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"They should be proud of their God-given talents"
Uh huh, so the arduous hours of practice and study don't count, huh?
Comments
Uh huh, so there aren't things that people are just good at?
There are, but practice will generally get you a lot further than an innate leaning, excepting folks like savants.
It rarely matters enough to make a difference.
Dedication and a willingness to learn are far more important than any notion of "talent". Which I think is largely a myth anyway.
There's an unhealthy idea that people are "just good at stuff" and spring fully-formed from the womb with the ability to draw really well or whatever. 95% of the time it's just a matter of taking the time to learn, the only real exceptions are savants, who tend to be naturally incredibly good at something very, very specific. Other than that, talent matters little.
The concept of talent strikes me as constructed rather than objectively observable. That someone is really good at something just because seems like fairy-dust thinking, rather than considering what influences might make someone good at something. For instance, while I haven't done visual art for years and years, I was considered to be "talented" with a pencil as a child. That wasn't true -- my older brother spent a lot of time doing art, and taught me how to observe the different elements in play, so I had a cognitive advantage that allowed my skills to progress at a faster rate. It seemed like magical talent because people were unaware of the fact, but altogether it was a matter of observation.
It isn't the concept of talent I'm annoyed at, although it is similar in nature.
It's the concept that people are skilled because some higher power decided that they should be good at something. That completely disregards any and all forms of training and/or skill building the person had to undergo (willingly or otherwise), and that is beyond insulting to me.
I am not good at drawing. I am not good taking the imaginings in my head and putting them to paper with my hands and having them come out the way I want, or even looking very good at all. Good this change with practice? Sure.
But there are definitely people who are better at it, and didn't have to practice much at all. Their skills certainly get better at it as they continue, but there is a part of them that is good at doing it, and it is just something in their brain or whatever that has that.
So yeah, I obviously believe that talent is a thing.
To your observation, no. How are you sure, however, that they haven't practiced and they just didn't bother telling you for their own reasons? And even if you know for a 100% true fact that they haven't consciously practiced, how do you know that there aren't any factors that have contributed to their skills?
It's not as simple as that.
There are many factors into that sort of thing that aren't immediately obvious. You might think they had little/no practice and are just good "because", but they're almost certainly not.
I am my own god.
I gave myself my talents.
Like Alex said it, it's not a magic blessing they were born with, but a variety of things that biased them towards a certain skillset.
Talent is a multiplier, not an additional chunk added to one's skill.
It's like, talent can get you to learn a skill in 3 hours rather than 5. But it does so by making you learn 5/3 faster, rather than by giving you two hours of training inherently present.
life is not an RPG glenn
man where do you live where life feels like an RPG
unless you're Australian, there just aren't nearly enough monsters.
Sometimes the best weapons come from hobos.
He is from Australia.
That is essentially correct, as far as I can tell.
This is exactly what I'm trying to say...
^ So essentially talent boils down to interest in something (plus certain physical attributes if good at a sport or something)
No?
It refers to like, how innately good you are at something. Someone who is more talented than me will pick things up a lot quicker and easier than I will- although they still have to work at it, or that talent goes to waste.
No matter how hard I try, to use an example, I will never be as good at basketball as Michael Jordan, even if I dedicated my life to playing basketball.
You're taking a general expression far too seriously.
I doubt it. Although it's not like this isn't actually debated among people, y'know.
Welcome to IJBM, everyone here has a talent of turning this sort of thing into a "heated debate"
> implying that was only once
For what it's worth, at least a handful of members here exist on the autism spectrum. Apparently I do, although I'm still getting used to the idea.
Anyway, the discussion wasn't about what fun was or how it ought to be had, but its qualities as a descriptive term in context of gaming. There's a reason, for instance, the analytic video game show Extra Credits uses the term "engagement" instead -- it describes enjoyment that can be derived from a game that may not be conventionally "fun". Like shitting bricks in a horror game. That isn't conventionally "fun", but it's still an attractive experience to some people.
"Fun" is sometimes a useful abstraction and it's a good shorthand for some situations. Obviously. That's why people use it so often. But when someone is talking about why they enjoyed a video game, it might not be useful because of the disparity between different versions of "fun". Which is why game design theory has its different theoretical takes on gamer types and whatnot, so this is hardly without precedent.
As for talent, it still seems like an odd concept to just take for granted in a secular intellectual context. I don't consider the "just because" excuse to cut it for anything in reality, and identifying the root causes of "talent" is doubtlessly beneficial. Correctly harnessing the causes of indirect skill retention could be a huge step forward in, say, education systems. No-one on this forum is going to be the one to do that research, but we can at least see the benefit in removing talent as a fixture of secular faith.
While the first line of that 4chan post is ridiculous, the 2nd one makes sense, actually. I find it annoying when people say "who cares about realism/background/story/similar concepts, it's fun!". Which is actually very valid for some games (or also books, movies etc.). But not for all of them, and some of us do want immersion. I think that was the poster's (terribly expressed) opinion regarding why "it's fun" is not always an argument winning everything.
Which, I guess, is what Alex just has said, just shorter
@Formaldehyde: What Alex and Octo said is basically my stance on the issue. I get what you're saying about stupid arguments, and I agree in principle, but sometimes semantic issues are thornier than they might seem at first blush. To oversimplify: One man's fun is not another's.
I have heard folks who self-described themselves as talented, but in the same breath also say that while talent allowed them to breeze through things for a time, they eventually hit walls and had to actually start working for it.
Just what exactly do you mean. You surely would agree that one person can be simply born with better genes for height than another, i.e. will grop up to be taller provided exactly the same nutrition and environment. Now, how about, say, hand-eye coordination? If it is the same, we can say some people are "talented" at darts. I guess it's just semantics, and I guess I already know the answer you will give me, but I felt like you were categorical on the issue and wanted to throw in my two arbitrary units of capital.