
The alluring danger of dilettantism - danw
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/the-alluring-danger-of-dilettantism/
======
jerf
Am I the only one thriving in this environment or something?

Some nights I play Bioshock. Some nights I work on my (hopefully innovative)
Haskell project. Some nights I watch a movie and some nights I write for my
blog. Sometimes at work I listen to music and sometimes I just buckle down and
code. I've been fighting with distraction lately, but with some success.

I like my life much better now than 20 years ago, when I was in (very easy)
school, had tons of free time, and hardly anything to do with it but read
books and play video games because even my local library had hardly any
resources that would teach me how to do anything. (Oh, if only I had found a
primer on writing assembler for my computer...)

I will say, though, that getting off the marketing treadmill is very
important. I just canceled my cable in favor of an electronic video approach
with a special emphasis on not getting advertised at anymore (in particular I
just had a son, and I want him to grow up in an environment _not_ shared with
whatever multi-billion dollar company buys its way into my house), and while I
don't run adblock in my browser, NoScript comes close enough for practical
purposes. I now pay only minimal attention to things like gaming news, because
it's way better to find out something cool came out a year ago ($15) then to
anxiously await something coming out in six months ($60). The only reason I
pay any attention at all is my taste for games that are only on the shelves
for a week (thanks, Atlus).

But with that proviso, what we have here is an abundance of _wealth_ , and I
for one prefer the problems of wealth to the problems of poverty. If you have
a problem, _deal with it_. No, seriously, deal with it, whatever it takes.
Because it's not likely to get much better, barring total social collapse.
Even the recession/depression at most will _slow down_ the production of _new_
distractions.

~~~
cturner
> Oh, if only I had found a primer on writing assembler for > my computer...

This is a regret of my childhood. So much time, and if only I'd had a good
mentor for programming or music I'd have moved much further forward by now
(and probably missed the angry young man stage as well).

Startup idea: simple mentoring site that aims to connect mentors in any topic
with students in any topic. Can be free or commercial, can be regional or
local, it's expected that both the student and mentor will need to pass some
sort of test to be accepted. Students and mentors are reviewed.

~~~
KirinDave
Agreed. Many of us that are children of the 80's are obviously and woefully
self-bootstrapped into the compsci and compeng industry. It really shows,
compared to a lot of kids who are up-and-coming stars who already have mastery
in subjects I haven't even had time to diversify into.

------
cturner
I have a mate who's a solid pianist and guitarist, and he plays guitar hero
too.

Like me, he's skeptical of academic types who try and steer every detail of
the little people's lives with grand-plan political philosophies.

This Jon Elster character sounds like a tripper. In one of the quotes he uses
the idea of 'marginal utility' to further an argument. The quote is taken from
a book about (and by a broad proponent of) Marxism. Much of Marxism is built
on the labour theory of value, which proponents of marginalism believe to be
discredited by the marginal theory of value, which is tightly derived from the
idea of marginal utility.

I haven't read any of Elster's work. All the same, I'm confident there's some
rigorous turd-polishing going on between the pages of that volume.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Elster>

Update: I may be selling him short. There seems to be a lot written by this
under the topic of 'Analytical Marxism', including that "Elster and Przeworski
were notable departures from the group in the early 1990s.". I've heard
friends recount stories from professors about the period that say that buying
into Marxism was in some circles had a similar dynamic to baptism in born-
again Christian circles. In that respect I suppose that pattern of trying to
bring more sense to loved themes is no better or worse than Catholicism.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Marxism> I'm now miles out of my
league and this will be my last edit here.

------
tptacek
This is a really dumb article. Guitar Hero is popular in large part because it
is social. One person might want to learn a guitar. A whole room full of
buzzed people do not. I can think of few things _less_ social than sitting in
a room developing callouses while trying to nail barre chords.

My brother is a professional guitarist, and _he's_ the one that brings (well,
Rock Band) on the holidays.

What's the rest of the evidence that society is avoiding difficulty? Are fewer
people becoming doctors or engineers?

~~~
sofal
I can say from my experience that while it's not Guitar Hero or Rock Band that
keeps me from practicing guitar, the author's example of psychedelic music is
an apt one. The sheer amount of guitar material available to me is almost
paralyzing. There really is no scarcity to help motivate me. I'm borrowing my
friend's guitar and he burned a couple instructional DVDs for me. There are
tabs online for just about any song you can think of. There are hundreds of
instructional and example videos on YouTube. When I plug the guitar into my
Mac I've already got a little recording studio and an amp with more settings
than I care to know about and 30 different guitars.

It's never been easier to learn guitar. Except that for some reason the ease
of it all makes me take it for granted and even makes me bored. I'm just a
quick search away from hundreds of videos of people who play better than I
could ever hope to. Sometimes it feels like everyone and their dog already
knows how to play except for me. While I ponder the futility of it, I get
distracted by all the other neat stuff that I can learn.

I have to consciously fight laziness. There are so many easy and fun things to
do nowadays that it takes some extra discipline to focus. I like to think I'm
succeeding. Sometimes I start out working on my personal project and then a
little while later here I am responding to someone's interesting comment on an
interesting article.

There is an interesting problem in a society like this. I've lost too many
friends and family to World of Warcraft to deny it. Perhaps it's not worse
than the problems faced by earlier generations, but it's definitely different.

~~~
tptacek
This is why there are guitar teachers, right?

~~~
rms
Yeah... you aren't supposed to learn how to play music by yourself.

------
foulmouthboy
Guitar Hero is a bad example of the argument being made here. Guitar Center
attributes a recent spike in sales from games like Guitar Hero inspiring
players to learn the real thing and move beyond their video game introduction
to music. [http://www.edge-online.com/news/activision-guitar-hero-
iii-p...](http://www.edge-online.com/news/activision-guitar-hero-iii-
passes-1b)

------
mattchew
There's a good point there, if you can get through the awful writing that it's
wrapped in.

It's just too easy to play a video game or read a blog post instead of write
code. And in the short run it's more fun (if this isn't you, count yourself
lucky). Three hours later you realize you've completely wasted an evening.

I have a friend who has natural musical talent. After watching him whip up on
Guitar Hero, we talked about getting together to play actual guitar sometime.
Maybe we will, maybe we won't, but I am quite sure we'll play GH again.

The lure of fake gratification and fake accomplishment is awfully hard to
resist for a lot of us. It is a problem and worth talking about. Also I think
we'll be able to figure out better ways of managing a world full of shiny fake
rewards as we get more used to it.

------
jfornear
What does the author define mastery to be? In the information age, with new
tools like WebMD, a product of capitalism and a profit-driven corporation, we
have greater knowledge of health and medicine than certified doctors in the
past ever could have dreamed of having.

------
jodrellblank
"eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing"

I fear spending a lot of time 'mastering' something meaningless. Music,
woodwork, metalwork, drawing, painting, they all sound worth spending time on.

Spending several years mastering Cisco router operating system commands,
Sharepoint internals and development, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Java, Oracle,
Jabber protocols, SGML/UML/YetAnotherMarkupLanguage? These don't sound fun,
but they do sound like they'll take almost as much time and effort - but only
because they were designed by big corporations/committees who don't care if
you spend your life helping them profit until your 'skill' is suddenly
worthless and non-transferrable.

~~~
time_management
_Spending several years mastering Cisco router operating system commands,
Sharepoint internals and development, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Java, Oracle,
Jabber protocols, SGML/UML/YetAnotherMarkupLanguage?_

Lisp and Haskell, on the other hand, I'd place closer to the "music, woodwork,
..., painting" category.

------
mechanical_fish
<http://xkcd.com/359/>

