for every creative endeavor. The only difference between making good art and saying "I tried and I could never..." is that the former kept going. Everyone starts bad. Everyone has to learn and improve.And that, more than anything, is what infuriates me about AI. Even if it weren't objectively bad for literally every other reason, it enables this mindset that creativity is this utterly valueless thing hoarded by those of us born to be great at it. The mindset of "my neighbor's kid could make this for twenty bucks." The mindset of "I'll pay you in exposure." Of "I did the hard part of coming up with the idea, now all you have to do is write the novel." Of "why pay [a fair wage for a skilled artist] when we could just generate this with AI?"
¹ No really, everyone. My partner has aphantasia, the inability to visualize objects in her mind, and I've seen her paint from reference, give cogent feedback on my work, and demonstrate a clear understanding of form and space in games like The Sims and Minecraft where the visualization is largely offloaded to the game world. She's really good at art, despite a limitation that most people would say should make it impossible. Everyone.
So much this. I was decent at drawing in high school, I spent a lot of time doing it. But I'm not upset other's can draw really well (I'm envious sure) but I haven't put the time in.
And I have aphantasia too. But I can compose art without having an internal representation. But it just changes the process where I have to draw something in a really rough sketch to see if it's what I want, definitely doesn't stop the process or even make it worse. I'm forced to put some thought into the composition on the page before I start drawing.
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@faithisleaping Honestly, I think that most of what we view as "natural talent" is just the level of interest in, and willingness to, keep practicing and improving. The rest is just aptitude, which isn't a skill level so much as a multiplier on learning speed.
And I like that you mentioned math and computers, because "creativity" in this context is more than just things like visual art. I can all but guarantee that I don't have the background to follow your work. I might even write it off as being way over my head, because it is. But at the end of the day, one of us got a doctorate and spent years doing Faith's job, and one of us didn't; it's not a matter of "can't," but of "haven't."
@SymTrkl IDK... I have a weird perspective on aptitude.
I've had to work through the reality of watching other people struggle and trying to help them with things that I find easy. It's not always a lack of effort or experience. There really does seem to be an asymptotic effect where people tend to plateau at some point.
Like with what I do, both on the computer and on the math side, a lot of the plateau comes down to "how much complexity can you hold in your brain?" Some people can only think through 3 levels of abstraction at a time, some 5, some 7, some 15. I've watched it happen as we're talking about something and as we move up the abstraction tree, they seem to entirely forget the lower levels. Then I have to remind them of something down there and their window shifts and they forget the higher-level goal. It's a weird phenomenon to witness.
But also, 3 is about all you need to be a perfectly competent software engineer and the vast majority of people have that.
And even if you can't visualize 7 layers, you can often make up for that by designing better layers that don't require you to be able to think about anything more than the layer you're looking at, the one above, and the one below. That's where experience comes in.
Honestly, the worst software engineers are the ones who can keep a lot of abstraction in their brain and don't have the experience / maturity to understand that they should still design for the software engineer who can't. Because they're the ones who build spaghetti code-bases that only they can maintain. And in reality, they can't either.
So while I wouldn't necessarily say that anyone with enough training and experience can do my job, the notion that you have to be me in order to be a software engineer is total bullshit. 90% of what we do on the daily is a skill just like any other and most people have a brain capable of learning it.
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@SymTrkl IDK... I have a weird perspective on aptitude.
I've had to work through the reality of watching other people struggle and trying to help them with things that I find easy. It's not always a lack of effort or experience. There really does seem to be an asymptotic effect where people tend to plateau at some point.
Like with what I do, both on the computer and on the math side, a lot of the plateau comes down to "how much complexity can you hold in your brain?" Some people can only think through 3 levels of abstraction at a time, some 5, some 7, some 15. I've watched it happen as we're talking about something and as we move up the abstraction tree, they seem to entirely forget the lower levels. Then I have to remind them of something down there and their window shifts and they forget the higher-level goal. It's a weird phenomenon to witness.
But also, 3 is about all you need to be a perfectly competent software engineer and the vast majority of people have that.
And even if you can't visualize 7 layers, you can often make up for that by designing better layers that don't require you to be able to think about anything more than the layer you're looking at, the one above, and the one below. That's where experience comes in.
Honestly, the worst software engineers are the ones who can keep a lot of abstraction in their brain and don't have the experience / maturity to understand that they should still design for the software engineer who can't. Because they're the ones who build spaghetti code-bases that only they can maintain. And in reality, they can't either.
So while I wouldn't necessarily say that anyone with enough training and experience can do my job, the notion that you have to be me in order to be a software engineer is total bullshit. 90% of what we do on the daily is a skill just like any other and most people have a brain capable of learning it.
@SymTrkl Working through this damn near wrecked me.
