#also shoutout to Jon Luckovich for still revolutionizing my life

[psalmsofpsychosis]

alright fieldtrip notes, mostly for myself because i know i have to come back to this again in a few weeks:

• A telltale sign of skill and expertise is nuance and intricacy. You can hyperfocus on some shit for all your life but what actually shows your skill in the area is the amount of complexity and nuance you have around the subject and its structure. The better we are at something, the more detailed and intricate our perception of it is.

• This can take hilarious turns, because you can get very stupid with what you're actually very skilled at. Your natural talent and your strengths can and do fuck you over; complexity does not always translate well. People go wack in the head with stuff they're good at all the time, but it's a very distinct and particular kind of wack, it's very detailed and convoluted.

• Contrasting that is what i call "simple stupid", in which people say and do hilariously insane shit because they have absolutely no nuance and intricacy around something. They basically have an understanding level of a 10 years old child around the subject, and while at best it introduces a kind a very lovely innocence that makes you coo at them, at worst it's so destructive both to the self and to others, because the person's perception has no nuance whatsoever tp ground it.

• The majority of people cannot tell the difference between complex fucked-up-ness and simple fucked-up-ness in themselves. But it's very obvious to other people who are actually skilled in the thing you're being fucked up about. They can tell it right away.

• And they're actually the only people who can offer you any semblance of useful information and help; because they speak to the nuance of your worldview.

• kinda unrelated to the points above, but you can actually be very skilled at something and not have it acknowledged/have it acquited to a cheap superficial effort of someone else, and it wouldn't be about you at all– it's the fact that the other person has no nuance and complexity around the subject at all, so they cannot recognise expertise when they see it. When others miss details in something they're not interested in, your intricate effort is the same to them as any surface level effort of the same kind, and their response will reflect that; to a dog a moving river is the same as a lake as the sea as the ocean, it's all "a body of water", and a dog is not a fish. it cannot detect any substantial change in the body of water, so to say. To a fish however, the intricacies of any given body of water is very evident, and their reaction will reflect it.

• and the point above is why you cannot really base your understanding of your skillset on other people's feedback, unless they're actual experts in what you're trying to accomplish ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ this is in no way implying that non-expert people's feedback dont matter, they do, in a myriad of ways. But they're not reliable metrics for assessing your skills, because of the lack of nuance.