The Technique Taboo

While there _is_ a technique taboo and I agree with your general observations, I think that there are a number of things going on here simultaneously that boil down to more than just a taboo on the idea that skill is a trainable attribute. For instance:

1. Many activities that appear to have taboos against training skills are just reflective of people who who are _optimizing something else_. In particular, enjoyment.

But when traditional colleges supply the labor force for a professional trade outside of academia, that's when discussion of skill (especially rote learning) becomes taboo[1] [LW · GW]. College students learn everything about their trade except how to do it. Then we maintain a collective silence concerning technique.

This collective skill silence isn't necessarily a taboo--it might just be that the kind of people who choose their fields for non-practical reasons (ie not to develop professional skills) don't really care about development their own skills that much. Instead of optimizing productive capabilities (ie skills), they might be trying to optimize consumptive capabilities (ie the ability to enjoy English literature or appreciate art or what-have-you). To elaborate:

An English major teaches you how to talk about novels, not how to write one.

This is true but, if you want to learn how to write, don't pick the major that helps you appreciate English literature. Instead, pick the major that helps you write. If you want to write a novel (fictional), writing majors[1] are a good move--one of my friends has done this and has reams of pages of her own work. If you want to write a novel (non-fictional), you might want to try majoring directly in something like history since that directly gives you experience writing about history. On the other hand, if you want to increase your capacity to appreciate English literature, be an English major.

"Getting better at drawing" is off-topic at my weekly local drawing club too. I've literally never heard it discussed.

As someone who briefly ran at art club back in the day, consider that the people showing up actually might not care that much about being good at drawing; they might just enjoy it and care about the activity.

2. In competitive contexts, people don't want to optimize their skills because it turns the situation into a race-to-the-bottom. If you're at work and one person is actively trying to upskill, that person is putting pressure on you to do something you'd prefer not to in order to stay competitive. An extreme example of this is anti-social punishment [LW · GW] (punishing people for being altruistic because it might create a norm where you have to be more altruistic).

This is a taboo against upskilling but it's not about the people at the top trying to maintain a social order; it's the people at the bottom trying to make sure they have the slack to stay where they are without losing their place.

3. In case there are many people are optimizing for enjoyment rather than upskilling (meditation is a good example of this) and there is some intructor managing the activity, the instructor is not under much pressure to have strong expertise. As long as instructors are good enough to lead the activity and ensure that people optimizing enjoyment find it valuable, they've done their job. Everyone goes home at the end of the day.

However, asking an instructor for advice on how to upskill puts responsibility onto the instructor.

• If the instructor gives you bad advice and you implement it with intent to upskill, the instructor has harmed you. Proper form prevents poor performance but improper form promotes it.
• If the instructor cannot give you good advice, you have harmed the instructor's reputation. In this case, the instructor deserves that reputation hit but it's still an incentive for them to oppose up-skilling.

The kind of dynamic between upskillers and enjoyment-optimizers also creates interesting situations. For instance, when I used to do Tae Kwon Do, there was a core of people dedicated to the practice (and would give you as much feedback and practice opportunities as you wanted) and a larger cloud of people just there to get their weekly exercise (and didn't care very much about upskilling). Going from one group to the other dramatically changes the conversation about skill.

And the infuriating response where people act like this obvious thing isn't real or is specific to the examples that then get hen pecked into even more specific irrelevance ("well, technically..."), or motte and bailey'd etc.

One part of this is that Informational rentiers/gatekeepers have to maintain a facade that they're not doing something that goes against common sense norms.

I'd put it in a way that is pretty explicit: most people are trained so completely to uphold obvious lies, stupidities, and failures of those deemed higher status that they start actually hallucinating clothing on the emperor.

Skill training is just one downstream consequence of this. Where the correct procedure doesn't flow from the territory, but via some other person's map that has been officially sanctioned.

The sky is blue <removed for lack of citation, see talk page>

Why don't the high status talk about technique? Because it's embarrassing how bad they are at it.

Thus kakonomics.

There is a way out.

Not all professions have this issue. Math is still math.

