What about Skills?
Skills are specific things we know how to do, like how to make
origami, how to weave, how to paint, and so on. They are generally
things you learn by doing, rather than by reading about in abstract.
Sure, you can gain knowledge about them by reading general theory, but
you have to actually get your hands dirty to get any level of mastery at
all. The more skills you have, the more intelligent you become: the
subconscious mind is always searching for patterns and analogies, and
the more skills you have, the more sources there are for the
subconscious mind to find these things. Thus, proficiency in one skill
lends itself to solving unexpected problems, sometimes even without our
being explicitly aware of it.
Metaskills are abstract skills which have to do with other skills. For example, an autodidact
is a person who has the metaskill of being able to self-teach him or
herself new skills without an outside teacher. A teacher is a person who
has the metatalent to teach skills to others; here I speak of someone
who is a teacher of a wide variety of things, not necessarily a teacher
who focuses on one single topic. Teaching one single topic, like
calculus, is a skill, but the ability to learn an
arbitrary
skill and then teach it to others, that is a meta-skill. Generalization
is a metaskill where you look at a wide variety of skills and figure
out the common underlying patterns. Specialization is one where you can
take a skill and focus it more precisely, to get a new skill which is a
special case of the broader original skill.
Skills Training and Metaskills Training
Skills training involves performing a skill over and over. As you
perform a skill, your subconscious mind constantly tries to figure out
how it can help you. At first, it doesn’t know how to help you at all,
and you have to consciously think about every littlest detail. In time,
the subconscious takes over more and more of the workload, allowing you
to perform the skill with less and less conscious attention. This is
sometimes referred to as muscle memory; you can do the skill without
even thinking about it. To get to this point, you have to perform the
skill quite a bit. Each time, it comes a little easier. Once your
subconscious has completely taken over the performance of the skill, it
shifts toward finding ways to optimize and improve the skill, and that’s
how you evolve from a mere
expert into a
master.
Training a metaskill is the same. Just because a skill is meta,
doesn’t make it any different from any other skill. The difference is
that we don’t usually consciously train our meta-skills because most
people don’t even recognize them as skills. Besides that, training a
meta-talent is more difficult than training a skill, because you can’t
as easily fall into a pattern of repetition. Whereas you can do
basketball training by throwing a basketball through a hoop a whole lot
of times, you can’t, for example, teach yourself calculus a whole lot of
times. In order to train the meta ability of being an autodidact, you
must consciously seek out new things to teach yourself. If mastering
chess requires playing ten thousand games, then mastering
autodidacticism requires teaching yourself ten thousand different
skills.
The benefit of mastering a skill is that you get to use that one
skill. It makes a contribution to your overall intelligence by giving
you that much more referential material from which to draw patterns and
analogies. By learning Japanese, I’ve gained the ability to talk to
Japanese people in their native tongue. The benefit of mastering a
metaskill is that you can get new regular skills more easily, or make
better use of the regular skills you already have. When you train a
skill, you are making a long term investment; when you train a
meta-skill, you are making a “long long term” investment. You’re making
an investment into your ability to make or profit from other long term
investments.
The Reflexive Nature of Metaskills
The great thing about a meta-skill is that it’s reflexive. It’s something you apply to skills; but it
is
a skill, therefore, you can apply it to itself. For example, consider a
master teacher who can skilfully teach every skill she possesses: in
particular, she can teach how to teach. A master autodidact can, in
principle, teach himself any skill: in particular, he can teach himself
any metaskill. (In a very real sense, master autodidacts are like gods.
They can do basically anything. I consider myself something of an
intermediate level autodidact.)
Here’s another example of a metaskill. Skills analysis is the ability
to take any skills you know, and break them down, analyzing them and
figuring out exactly how they work. For different skills, it requires a
different mastery of skills analysis to break them down. For example,
just about anyone can analyze the “skill” of flipping coins. But it
would take a very good skills analyst to analyze the skill of playing
the harp. Skills analysis is itself just another skill, so in theory, a
good enough skills analyst could break it down and analyze it.
The novel “Cheaper By The Dozen” tells the tale of the family of
Frank Gilbreth, a self-described “Efficiency Expert”. He devoted his
life to finding ways to make various tasks more efficient. He even
invented a general system of “therbligs”, small undecomposable units of
work, for analyzing general tasks. In fact, he was pioneering the “time
and motion study” metaskill, which takes skills and finds ways to make
them more efficient. What if someone was so good at time and motion
study that they could apply it to itself, and find ways to make time and
motion study itself more efficient? Then they could apply it to itself
more efficiently, and make it even more efficient, and so on. How
efficient could it get?
The Continuum Between Skills and Metaskills
I’ve actually been speaking of just “skills” and “meta skills” to
simplify the discussion. There’s actually
an entire continuous spectrum
between the two. Take computer programming, for example. Programming
computer games in Java is a specific skill. Programming arbitrary java
applets is a slightly more meta skill, which includes the ability to
program games, if you’re so inclined. Being able to program websites in
arbitrary
languages, learning the languages as you need ‘em, is a more meta
skill. Going even more meta, you have the skill of programming
any program, not just websites, in any language, learning the languages as you go.
One way to train a metaskill is to figure out the spectrum below it,
and start low on the spectrum and work your way up. For example, if you
want to learn to be a master teacher, you might start by simply learning
how to teach your favorite subject, say, singing. Once you’re good at
teaching people how to sing, you might generalize it to teaching people
performance art in general. And from there, it’s not as big a jump to
teaching people any arbitrary skill that you yourself possess. The
master of a meta-ability probably got that way by applying the technique
“by accident”, without actually being consciously aware of what was
going on.
(published with kind permission of the Author, Sam Alexander, www.xamuel.com)
