18: natural talents

Even sidestepping the thorny how’s and why’s of Epistemology and Cognitive Science, it’s not an easy task to quantify what one knows. In other words, the task ahead of us in this post is to create a way to rank different people within a predefined skill. Besides being an interesting and challenging problem, it has many realistic implications, such as in creating hiring strategies. Personally, I rank and re-rank myself periodically over the span of my knowledge to chart progression and uncertainty. It allows me to set goals and effective exit strategies. And, I just like to level up, if you will.

Natural Skills are unlearnable, unchangable parts of ourselves that determine what learned skills we enjoy practicing and ultimately become proficient in.

• Metacognition
• Interpersonal intelligence
• Intrapersonal intelligence
• Verbal/linguistic intelligence, writing
• Determination, or yapping like a dog.

Natural Weaknesses:

• Business Strategy
• Analytical intelligence: mathematics, sciences.
• Networking
• International relations

- framework for thinking about problems?

You’ll note two things very quickly. The first is that these are unmeasurable and innate (as they’re meant to be). In a sense, these are closer to preferences than skills. Completely fine, as they’re meant to give you an idea of what skills you’ve picked up you genuinely enjoy and which you picked up out of practical necessity. The second is that you might not agree that the above are unlearnable. I would argue that they are unimprovable — we can improve the structure of our own knowledge and thus, the efficiency by which we process information and deal with concepts or objects, but we cannot actually improve our innate horsepower.

One interesting question that emerges is: can we truly enjoy something and yet be completely unskilled at it? Before you completely dismiss this question, remember how much one has to know to be able to even be unskilled at something and think about what “learning” means.