It was my impression that mathematicians mainly discuss math and not the skill of doing math. I witnessed explicit discussion of how to do math in neither school nor university. I haven't had any discussion about what it means to build skill as a biologist either (I studied bioinformatics).

On the other hand, I have plenty of exposure to strength training and the plenty of gyms even buy expensive body weight scales to help their students to measure their body fat percentage better.

Magicians aren't a community that likes to publicly discuss technique, they have a lot of taboo against that.

Meditation is a subject that's a lot more complicated. There's always the concern that too much intention to get better in a way that a person already knows leads the person away from being open for the change that they need to progress. John Yates who wrote maybe the best book that's currently out there (The Mind Illuminated) that sees meditation as a skill with a clear progression tree recently lost his position as a teacher because he didn't pass the minimum skill requirements for the role after four decades of hardcore meditation practice (upholding the five lay precepts). While I don't necessarily find the argument against explicit meditation training conclusive, I think there are good arguments on both sides.

I’m friends with programmers who can’t touch type.

If by “touch type” you mean the “home row” sort of technique that’s taught in typing classes, then I have yet to see a single convincing argument for why I should bother to learn this. (I’m a programmer.) I see it often taken for granted that this sort of “touch typing” is simply a must for coders, but whenever I ask why that’s so, the reasons I’ve seen given do not make the slightest bit of sense.

Now, if you simply mean “typing without having to look at the keyboard”, well, sure. I can do that. Didn’t have to learn any specific “technique” for it, though.

P.S.:

50 to 80 words per minute is around the average for professional typists, and should be what most people strive for if they type for a living.

—from https://elearningindustry.com/why-average-typing-speed-is-important

I just took an online typing test. On my MacBook Pro, while lying on the couch, in a not-entirely-comfortable typing position, my typing speed is 73 wpm.

Specific “touch typing” techniques are completely unnecessary. Please let’s let this absurd myth die.

For a strange few decades that may just be starting to end, if you went to art school you'd be ostracised by your teachers for trying to draw good representational art. "Representational art" means pictures that look like real things. Art school actively discouraged students from getting better at drawing.

I roll to disbelieve on this. All the art classes I've taken in the past decade focused largely on representational art. (esp. figure drawing). The taboo was drawing cartoons, anime in particular

Forbids electronic systems for logging their progress? Is it possible there's a separate motivation for this than hostility to technique, ie 'don't sit on the machine and play with your phone' or 'for liability reasons we can't allow you to attach the velocity device to the equipment'?

My experience of weightlifting is highly technique focused. Frequently unsophisticated, but technique focused nevertheless. Sports like powerlifting and olympic lifting are increasing in popularity all the time, and these are utterly reliant on discussion of technique. Copious discussion.

On the other hand, it does occur to me that the comparative dearth of authoritative answers is consistent with a taboo in the relatively recent past.

I agree with this post. I'd add that from what I've seen of medical school (and other high-status vocational programs like law school, business school, etc.), there is still a disproportionate emphasis on talking about the theory of the subject matter vs. building skill at the ultimate task. Is it helpful to memorize the names of thousands of arteries and syndromes and drugs in order to be a doctor? Of course. Is that *more* helpful than doing mock patient interviews and mock chart reviews and live exercises where you try to diagnose a tumor or a fracture or a particular kind of pus? Is it *so* much more helpful that it makes sense to spend 40x more hours on biochemistry than on clinical practice? Because my impression of medical school is that you do go on clinical rounds and do internships and things, but that the practical side of things is mostly a trial-by-fire where you are expected to improvise many of your techniques, often after seeing them demonstrated only once or twice, often with minimal supervision, and usually with little or no coaching or after-the-fact feedback. The point of the internships and residencies seems to be primarily to accomplish low-prestige medical labor, not primarily to help medical students improve their skills.

I'd be curious to hear from anyone who disagrees with me about medical school. I'm not super-confident about this assessment of medical school; I'm much more confident that an analogous critique applies well to law school and business school. Lawyers learn the theory of appellate decision-making, not how to prepare a case for trial or negotiate a settlement or draft a contract. MBAs learn economics and financial theory, not how to motivate or recruit or evaluate their employees.

