CA/PA
I've been thinking about this for a long time: Can practice always put you among the top of your league? This school of thought would suggest that with the best training facilities, the best coaches, and intensive training, anyone can become a David Beckam. If it were so then we should be seeing multiple David Beckams and his footballing skills wouldn't be so highly rated. In such a scenario the playing field will be levelled and players' skills will approach uniformity.
If it were the converse case, where practice can never put you at the top, and that how good you can be in a particular field has already been pre-determined by your genes, then it would mean that there really is no point training so hard as you can never be an outstanding footballer, or whatever else.
The reasonable view most would take is to reconcile both schools of thought and come up with a compromise, which seems to be the popular way to do things when 2 extreme sides don't sound intuitively correct. After all, if you don't commit yourself to either extreme you don't expose yourself to accusations of extremity, nor would you have the uphill task of proving your extreme point.
The compromise we will reach in the abovementioned case would be that, to be an outstanding player of any field, both genes and practice play a part. So you may have the gene of a fantastic footballer, the innate flair, but if you rest on your laurels and don't practise hard, or if you don't have proper coaching advice and decent training facilities you will simply remain average. We can put it this way: everyone has a pre-determined potential in a given field. This potential is not automatically reached as time passes, but rather, you need a combination of favourable environmental factors to reach that potential.
But there are still problems with this middle ground that we take. It still maintains unequivocally the importance of genes. So if I were a chess player and diligently study textbooks and play many matches and approach my potential, I could still lose to someone not so diligent, not so experienced, but who has better skills than me. How is this possible, you ask? How can he have skills when he wasn't so diligent, even if his potential is greater?
Consider this: I have a potential ability (PA) of 50 for chess. I had a starting ability (SA) of 10. Through my diligence and favourable environmental factors I have reached that potential, and so my current ability (CA) is 50. [These terms I found on a football manager forum by the way, in case you find it so familiar] My opponent has a PA of 100. However he is lazy, he doesn't work hard enough to reach that PA. But he can still win me because his CA could be >50. And his CA could be >50 because for two reasons:
1) his SA was initially high. It could be as high as 51 right from the start, though that is unrealistic because if 50 is a level that requires theoretical knowledge of chess he could'nt have been born with a number more than 50. Then again, when you see all those 7-year olds winning 20 year-olds in chess maybe it isn't so unrealistic. Theoretical knowledge could be either inferior to innate skills (the youngster could have a keen grasp of tactical positioning, for example) , or theoretical knowledge is actually the written version of innate skills. Where it took me a book to tell me that generally speaking, a rook is worth 5 points and a knight 3 points, this knowledge could be mere intuition to the youngster. Where it took me a book to know how to play against the ruy lopez, for example, the youngster could have such a keen sense of tactical positioning that he will always play the most effective counter against ruy lopez, without reading anything about it.
2) his rate of change of CA is higher than mine. Three years ago when my CA was 40 and his 30 I would've won him easily; after three years I went to a CA of 50 which is my peak, and he went to, say, 60. While we did agree earlier that PA was pre-determined and that whether we can reach our PA or not hinges on hard work, motivation, and environmental factors, rate of change of CA could be a predetermined value as well and have little to do with external factors. In concrete terms it means that for every ounce of experience that we gain, the youngster's CA changes at a rate faster than mine. Of course, we must also consider the fact that I may gain a significant amount of knowledge/experience over him in a given time, such that my rate of change is higher than his, but since I am capped at 50 it is only a matter of time before he overtakes me. We must also assume that the closer we reach our potential, the harder it is to climb further up ie the rate of change of CA decreases as we move closer to the PA value, which seems a reasonable assumption to me.
Either case underscores the importance of genes. In the chess scenario, If my CA is near my PA of 50 after years of hard work, I could still be beaten by slightly-talented but alot-less hardworking individuals. SA and rate of change of CA could be genetically determined even if actual CA is not. As such, and considering that PA is pre-determined, if someone wishes to specialise in a certain field, it has already been pre-determined whether he would excel in it or not.
Whether you hold the extreme view that practice doesn't matter, or the middle ground where it does matter to determine whether you reach your PA, it seems that hard work, diligence and effort are discredited. The reason why we in all reality don't feel a sense of loss due to determinism is because we are not aware of the exact values of our PA at all. If I wanted to play tennis as a competitive sport and I know that my PA is 50 where the average PA is 70, I don't think I'd be very motivated to go into it in the first place. We only see glimpses of this determinist theory at work when we see things like students working so hard but still failing to get into university.