"I just have a better engineering brain" is a wildly arrogant and privileged take. I fucking hate it and I will never look at someone else and say "It's because I'm smarter than you." The people who go through life with those attitudes are fucking assholes! (And often not as smart as they think they are.)
But I've also run head-first into this enough times that I've kind of had to accept that I have a weird brain that happens to be really damn good at doing the thing that I do and that I somehow lucked into a thing that meshes with my brain. I've had to learn to accept and be thankful for that coincidence and stop fighting it.
Among other things, accepting this has given me a lot more patience with other people. I can accept that they're struggling rather than feeling weird and awkward and getting annoyed when it isn't just clicking for them.
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@SymTrkl Working through this damn near wrecked me.
"I just have a better engineering brain" is a wildly arrogant and privileged take. I fucking hate it and I will never look at someone else and say "It's because I'm smarter than you." The people who go through life with those attitudes are fucking assholes! (And often not as smart as they think they are.)
But I've also run head-first into this enough times that I've kind of had to accept that I have a weird brain that happens to be really damn good at doing the thing that I do and that I somehow lucked into a thing that meshes with my brain. I've had to learn to accept and be thankful for that coincidence and stop fighting it.
Among other things, accepting this has given me a lot more patience with other people. I can accept that they're struggling rather than feeling weird and awkward and getting annoyed when it isn't just clicking for them.
@SymTrkl But again, lest you start feeling down about all this...
Having Faith's brain isn't a prerequisite for anything. ANYONE can learn to code just like anyone can learn to draw or anyone can learn to wire a circuit breaker box.
Also, the weird white man obsession with IQ and with finding 10x engineers is so catastrophically dumb. They use all the wrong metrics to decide who is and who isn't and it all ends up just being misogyny at the end of the day. The really good ones are quietly in the corner getting underpaid to fix all the mistakes of the loud white man idiots who think they're 10x engineers.
Oh, and that's women's work, with everything that feminism has spent the last 100 years figuring out that that implies.
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@SymTrkl But again, lest you start feeling down about all this...
Having Faith's brain isn't a prerequisite for anything. ANYONE can learn to code just like anyone can learn to draw or anyone can learn to wire a circuit breaker box.
Also, the weird white man obsession with IQ and with finding 10x engineers is so catastrophically dumb. They use all the wrong metrics to decide who is and who isn't and it all ends up just being misogyny at the end of the day. The really good ones are quietly in the corner getting underpaid to fix all the mistakes of the loud white man idiots who think they're 10x engineers.
Oh, and that's women's work, with everything that feminism has spent the last 100 years figuring out that that implies.
@SymTrkl Okay, rant over.
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@SymTrkl IDK... I have a weird perspective on aptitude.
I've had to work through the reality of watching other people struggle and trying to help them with things that I find easy. It's not always a lack of effort or experience. There really does seem to be an asymptotic effect where people tend to plateau at some point.
Like with what I do, both on the computer and on the math side, a lot of the plateau comes down to "how much complexity can you hold in your brain?" Some people can only think through 3 levels of abstraction at a time, some 5, some 7, some 15. I've watched it happen as we're talking about something and as we move up the abstraction tree, they seem to entirely forget the lower levels. Then I have to remind them of something down there and their window shifts and they forget the higher-level goal. It's a weird phenomenon to witness.
But also, 3 is about all you need to be a perfectly competent software engineer and the vast majority of people have that.
And even if you can't visualize 7 layers, you can often make up for that by designing better layers that don't require you to be able to think about anything more than the layer you're looking at, the one above, and the one below. That's where experience comes in.
Honestly, the worst software engineers are the ones who can keep a lot of abstraction in their brain and don't have the experience / maturity to understand that they should still design for the software engineer who can't. Because they're the ones who build spaghetti code-bases that only they can maintain. And in reality, they can't either.
So while I wouldn't necessarily say that anyone with enough training and experience can do my job, the notion that you have to be me in order to be a software engineer is total bullshit. 90% of what we do on the daily is a skill just like any other and most people have a brain capable of learning it.
@faithisleaping No, that tracks. In visual art, there are people who can lay down their final lines on the first attempt; that's the "15 layers of abstraction." Most people can't do that, and as you say there seems to be a plateau affect for it. Most people have to work through layers of abstraction to draw anything, stepping through things like form, volume, lighting, before they can move on to the final detailed rendering. And the main obstacle I see stopping people from making art is not being able to immediately do the final render from a blank page, which feels uncomfortably like how I avoided assembly for so long because I couldn't write an entire game engine in it.
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@SymTrkl But again, lest you start feeling down about all this...
Having Faith's brain isn't a prerequisite for anything. ANYONE can learn to code just like anyone can learn to draw or anyone can learn to wire a circuit breaker box.
