the menagerie

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

00: Fool

The Fool, in all his forms, represents unlimited potential. The Major Arcana places him at 0, the number that requires some other number than itself to provide the context of what zero means. Zero is cyclical, and represents both start and end of journey at the same time, ready to embark upon new adventure and learn, and returning and integrating what has been gathered so that the next loop goes with more information and knowledge. Zero is the first index value, which is a thing you have to learn and remember when working with computers. Humans generally start from one when they count, because zero holds no intrinsic value to them. (Zero is actually a fairly abstract mathematical concept, despite being crucial to most operations. I think its only rival for importance and many-faceted-ness in mathematics is one.)

Unlimited potential describes infants and children very well, since their brains are in their most plastic states, learning and absorbing the world, language, society, and how to operate their bodies in space at a phenomenal rate. Eventually, that learning rate tapers off as decisions get made about what to practice and obtain skill in, sacrificing plasticity for efficiency, but it never goes away entirely. We get all kinds of "human-interest" stories in the media about someone of a somewhat advanced age picking up and obtaining great skill in a discipline that they had no knowledge or practice in not that long ago. The entire system of athletics, whether for Olympic prizes or lucrative sport contracts, starts very young and demands both skill and discipline to rise in ranks where someone might challenge for those same athlons. And in other tracks, we see stories all about smart people doing smart things (and a fair number of stories about smart people doing things they believe are smart, but have consequences that are clear and obvious to people outside of their specific discipline.)

Carol Dweck, in the early 2000s, published a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success that introduced to us two new concepts to work with: a fixed mindset, where someone believes their intelligence is finite and there is no way of developing it further, and a growth mindset, one that believes there is development potential skills, abilities, and intelligence. This became simplified in the popular parlance and spawned a fair number of ideas about how to keep people, and especially children, out of the fixed mindset, usually centering around the idea of praising students for the effort they've put into their work rather than suggesting that they lack smarts or other fixed qualities that would make them good at things like schoolwork and the various subjects. Dweck came back to revisit these ideas with clarifications and to squash the idea that effort was the only quality that was praiseworthy in helping someone develop a growth mindset in a 2015 Education Week article. And to say that most people have a mix of fixed and growth mindsets about their skills, abilities, and applications of intelligence.

I'll say that mathematics is one of the spots where there's the easiest contrasts of fixed and growth mindsets, although there's some confounding coming from xkcd 385 that contributes to some students being steered heavily toward fixed mindsets. I mostly mention this in the context that I didn't hit my math wall until integral calculus, where I didn't fully understand how I was supposed to go about transforming an equation into forms that I could apply rules to by using the various exotic and trigonometric properties of one, as well as the occasional shuffling of various components to one side of the equation or other so that I could, again, put things into forms where rules could be applied. This makes a little more sense, because geometric proofs were the thing I disliked the most because of the way they made me go through logic and fill out what I knew from what was provided. Despite the fact that I like playing games and solving puzzles, which is the same kinds of things, just with different visuals.

But until that, and with a fair number of other subjects, I was cruising with absorption of knowledge and doing well on tests, and all was well, at least in the realms that can be measured and quantified. My second grade teacher thought I might have a learning disability, because she never saw me do work in class. She saw that the work was good and done well, but she never saw me go to work on the worksheet and finish it while she was explaining and demonstrating the concepts and procedures on the board, such that I was done and quietly reading by the time she turned back around to give us time to work on our sheets. The tests came back that my weak spot was at least one grade level above my current space, and the opportunity to pick up that I did have something affecting me was lost, because that's not what was being tested. They wouldn't have diagnosed me then, anyway, because I presented atypically for my gender presentation at the time, and there wasn't any reason to test for it. These days, I think that if someone comes back as some sort of savant or "gifted" student, you should run them through a battery to see if they have any accompanying neurospice that could cause them great grief in their future.

This ease at things that others considered difficult meant painful emotional experiences when the perfect child turned out to be human after all. And I also had at least one physical altercation in my life because I saw something as simple that someone else found difficult, and they didn't like my attitude about it. (I'm not surprised that I would have come across as arrogant about it or similar. I wasn't intending to do it that way, but I'm definitely a poster child for "What I intend and how it's received are two different things, and I'm not great at accepting that it was received differently than I intended it to be.") It makes me sensitive to the disappointment of others, and it also makes me want to avoid situations of consequence or importance, because if it's important and I fail, then the fallout is both deserved and all my fault, regardless of how the failure happened, and someone will be by to punish me for failing soon.