One way out of this is to argue that you can actually increase your PA through hard work. So if I reach my potential in chess even more hard work can expand that potential from 50 to 55, then from 55 to 60. But if one is to adopt this line of thought, one must be able provide a reasonable hypothetical explanation to why this is so. How can sheer hard work improve my PA in chess? If you say that sheer hard work improves my thinking skills and therefore my PA, what you really are doing is confusing the concept of CA and PA. Prolonged exposure to chess may improve my thinking skills and logic, The Sims-style, but when that happens CA rises, not PA. Your PA, by definition, already determines the max capacity your brain can handle, how logical it can ever become, how well you can ever dribble a ball in the best of circumstances.
Suppose I train my dribbling skills 20 hours a day what rises dramatically is my CA, but my PA will not change a bit. Suppose then we think out of the box and we give you the best coaches in the world, we let you have access to the best books on dribbling, we give you yoga classes to improve your agility, your flexibility, your mental condition, we train you intensively in all other secondary skills like balance. What happens is that your CA increases even more dramatically, but still your PA doesn't. Your PA defines the maximum agility your body can handle both physically and mentally. If your CA and PA are equal, the only way to improve further is to import legs from the best dribbler in the world. But that is not enough, you will need to import psycho-motor skills from the best dribbler in the world, and so on. When you're done importing you realise you are in the body of the best dribbler in the world, and that you are not yourself. If you are yourself, you can never be the best dribbler in the world. You may never even become a good dribbler. It has already been predetermined.
One reason why we do not feel this sense of determinism is, I repeat, because life is not a game where we know our CA/PA/SA values. Another reason is that most of us, most of the time, in most fields, are stuck in the middle band. In the middle band there are a lot of people with close PA attributes. Even at the top range of the middle band there are a lot of people. With so many people around us with so close attributes, it is likely that we endeavour to take over the next person, and the next person next to him, when actually for all we know, we are only netting a 0.00000001 gain in CA per unit of time and effort, and that we are already at a CA of 50 upon a PA of 52.
Anyway so far we have only considered cases where CA is close to PA. What about cases where CA is nowhere close to PA, but where PA is very very high? Such cases are what we would call hidden talents, and if this theory is true, hundreds if not thousands of people may have lived their life without knowing they could have been the next Einstein, Bobby Fischer, or Roald Dahl.
If it were the converse case, where practice can never put you at the top, and that how good you can be in a particular field has already been pre-determined by your genes, then it would mean that there really is no point training so hard as you can never be an outstanding footballer, or whatever else.
The reasonable view most would take is to reconcile both schools of thought and come up with a compromise, which seems to be the popular way to do things when 2 extreme sides don't sound intuitively correct. After all, if you don't commit yourself to either extreme you don't expose yourself to accusations of extremity, nor would you have the uphill task of proving your extreme point.
The compromise we will reach in the abovementioned case would be that, to be an outstanding player of any field, both genes and practice play a part. So you may have the gene of a fantastic footballer, the innate flair, but if you rest on your laurels and don't practise hard, or if you don't have proper coaching advice and decent training facilities you will simply remain average. We can put it this way: everyone has a pre-determined potential in a given field. This potential is not automatically reached as time passes, but rather, you need a combination of favourable environmental factors to reach that potential.
But there are still problems with this middle ground that we take. It still maintains unequivocally the importance of genes. So if I were a chess player and diligently study textbooks and play many matches and approach my potential, I could still lose to someone not so diligent, not so experienced, but who has better skills than me. How is this possible, you ask? How can he have skills when he wasn't so diligent, even if his potential is greater?
Consider this: I have a potential ability (PA) of 50 for chess. I had a starting ability (SA) of 10. Through my diligence and favourable environmental factors I have reached that potential, and so my current ability (CA) is 50. [These terms I found on a football manager forum by the way, in case you find it so familiar] My opponent has a PA of 100. However he is lazy, he doesn't work hard enough to reach that PA. But he can still win me because his CA could be >50. And his CA could be >50 because for two reasons:
1) his SA was initially high. It could be as high as 51 right from the start, though that is unrealistic because if 50 is a level that requires theoretical knowledge of chess he could'nt have been born with a number more than 50. Then again, when you see all those 7-year olds winning 20 year-olds in chess maybe it isn't so unrealistic. Theoretical knowledge could be either inferior to innate skills (the youngster could have a keen grasp of tactical positioning, for example) , or theoretical knowledge is actually the written version of innate skills. Where it took me a book to tell me that generally speaking, a rook is worth 5 points and a knight 3 points, this knowledge could be mere intuition to the youngster. Where it took me a book to know how to play against the ruy lopez, for example, the youngster could have such a keen sense of tactical positioning that he will always play the most effective counter against ruy lopez, without reading anything about it.
