Interesting, I seem to have touched a nerve with this rant on practice. Kate-who-shuns-comments emailed me requesting three things that don’t require practice. The ones I could think of were:

• sleep
• TV watching
• walking

and I add here

• reading         

I think the last two require some initial start-up but then are maintained by use – is that practice?

And then I realized there was another category I had missed. There are the things that you can get good enough at to forget about. That is where walking comes in – just think of babies getting organized to walk, those early days are killer – and some other physical things. They are, if not perfectable, at least attainable.

It is possible to get good enough at riding a bicycle that you become one with it, and fly over hill and down dale and hardly think about shifting or your feet going around. Walking took practice once, but for the most part we take current mastery for granted, and march through our lives one foot after the other, contemplating other things.  For some people cooking is like this. We remember a few recipes or concepts, and wing it from there, forever. Or until the in-laws come for Thanksgiving dinner.

The title for the previous post came from a David Brin book. I think it might have been his first book written, although not the first published, because it was pretty rough and fairly thin, and relied heavily on intrepid grad students. The idea, that practice improved performance, was applied beyond the sentient and into the inanimate. So not only could people get better at what they were doing by practicing, but a backpack could be a better backpack by being used as one. The straps would fit better, the pockets would be the right sizes for what you put in them, waterproofing would improve… In someways this resembles beloved objects being broken in; think your most comfy pair of jeans, hiking boots, oldest favorite hammer, etc. But in other ways, it is just freaky. Inhabitants of this world couldn’t engineer things, because the effect modified them before users could comment on them (begging the question "how do it know?"). I believe Our Hero saved the day by applying engineering principles to … whatever. It was a long time ago.