Dweck is trying to encourage instructors and people who are working with others to adopt the idea of the growth mindset and try to foster it in others. Not just a matter of changing feedback so that it focuses on qualities and items that can be improved or the effort put into the situation (and avoiding feedback that references fixed or intrinsic qualities like "smart"), but also providing the scaffolding and feedback that allows for growth and learning, so that the skill can be not only practiced, but practiced correctly and well. It's not enough to praise effort if the answers are still coming out wrong and there's no understanding of what's going on and where the mistakes themselves are coming from. Humans are capable of learning and doing all kinds of things, many of them remarkably complex. Instruction and repetition and refinement are generally the ways that this works, and if we're going to require all of our small humans to go to school for twelve-thirteen years of their lives, we may as well make the environment as rich in opportunities to grow as we can. (There is an entire separate post here about the ways many educational systems provide the exact opposite of this growth-rich environment, and not all of it is the fault of the instructor and the feedback they give.) While that sometimes gets tritely summed up as "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right," that reduction makes it seem much more like it's a matter of willpower rather than one of opportunity.

Many of the creative arts, and several of the scientific ones, are less about people of great inherent talent having an inspired burst and then created a masterpiece out of whole cloth using nothing more than their raw talent. Musicians rehearse, writers compose, artists have references and practice works, dancers and athletes train and practice. The skill-taste gap is real, and while some things may be easier to pick up than others, the actual limitations of the brain and body are about whether the brain can translate verbal or demonstrative instructions into body movements, and whether the body in question can perform those movements at the desired level of skill and speed. Where I think a lot of our childhood pathways fail us is that we get told early on to focus on what we're good on, and our feedback tends to be in that form. The point of the schooling system (and the university system beyond that) is to get us in a state where we can perform labor for wage, unless we are one of the lucky few capitalists where we have enough for ourselves and our work is instead making others perform labor for us for wages. Creative arts and other such pursuits might be where our desire lies, but the necessities of not starving often prevent us from fully exploring those arts and pursuits, or they twist it into something that is used for not starving instead of for exploration, practice, and attempting to grasp a little of the numinous. The messaging about doing what you do well, combined with the artificial scarcity of capitalism, can often put us in fixed mindsets about creative arts, because the standard warps from "will doing this make me feel like a fulfilled and whole human being?" to "can I do this well enough for other people to give me money so I don't starve?"

The Fool and the concept of Beginner's Mind are intertwined with each other. Approaching any situation, including existing in a body of matter, with the curiosity of someone who doesn't know anything about the situation, but is interested in learning about it, or observing it and letting it move on, is to approach something with the greatest potential for growth. By shedding as many preconceptions as possible about the thing being approached, the full realm of possibility opens up before you. Admittedly, sometimes conceptions of things come with experience, and that's useful to bring in. Not approaching something with an expectation of how it will turn out, but being prepared in case it does go a way that you have experienced before. Zen, and its famed koans, and much of the practice of it revels in contradiction. Practicing meditation is so that you can get to where you already are. Sitting and observing the world as it goes by, without chasing after any one thing, lets the mind realize the impermanence of all things, the great constructions that take place within our very selves. Knowing about it makes it easier to jettison the whole thing and to practice approaching each moment of life as it is, rather than what it will be, or what it was, and without the structure of preconceptions clouding reality. It always seems impossible until it is done, and Zen tends to work toward the sharp flash of insight when it stops being a theoretical and starts being a practical. In response to another person saying they wanted to become a monk to "deepen their practice," a monk starts laughing and says the person seeking to become a monk already is one, and that there is no deeper to the practice of Zen, just the one level. The one, seemingly-impossible-until-insight level.

We see breakthroughs like this happen all the time with small ones and ourselves. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense, and then it does. With enough time, practice, and instruction, some things that were thought to be limits aren't, and it's not that the person is stupid, it's that they didn't have the right frame to work with. Or not enough opportunity to practice and refine. Or a low-stakes situation where they could get over the anxiety about it needing to be perfect or sale-worthy and instead focus on doing the actual practice.

There are going to be limits, where some things just won't happen, or be comprehensible, no matter how much good instruction and practice we get. I suspect, however, that most people don't actually reach their true limits on most things in their lives, because they don't get the opportunity to see where those true limits are. Many of the stories that appear in this and other series where I talk about myself are stories where I thought I wasn't "good at" something, but I could practice it and approach it in a Fool-ish way, and now it's (marginally) better than it was before. Because of the experiences my brain has had around praise and punishment, saying I have expertise in things is unlikely, but demonstrating that I have it is routine. And it's tempting to have a fixed mindset about things that are difficult, because I spent so much of my life with things that were not difficult to me. Letting myself overgeneralize into the belief that I used all my skill points on these things and there are none left over for anything else is an easier thing to believe, rather than it being a matter of time and practice. You'd think that being an information professional, where the formal training you go through is much more about learning underlying concepts and methods that then get put to use in specific situations, would make it easier for me to recognize and dismiss the fixed mindset, but, alas, brains. The best I can do is continue to be a Fool when I recognize the need for it.