Also, the weird white man obsession with IQ and with finding 10x engineers is so catastrophically dumb. They use all the wrong metrics to decide who is and who isn't and it all ends up just being misogyny at the end of the day. The really good ones are quietly in the corner getting underpaid to fix all the mistakes of the loud white man idiots who think they're 10x engineers.
Oh, and that's women's work, with everything that feminism has spent the last 100 years figuring out that that implies.
@faithisleaping Weirdly, because I know I take any excuse to feel down about myself, not so much.
Mostly because when you were talking about layers of abstraction, I was thinking about how I'll be stepping through the debugger for that Microcorruption CTF that I do, and how I'll see values getting store to the stack or specific registers, and know on some level what the C code had to look like. And I can definitely see how, even if I understood everything top to bottom, there would be a point where I couldn't keep the assembly and an upper level abstraction in my head at the same time, but that wouldn't necessarily prevent me from understanding both.Besides, I don't need to be Faith because I don't want Faith's job.
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@faithisleaping Weirdly, because I know I take any excuse to feel down about myself, not so much.
Mostly because when you were talking about layers of abstraction, I was thinking about how I'll be stepping through the debugger for that Microcorruption CTF that I do, and how I'll see values getting store to the stack or specific registers, and know on some level what the C code had to look like. And I can definitely see how, even if I understood everything top to bottom, there would be a point where I couldn't keep the assembly and an upper level abstraction in my head at the same time, but that wouldn't necessarily prevent me from understanding both.Besides, I don't need to be Faith because I don't want Faith's job.
@SymTrkl @faithisleaping Just so we’re clear, I could barely follow what you just described about the stack or registers, and only at the most superficial level.
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@SymTrkl @faithisleaping Just so we’re clear, I could barely follow what you just described about the stack or registers, and only at the most superficial level.
@Willow See, this is why they should make kids use RPN calculators in school.
@faithisleaping -
@faithisleaping Weirdly, because I know I take any excuse to feel down about myself, not so much.
Mostly because when you were talking about layers of abstraction, I was thinking about how I'll be stepping through the debugger for that Microcorruption CTF that I do, and how I'll see values getting store to the stack or specific registers, and know on some level what the C code had to look like. And I can definitely see how, even if I understood everything top to bottom, there would be a point where I couldn't keep the assembly and an upper level abstraction in my head at the same time, but that wouldn't necessarily prevent me from understanding both.Besides, I don't need to be Faith because I don't want Faith's job.
@faithisleaping Also, I included the GG panels as a joke, but they're also illustrative (hehe) of my earlier point. I can go over that drawing of Agatha Widlerizing a gadget at length, talking about the silhouetting, illusion of motion, eye travel, and the things that could have been done differently to enhance the reader impact. (Nothing against Phil Foglio, but he's a lot stronger at detailed environments and facial expressions than his is at conveying action.) And I think that there's something of your point about plateaus in there as well, because I personally have a really hard time drawing the type of detailed backgrounds packed with little jokes that are something of a Foglio trademark. And it's hard not to spin that off into "these artists are just materially better," which is just as icky a concept as "my engineering brain is simply superior."
Whoops we accidentally invented auteur theory for computer science.
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Suddenly reminded of all the slop artists who justified it not for productivity or efficiency reasons, but because they would "never" be able to create visual art otherwise.
Imagine looking at someone who studied and practiced for years to hone a skill, and seeing an injustice. Assuming that you are owed the results of hard work you haven't done.
The fun thing is, this isn't new. This is the fallacy of natural talent. The uncomfortable minimization of our work as "you're so talented, I could never..."
Like we just woke up and started drawing good. Spoiler alert: Everyone can draw.¹ The only thing "talent" gets you is speed of acquisition, because visual art is 100% a learned skill. And this holds true for every creative endeavor. The only difference between making good art and saying "I tried and I could never..." is that the former kept going. Everyone starts bad. Everyone has to learn and improve.And that, more than anything, is what infuriates me about AI. Even if it weren't objectively bad for literally every other reason, it enables this mindset that creativity is this utterly valueless thing hoarded by those of us born to be great at it. The mindset of "my neighbor's kid could make this for twenty bucks." The mindset of "I'll pay you in exposure." Of "I did the hard part of coming up with the idea, now all you have to do is write the novel." Of "why pay [a fair wage for a skilled artist] when we could just generate this with AI?"
¹ No really, everyone. My partner has aphantasia, the inability to visualize objects in her mind, and I've seen her paint from reference, give cogent feedback on my work, and demonstrate a clear understanding of form and space in games like The Sims and Minecraft where the visualization is largely offloaded to the game world. She's really good at art, despite a limitation that most people would say should make it impossible. Everyone.
@SymTrkl dear goddess all of this...
