[extropy-chat] Some of my Recent Creations

[Ian Goddard]

John K Clark wrote:

> Ian you're good, you're damn good. I'd give a 
> million bucks to have half your talent, and that's 
> not just a figure of speech I mean it quite
> literally. 

 Wow, a million thanks John! ;)

> One of my most painful memories was me in the first 
> grade when the teacher asked us to draw something, 
> I forget what. I thought I'd done a pretty good job 
> but then the teacher told us to hand in our 
> pictures by passing them to the student ahead of 
> us. I was at the head of the class so I saw what my 
> fellow students had drawn and my heart filled with 
> despair, each and every drawing was better than 
> mine, not just a little bit better but INCOMPARABLY 
> better. Up to then I'd been a argent little bastard 
> but suddenly I learned I was not the best at 
> everything, in fact I sucked world class. If the 
> gods were kind they would have given me a hell of a
> lot more artistic ability or just a bit little 
> less; as it is I had just enough to realize how 
> badly I sucked but not enough to do anything about 
> it. Salieri was to Mozart as I was to Salieri. 
> Fortunately I have other talents but if art was all 
> there was in the world I'd be in a home for the 
> retarded right now.


 Before I go off sounding like a total egomaniac in my
observations below, let me note that there are
problems in each of my drawings, and the more I look
at them the more I notice and thereby the more I learn
what I need to do and avoid in the future.

 Perhaps I'm wrong, but talent may be only or mostly a
result of practice. I used to draw all the time when I
was a kid. I recall around age 11 trying more
challenging drawings and the results not looking like
accurate representations of their referents. So I felt
bad about it and tried to understand what do I need to
do to make them right, then I really worked at it.
Later I also learned a lot from art professors. And of
course I still have a lot of progress to make and
there are so many illustrators far better than I can
imagine. But my point is, I'm inclined to believe that
'talent' is mostly, if not entirely, acquired through
consistent practice rather than being an innate gift.

 In recent years I've put myself in your seat
(described above), but wrt to mathematics. Believe it
or not, I managed to graduate high school without
understanding what those letters are doing in math
equations in algebra class. I'm totally serious! To be
nice, the teacher gave me a C when I should have been
given an F. I hated math and resisted all efforts to
learn it. By all appearances I was 'math impaired'. I
truly believed that I just couldn't do math. But the
truth was that I simply refused to try. When facing
some new math I confused the initial "I don't
understand this" with "I *can't* understand this," and
so I'd immediately throw in the towel.

 But in my late thirties I realized so many questions
I had require a grounding in math. So a few years ago
I went back to the local community college where I'd
taken art classes previously. On my placement exam I
scored in the high 90s, except for the math portion
where I scored in the 27th percentile! And it wasn't
because I'd forgotten math skills, it was because I
never had them. Yet there I was with, of all things,
the intention of focusing on math. Then I Aced all my
math classes from prealgebra, through algebra, trig,
up to calculus 1 (which is as high as I've gone). I've
also Aced discrete math courses and 12 credits in
logic (though I got a B in one logic course due to
missing two big exam problems). To be sure, I'm still
far from being mathematically adept(!!), and what I
learn quickly fades if not reinforced (whereas I can
go without drawing for 8 years and then pick up right
where I left off). But my point is that it seems to me
that being able to do something well is largely a
function of effort and practice, and having 'talent'
is what the output can look like given enough input. 

 Ironically, everything in the philosophy section of
my website I wrote before I ever really took a math or
logic course. I hope to update that section sometime
soon! My long-term goal is to contribute to the
ongoing effort to capture human cognitive processes
(thought, language, and maybe even consciousness)
within a computational framework. I expect this is an
effort that may take humanity a few more centuries.
But I believe ultimately it can be done since I
believe our brains are organic machines doing just
that right now. I think logic research has a lot more
to do with synthetic cognition than numerical
mathematics. ~Ian


http://iangoddard.net 

"A proposition can be true or false only in virtue of
being a picture of reality." -- Wittgenstein




 
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