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Women wrestlers rule
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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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On a complete side note, I really hate the term "talent" when it's used to talk about skills. Calling someone talented is unfairly derisive to both parties involved.
It's insulting the recipient, since it dismisses their skills as some innate ability, and invalidates the months or years of hard work they did to get where they are.
It's also unfairly deprecating to the giver, by reinforcing the notion that you need to be "talented" to do cool things, and that they're just inherently "untalented" and would never be able to do them even if they tried.
But I guess it does work as an excuse for not working toward self-improvement, and alleviates that cognitive dissonance...
How do you distinguish between when people say "talent" to mean skills and when they legitimately mean talent?
If someone has just started learning to do something and is unexpectedly good at it, you can call that talent.
If you say that someone has a talent for doing something that they've done for a long time and put a lot of practice into, that's when I consider it rude.
What if someone does something for a long time and puts in a lot of practice and they're not as good as/better than other people with similar time & work?
Then the average person is going to have a much harder time attributing proficiency to either of those factors, and it's much more appropriate to just compliment their hard work and dedication.
Why is it more appropriate?
Because it acknowledges something someone worked for rather than something they were born with.
Do you think work is separable from a person's circumstances of birth? Lots of things influence a person's ability to work, chiefly how much money they were born into, but also some people are born with certain abilities that make them more capable of doing work.
Do you think work is more valuable because it somehow comes from a person's character? Is character separable from birth?
And also, what about someone who worked as hard as they could and could only ever achieve a middling career in their chosen field? Do you put their apparent failure down to simply not working hard enough? Do you think that's rude?