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Comment by Timpy | Hacker News Reader

The example of artistic skill translating to military cartography was the most interesting part of the article. Tell me HN, what are your expiring and permanent skills?

I would cite knowledge of a particular software as a rapidly expiring skill. You can learn a particular software and become an absolute productive genius in it, but let a couple years pass without touching it and you'll return to find the software has changed, and your relentless speed and muscle memory is constantly crashing into the changes.

The most permanent skill I can think of is being able to gain knowledge from books. Sitting down with a text and really being able to glean knowledge from it. I don't think that skill is ever going to expire.

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Yes, I would generalize a bit more and say the most permanent skill is the ability to learn & adapt.

Can you learn from your social faux pas? Can you learn how to collaborate more effectively? Can you learn new software? Can you develop structure in highly uncertain environments?

It is the rate at which one can adapt that I find to be most permanent. (In other words, and with some irony, the thing which is the most permanent is the capacity to change.)

This is the best answer.

See, the lesson I took away from drawing-for-cartography-for-military-commanders wasn't what the article hoped for.

What that made me think is: Skills that, in the present seem like millennia-old permanent skills might in the future turn out to be expiring.

Sure, everyone knows javascript-framework-du-jour is an expiring skill.

But is handwriting? Mental arithmetic? Cooking? Differentiation?

Well, go back even just 30 years (though increasingly less common by then) and you had several generations of slide rule users in the engineering and science fields. People knew how to use logarithm tables (even I was taught them in the mid-90s in high school, but outside a single no-calculator math course, I never used them after).

I think some of the math topics (mental arithmetic) will remain valuable, but as you press into different intermediate and higher skill levels you'll see some things disappearing (like the aforementioned slide rules). The act of differentiating will remain useful, but more useful is understanding how to establish the model for your system which includes differentiation and integration. So we may see a decline in the mechanical skill, but an increase in understanding/applying it.

I mean, look at a lot of contemporary machine learning approaches. Most of the practitioners probably don't understand a lot of the mechanics of the math inside the models, but do understand the applications. That's not bad, it's just different. A few people need to master the internals to make progress on them or implement them, but most can get by and make useful (hopefully) applications without that level of understanding.

I actually consider my Emacs skills permanent. I have made small adjustments over the year, mostly removing stuff from my configuration as the defaults improved. The basic stuff I decided to go through in my youth is the same.

I try to improve my understanding of my surroundings, and I consider that a sort of permanent albeit developing skill too. Biological systems, political systems, social systems, individual human beings (I'm curious, I want to understand people I know).

I can forget about books with no problem. Sometimes after being 3/4 through a story a small feeling sets in that you somehow know the content and then you read something that makes it clear you already read it. It isn't even a sign of quality, happens with interesting and boring books. Perhaps it is different with nonfiction but I doubt it. Certainly didn't work with my french textbook.

What I think you cannot unlearn is some motor skills like cycling or skiing. Learned skiing at the age of 4-6 and then never came to it for nearly 15 years. Was afraid I would have to relearn everything but it was absolutely no problem as if I never did anything else the last decade. Maybe age of learning is a huge factor here.

I unlearned skiing. It had been about 18 years since I last skied, but I have been an avid snowboarder during the intermediate. I simply did not have the muscle memory needed to manipulate the skis, I knew what I wanted to do in my mind, but could not figure how to tell my body how to do it.

Some permanent skills in my trade:

Programming -- in general, not just language specific. Many people simply can't do it, and I don't see it going away in my lifetime.

Quantitative problem solving.

Scientific reasoning.

The laws of physics won't change any time soon, being able to interpret them is a skill.

Being able to see my way through fabrication of a complex prototype using the materials and techniques that are available and practical for the job at any given moment.

Being able to entertain people creatively.

I actually think that being able to learn an expiring things deeply enough that you start to see the permeant skills underneath is really important.

Being able to look at something and quickly separate the core important concepts that are being used from the syntax and implementation details seems super important for long term success in a field.

> I would cite knowledge of a particular software as a rapidly expiring skill. You can learn a particular software and become an absolute productive genius in it, but let a couple years pass without touching it and you'll return to find the software has changed, and your relentless speed and muscle memory is constantly crashing into the changes.

Depends on the software. In modern IT-oriented software, or webdev which is basically the same thing, where we have made a sport of rewriting things for the sake of rewriting them, yeah that's totally true.

But Someone with 1990s Excel wizardry will still be an Excel wizard today. I'm sure the same is true of a lot of professional software out there where "professional" != "IT".

Just wait until it's decades. I look at some of the Windows C++ code I wrote in the 90's and it's unrecognizable. Until I look at the sarcastic comments and think "yep, that's me".

Learning a particular trade might expire, but learning how to learn will never be futile.

Coincidentally, that's also one of the course I'm taking on Coursera.

Every field has "the fundamentals," and mastery of the fundamentals is what separates the exceptional from the merely good.

John Nash's "Non-Cooperative Games" has a grand total of 5 references in its bibliography. A modern PhD thesis will have hundreds.

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