As far as *why* we don't see more discussion about how to improve technique, I think part of it is just honest ignorance. Most people aren't very self-reflective and don't think very much about whether they're good at their jobs or what it means to be good at their jobs or how they could become better. Even when people do take time to reflect on what makes a good [profession], they may not have the relevant background to draw useful conclusions. Academic authorities often have little or no professional work experience; the median law professor has tried zero lawsuits; the median dean of a business school has never launched a startup; the median medical school lecturer has never worked as a primary care physician in the suburbs.

Some of it may be, as Isnasene points out, a desire to avoid unwanted competition. If people are lazy and want to enjoy high status that they earned a long time ago without putting in further effort, they might not want to encourage comparisons of skill levels.

Finally, as Isusr suggests, some of the taboo probably comes from an effort to preserve a fragile social hierarchy, but I don't think the threat is "awareness of internal contradictions;" I think the threat is simply a common-sense idea of fairness or equity. If authorities or elites are no more objectively skillful than a typical member of their profession, then there is little reason for them to have more power, more money, or easier work. Keeping the conversation firmly fixed on discussion *about* the profession (rather than discussion about *how to do* the profession) helps obscure the fact that the status of elites is unwarranted.

A Computer Science Engineering major…well, you get the idea.

My undergraduate degree is in Computer Science (not even any “Engineering”, just plain old academic Computer Science).

Included in the requirements for said major were two semesters of “Design & Implementation of Software Applications”. The class was taught by a tech industry veteran and successful entrepreneur (he was an “associate professor” or some such, i.e. teaching this class was a side job for him), and it dealt directly with practical, real-world software engineering skills, including development methodologies, requirements specification, etc., in addition to the usual techniques of object-oriented application development and so on.

Other classes included Operating Systems (where we did not simply study theory but did things like writing a process scheduler), Computer Graphics, and more; and the final project for the degree was “find some professor / office / organization on campus that needs some app written, or piece of research code, or other useful piece of software, and write it for them”.

So… the idea that CS degrees don’t teach skills, seems to me to be extremely far-out.

Most of the the examples you have listed are observations made by you and your conclusions are too far reaching, in my opinion. There are many reasons for an art group to decide improving general skills is off topic. Do art schools actively discourage skill improvement? What is discouraging exactly? What defines a skill and getting 'better ' in terms of art? What I think you have observed is a small human behaviour which results in a group wide phenomenon. An emergent behaviour from fundamental systems within the human mind.

The science behind the topic is limited, most of what we can do is observation and speculation. I think the best approach is identifying key behaviours through reduction. One key behaviour I observe is how we learn, it is our greatest strength, it is the ability to learn complex topics and actions. The majority of times we learn a new process and its intricate steps, we continue to reproduce those steps exactly without question. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwwclyVYTkk

The video above demonstrates, regardless of the reason, that we usually copy almost every action when learning from others. For most steps within a majority of our processes we do them without question. Another great example of something we learn but don't often question is the SIN and COS functions within math. This can connect to what you observed, a teacher learned art a specific way and continues to propagate it that way. You come along and question it, but it is already the norm, you are met with resistance. This is the culture of a topic.

I believe that these problems will always exist as they are based on the nature of how are brains function. A solution would be to teach self awareness on this problem so individuals can catch it. I first thought of suggesting, that we should just teach openness to foreign ideas but that can lead to the same problem, where change and openness are an obsession that we don't question or oppose questioning.

Humans like patterns and sticking to them. We like consistency and predictability.

You are mixing up two topics. Separating them does not provide any immediate clarity, but it's important to separate them. One topic is keeping records, observing progress, and trying to do better. The weightlifters record objective performance. Math students try to see if they can do an exercise. Practice helps, but the feedback of performance doesn't say how to improve. The other topic, evoked in my mind by the word "technique," is breaking down a big skill into small skills. Biology students learn the specific technique of how to use a pipette. The editor is just one tool of programming, but merely identifying it suggests ways to improve (starting with just reading the manual).

In what part of the US do you live?

Societies make taboo exactly those topics whose mere discussion threatens the precarious dominance of those at the top of the social order

Interesting. I think the exact opposite! That discussions of skill are taboo in order to shield those least skilled from feeling uncomfortable.