i am starting to feel that skill imbalances in the world are not because of some natural talents of one individual and lack thereof in another. it is more like a bad start in learning things. similar to when you try to learn something and then you learn it incorrectly. people spend time and time doing stuff incorrectly and then it accumulates and multiplies. it doesn’t sound like much - you can always re-learn - but in practice i doubt anyone would learn something from scratch. if you learned how to drive and you acquired wrong reflexes - you are not going to re-learn anything, you will just carry on with your life. imagine you didn’t build a behavior of resting your leg on the brakes? why would you bother to change something? how will you even learn that you are doing something wrong? chances that you will get there are next to none.

such problems then multiply - bad ideas, bad principles, bad knowledge. bad driving skills will lead to lacking understanding of a probabilistic nature of the world which will lead a person to aim for local maxima. or not learning to ride a bicycle leads to an overly cautious life which leads to anxiety and then to depression.

is it like a butterfly effect?

you start by not learning some skill and it permanently shuts off some knowledge branch, some part of life.

some people do this a lot, maybe even everyone does this to some extent

and this stuff simply divides people and the poor become poorer and the rich richer​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​