Link to original post: [drupal=5193]Paradigm Paralysis (the line between good and great; incompetent and prodigious)[/drupal]
I was recently asked a good question: what separates the poor from the good from the great? (in terms of ability/skill/talent/whatever)
I think talent is determined by how efficient your thought model is for the given task, or rather, how you think about/approach it. After all, the task is an application of information, and how effectively you wield that information determines the success or failure. Think about it: your brain is essentially an enormous Boolean logic network (much like a computer), so everything ultimately reduces to information and how it's processed. There's nothing irreducible about talent or skill, especially in Smash.
With that in mind, people who're apparently talented for no good reason just have the inheritance of a suitable model for whatever it is that they're good at. Some talented Smash players who got good, but not national-level could be argued to be people who approached the construction of relevant thought models a certain way, but said way capped and reached its potential, and they never thought or bothered to reconstruct that model by virtue of what I call paradigm paralysis--being stuck in one particular mode of thinking.
Visualize this concept as two lines. Bad models, i.e. ones where information isn't processed in an efficient way could be analogized as two lines that intersect and subvert early on and can only compute certain problems and get stuck on others. Good models can be said to be lines with higher slopes, so their limit is higher. Great models can be said to be parallel lines, wherein the process of amending the thought model never ends by virtue of an active effort to examine preexisting ones, identify problems, and adapt. This would be my argument for why national level players are, above all else, consistent.
Talent and skill are available to anybody with enough dedication; it just depends on you being observant and being able to identify your thoughts so you can interface with you how think. If someone is talented, it isn't because they were gifted the sacrosanct birthright of Olympus, rather, because they either worked to create a superior thought model through which they understand the game via systematic reprogramming, or were indeed lucky enough to have a certain cognitive predisposition that suits the successful application of Smash, making the process more implicit and smooth. Either way, "talent" is an insidious and deceptive concept. If you consider the essence of information, you'll see all this to be absolutely true.
Hopefully reading this and finding it to be sound will encourage people who don't think they "have it in them" to adjust their frame of mind and persevere in light of the prospect that talent can be earned just as much as it can be inherited.
I was recently asked a good question: what separates the poor from the good from the great? (in terms of ability/skill/talent/whatever)
I think talent is determined by how efficient your thought model is for the given task, or rather, how you think about/approach it. After all, the task is an application of information, and how effectively you wield that information determines the success or failure. Think about it: your brain is essentially an enormous Boolean logic network (much like a computer), so everything ultimately reduces to information and how it's processed. There's nothing irreducible about talent or skill, especially in Smash.
With that in mind, people who're apparently talented for no good reason just have the inheritance of a suitable model for whatever it is that they're good at. Some talented Smash players who got good, but not national-level could be argued to be people who approached the construction of relevant thought models a certain way, but said way capped and reached its potential, and they never thought or bothered to reconstruct that model by virtue of what I call paradigm paralysis--being stuck in one particular mode of thinking.
Visualize this concept as two lines. Bad models, i.e. ones where information isn't processed in an efficient way could be analogized as two lines that intersect and subvert early on and can only compute certain problems and get stuck on others. Good models can be said to be lines with higher slopes, so their limit is higher. Great models can be said to be parallel lines, wherein the process of amending the thought model never ends by virtue of an active effort to examine preexisting ones, identify problems, and adapt. This would be my argument for why national level players are, above all else, consistent.
Talent and skill are available to anybody with enough dedication; it just depends on you being observant and being able to identify your thoughts so you can interface with you how think. If someone is talented, it isn't because they were gifted the sacrosanct birthright of Olympus, rather, because they either worked to create a superior thought model through which they understand the game via systematic reprogramming, or were indeed lucky enough to have a certain cognitive predisposition that suits the successful application of Smash, making the process more implicit and smooth. Either way, "talent" is an insidious and deceptive concept. If you consider the essence of information, you'll see all this to be absolutely true.
Hopefully reading this and finding it to be sound will encourage people who don't think they "have it in them" to adjust their frame of mind and persevere in light of the prospect that talent can be earned just as much as it can be inherited.
Some people's thought models are inherently compatible with a given breed of concepts, and others' have to be manually ameliorated. The terrific thing about human minds though, is counterfactual reasoning, so all it takes is one instance of error to trigger profound adjustments. As I said though, it takes hard work to develop a meta-model through which one can more directly interface with how they think and to create more efficient individual models.