2) his rate of change of CA is higher than mine. Three years ago when my CA was 40 and his 30 I would've won him easily; after three years I went to a CA of 50 which is my peak, and he went to, say, 60. While we did agree earlier that PA was pre-determined and that whether we can reach our PA or not hinges on hard work, motivation, and environmental factors, rate of change of CA could be a predetermined value as well and have little to do with external factors. In concrete terms it means that for every ounce of experience that we gain, the youngster's CA changes at a rate faster than mine. Of course, we must also consider the fact that I may gain a significant amount of knowledge/experience over him in a given time, such that my rate of change is higher than his, but since I am capped at 50 it is only a matter of time before he overtakes me. We must also assume that the closer we reach our potential, the harder it is to climb further up ie the rate of change of CA decreases as we move closer to the PA value, which seems a reasonable assumption to me.
Either case underscores the importance of genes. In the chess scenario, If my CA is near my PA of 50 after years of hard work, I could still be beaten by slightly-talented but alot-less hardworking individuals. SA and rate of change of CA could be genetically determined even if actual CA is not. As such, and considering that PA is pre-determined, if someone wishes to specialise in a certain field, it has already been pre-determined whether he would excel in it or not.
Whether you hold the extreme view that practice doesn't matter, or the middle ground where it does matter to determine whether you reach your PA, it seems that hard work, diligence and effort are discredited. The reason why we in all reality don't feel a sense of loss due to determinism is because we are not aware of the exact values of our PA at all. If I wanted to play tennis as a competitive sport and I know that my PA is 50 where the average PA is 70, I don't think I'd be very motivated to go into it in the first place. We only see glimpses of this determinist theory at work when we see things like students working so hard but still failing to get into university.
One way out of this is to argue that you can actually increase your PA through hard work. So if I reach my potential in chess even more hard work can expand that potential from 50 to 55, then from 55 to 60. But if one is to adopt this line of thought, one must be able provide a reasonable hypothetical explanation to why this is so. How can sheer hard work improve my PA in chess? If you say that sheer hard work improves my thinking skills and therefore my PA, what you really are doing is confusing the concept of CA and PA. Prolonged exposure to chess may improve my thinking skills and logic, The Sims-style, but when that happens CA rises, not PA. Your PA, by definition, already determines the max capacity your brain can handle, how logical it can ever become, how well you can ever dribble a ball in the best of circumstances.
Suppose I train my dribbling skills 20 hours a day what rises dramatically is my CA, but my PA will not change a bit. Suppose then we think out of the box and we give you the best coaches in the world, we let you have access to the best books on dribbling, we give you yoga classes to improve your agility, your flexibility, your mental condition, we train you intensively in all other secondary skills like balance. What happens is that your CA increases even more dramatically, but still your PA doesn't. Your PA defines the maximum agility your body can handle both physically and mentally. If your CA and PA are equal, the only way to improve further is to import legs from the best dribbler in the world. But that is not enough, you will need to import psycho-motor skills from the best dribbler in the world, and so on. When you're done importing you realise you are in the body of the best dribbler in the world, and that you are not yourself. If you are yourself, you can never be the best dribbler in the world. You may never even become a good dribbler. It has already been predetermined.
One reason why we do not feel this sense of determinism is, I repeat, because life is not a game where we know our CA/PA/SA values. Another reason is that most of us, most of the time, in most fields, are stuck in the middle band. In the middle band there are a lot of people with close PA attributes. Even at the top range of the middle band there are a lot of people. With so many people around us with so close attributes, it is likely that we endeavour to take over the next person, and the next person next to him, when actually for all we know, we are only netting a 0.00000001 gain in CA per unit of time and effort, and that we are already at a CA of 50 upon a PA of 52.
Anyway so far we have only considered cases where CA is close to PA. What about cases where CA is nowhere close to PA, but where PA is very very high? Such cases are what we would call hidden talents, and if this theory is true, hundreds if not thousands of people may have lived their life without knowing they could have been the next Einstein, Bobby Fischer, or Roald Dahl.
2 Comments:
I guess the world isn't fair, and it is sad to see people try really hard for something they want to be, but do not succeed, or is surpassed by someone of inferior determination with inferior effort.
Perhaps a more consoling way of looking at this, is that there is no PA, just how fast your CA rises, which for some, happens to be excruciating little at a level.
As for the last part, I think many hundreds of people do have talents like Einstein and so on but are not discovered. I guess the current human way of organising things, economically and sociologically, are nowhere near that level of efficiency. It boils down to a bit of luck in the end.
Maybe that's why we cherish people like Einstein, as we feel he's an extraordinary man above others, but also that he is a man, like us. This, perhaps, gives the hope that in all of us, exists a bit of that brilliance.
Aquila
pa and ca will change according to the time, experience, environment, etc. there is another critical element which is "luck" or "mood"/"form" at the point of execution which is unaccounted for.
eventually, it is smart vs luck vs hard-working.
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