Comment by Niggling (payton-yao) on Subskills of "Listening to Wisdom" · 2024-12-09T21:46:32.559Z · LW · GW

I think there are qualia that you can't transmit with words alone. Some ideas are psychologically load-bearing and to some degree, those are the ones that you can't create with just meta-cognition because they're strongly tied to deeply emotional beliefs.

Concretely, with the example of learning to play chess, there's a point where you get good enough to beat/draw everyone in an average high school. That point is about 1500-1800 ELO. Then you'll join a chess tournament and get your ass handed to you. There's a confidence you pick up at that point of knowing that you can win against almost every random stranger on the street, but also the humility that you can't actually beat any good chess players.

At that point, if you look at a beginner's book of chess puzzles, all of them will look really easy. But a book targeted towards grand masters of the game will leave you with the feeling that it's a book of practical jokes with no solutions. You learn that there are levels to "doing the impossible".

After hundreds of hours of study, you understand at a visceral level that effort can get you really, really far. If only other people put in this effort too, they can be pretty good. And then one day you play a ten-year-old prodigy. And you finally understand that one-in-a-million talent is truly oppressive. You're pretty good, but you'll never be an FIDE-recognized grand master. That kid will be one one day. Maybe. But even he will never beat Magnus Carlsen.

I don't know if we even have a word for this feeling. The simultaneous confidence of likely being able to beat every stranger you walk past, the humility in understanding that you're actually trash, and the compassion of understanding that if you don't have Magnus Carlsen's talent, maybe not everyone has your talent and they're not any lesser for it.

I'm sure you can read these words. I'm just not sure how well it can transfer from my head to yours if this feeling isn't already in your "experience library." And I can't imagine how to get this feeling into that library without first doing extremely well in some other analogous competitive deliberate practice game.