Impressions of superiority

It is a quirk of our society that our sense of achievement is diminished by aptitude. We praise above all individuals who have overcome adversity in their achievement. Many view being told they have an aptitude or ability as tantamount to saying they didn’t have to overcome as much as other people would have.

I am aware of my natural aptitudes for some activities. I had no particular difficulty learning to play the guitar and appear to understand music pretty well. My mathematical intuition is sound. I find it easy to learn new programming languages. I also have certain… challenges. I am easily distracted, I find medium-term planning difficult and my learning mode is often highly inefficient as I require a lot of background and overview before things start making sense. It has taken me a lot of time to figure out what the population average abilties in some of these areas are. I am by no means there, but I have learned enough to know which properties are high and which are low.

The reason for listing my own abilities here is an attempt to defuse the knee-jerk reaction that I have perceived many times when you tell other people they have abilities above the norm. Many people will vehemently deny such abilities because they assume you are implying they didn’t have to work at it. It seems more acceptable to lament the lack of such abilities in others than to claim them for yourself. Many people don’t even do that – they will deny any particular variation in these abilities among people and instead end up lamenting their lack of application. I find this particularly objectionable, as the implication is often that the reason for failure is fundamentally a weak will.

Here’s how a sample dialogue often plays out:

Me: I have left off marking my papers again, and will have to put in a late night tonight.

Them: Oh, I always get my marking out of the way first thing, then I feel much better.

Me: I wish I had your well-developed work ethic and drive to completion

Them: I don’t really have any particularly well-developed drive to completion – you can do this too.

Me: I have tried and failed. Perhaps I am just weak-willed. But more likely I am more easily distracted than you are, or find this task more onerous than you do

Them: How dare you imply that I don’t need to apply myself to get this stuff done!

Unequal distribution of abilities sits poorly with the doctrine of equality (or at least equal opportunity). Even worse, it is very difficult to think of oneself as anything other than “normal”. When I lost 25 kg, I honestly did not seem any different to myself in the mirror. I can just remember seeing a lot more fat people around. When I started running, it never felt much different to run at a comfortable pace, even though that has changed radically as I trained. It’s an all-too easy trap to fall into as ones abilities develop: renormalisation. As you become more knowledgable, you just start to see more idiots. As you become less fit, you start wondering how all these people can be so active.

This post is a bit of an impression rather than a well-though out argument. I wanted to get this down while I was still thinking about it after having discussed it at a party last night. There is much left out here: how much of these abilities are innate and how much are learned? How does practice feature into it and how well can we assess our own abilities, and what is the mechanism of self-control (in fact, what is being controlled). That will have to wait for later.