I've had people say similar things to me. You know why I'm this good at writing the kind of things I write? Because I do it a lot it's not some innate genetic predisposition to writing short horny shit, it's just practice. You should see my early stuff. I'm glad my Twitter account went away. There is some embarrassing stuff buried in the depths of that archive -
Suddenly reminded of all the slop artists who justified it not for productivity or efficiency reasons, but because they would "never" be able to create visual art otherwise.
Imagine looking at someone who studied and practiced for years to hone a skill, and seeing an injustice. Assuming that you are owed the results of hard work you haven't done.
The fun thing is, this isn't new. This is the fallacy of natural talent. The uncomfortable minimization of our work as "you're so talented, I could never..."
Like we just woke up and started drawing good. Spoiler alert: Everyone can draw.¹ The only thing "talent" gets you is speed of acquisition, because visual art is 100% a learned skill. And this holds true for every creative endeavor. The only difference between making good art and saying "I tried and I could never..." is that the former kept going. Everyone starts bad. Everyone has to learn and improve.And that, more than anything, is what infuriates me about AI. Even if it weren't objectively bad for literally every other reason, it enables this mindset that creativity is this utterly valueless thing hoarded by those of us born to be great at it. The mindset of "my neighbor's kid could make this for twenty bucks." The mindset of "I'll pay you in exposure." Of "I did the hard part of coming up with the idea, now all you have to do is write the novel." Of "why pay [a fair wage for a skilled artist] when we could just generate this with AI?"
¹ No really, everyone. My partner has aphantasia, the inability to visualize objects in her mind, and I've seen her paint from reference, give cogent feedback on my work, and demonstrate a clear understanding of form and space in games like The Sims and Minecraft where the visualization is largely offloaded to the game world. She's really good at art, despite a limitation that most people would say should make it impossible. Everyone.
@SymTrkl Yeah, i consider "talent" a slur made to devalue practice.
Going slightly sideways, after i quit IT i kept coding for my own fun, and these days it is a form of art for me. An interesting side effect of it is that i feel similar about all the vibe coding as artists feel about genAI art, only with a bit less despair.
The saddest part for me is the motivation-killing effect of all the LLM stuff. I can still enjoy coding because i'm already good at it. But i given up trying to practice drawing a couple of years ago, since it doesn't feel like there is any point.
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@SymTrkl dear goddess all of this...
I've had people say similar things to me. You know why I'm this good at writing the kind of things I write? Because I do it a lot it's not some innate genetic predisposition to writing short horny shit, it's just practice. You should see my early stuff. I'm glad my Twitter account went away. There is some embarrassing stuff buried in the depths of that archive@mindpersephone You don't want to see the years of absolute trash that I wrote without posting anywhere before I started doing horny microfic on fedi.
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@SymTrkl Yeah, i consider "talent" a slur made to devalue practice.
Going slightly sideways, after i quit IT i kept coding for my own fun, and these days it is a form of art for me. An interesting side effect of it is that i feel similar about all the vibe coding as artists feel about genAI art, only with a bit less despair.
The saddest part for me is the motivation-killing effect of all the LLM stuff. I can still enjoy coding because i'm already good at it. But i given up trying to practice drawing a couple of years ago, since it doesn't feel like there is any point.
@theartlav The biggest failing of STEM education is that they let people keep believing that there's any meaningful difference between art and engineering.
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@faithisleaping Weirdly, because I know I take any excuse to feel down about myself, not so much.
Mostly because when you were talking about layers of abstraction, I was thinking about how I'll be stepping through the debugger for that Microcorruption CTF that I do, and how I'll see values getting store to the stack or specific registers, and know on some level what the C code had to look like. And I can definitely see how, even if I understood everything top to bottom, there would be a point where I couldn't keep the assembly and an upper level abstraction in my head at the same time, but that wouldn't necessarily prevent me from understanding both.Besides, I don't need to be Faith because I don't want Faith's job.
@SymTrkl yaay someone else reading GG!
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@mindpersephone You don't want to see the years of absolute trash that I wrote without posting anywhere before I started doing horny microfic on fedi.
@SymTrkl oh I believe it. All of us have something like that and it's a requirement of getting as good at this as we are.
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@SymTrkl oh I believe it. All of us have something like that and it's a requirement of getting as good at this as we are.
@mindpersephone "Your first 1000 paintings will be garbage."
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@SymTrkl yaay someone else reading GG!
@anyia Literally dozens of us. As I recall @RoseRaven and @theogrin are also fans.
@faithisleaping -
@anyia Literally dozens of us. As I recall @RoseRaven and @theogrin are also fans.
@faithisleaping@SymTrkl @anyia @RoseRaven @theogrin @faithisleaping I also used to at some point, but then the archive anxiety got the best of me.
