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army1987 comments on Not all signalling/status behaviors are bad - Less Wrong
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I think there is one pattern that being good at something (socially accepted) is good signalling... but trying to improve at something (and thus showing that you think you are not good enough yet) is bad signalling.
I have noticed this pattern years ago, when I was trying to write sci-fi stories, and was meeting with other people who tried the same. I found somewhere on internet that many famous writers attended some kind of writer workshops. So I suggested to my friends that we should find out whether such workshop exists near us, and if not, try to create our own workshop. Most of them were horrified by that idea. When I asked why, they told me that a person either has a talent for writing, or not. The former cannot learn anything at workshops, because the true art cannot be taught; only the latter could learn to become a more skilled art-less graphomaniac. I thought such reasoning was stupid, and asked some literary critics about it: but they confirmed that they would percieve a person known to have attended such workshops as an art-less wannabe, because the true talent must be born. I refused to accept their reasoning too (because I have read a few autobiographies of famous writers, and many of them had some kind of writing education), but I have learned that admitting to a systematic self-improvement can be a huge status loss. (So a smart thing to do is to attend the workshops secretly, and to pretend you were just born with such ability; at least until your status becomes unshakeable.)
Shortly: to fix a problem, first you have to admit it. Admitting the problem = status loss.
Recently I was thinking about how exactly is this possible: how can improving your skills seem like a status loss? Like, is there any way to have good skills other than improving them? How else can the good-skilled people become good-skilled, if not by gradual learning? But then I realized that perhaps it's the life-long learning aspect that goes against our instincts. In an ancient environment, life was short and rather simple -- people learned their skills as children (naturally low-status), and as adults they have just used them; improving them further by using, but not starting from near-zero. Today, the life is so complex that we cannot learn everything as children, but our brains still see the first steps in mastering any skill as childish. We still feel learning is natural for children (skills learned in childhood we perceive as inborn), but retarded (literally: too late) for adults.
That doesn't seem to be the case where I am: I often hear "Have you been practicing? You've gotten much better than last time" in (what sounds to me like) a complimentary tone, whereas replying to "Where did you learn that?" with "I didn't, I'm just improvising" is often met with (what looks to me like) disappointment/disenchantment. (EDIT: But I'm 25. What age did you have in mind as "adult?"
In your example people first notice you being better (that is high status) and only then become curious about the causes. My examples were about people noticing someone practicing, or just discussing a hypothetical practice in future, with no improvement yet. That's not the same situation.
Simply said, you get -1 point for trying, +5 points for succeeding. Problem is that trying comes first, succeeding later. So there is that unpleasant phase of "already trying, not yet succeeding", which you cannot avoid (though you can keep it secret). During this phase you have low status. Only later, when the success comes, your status becomes higher than it was originally.
The high-status answer to "Where did you learn that?" is "I am just naturally good at it". Of course that works only if it is credible, which depends on the audience.
For example if I would try to get high status for my programming skills, to a totally computer-illiterate person I could say "I just naturally understand the computers; I was like this since my childhood". No details necessary. To them, any computer skills are probably magic, accessible just for special kind of people, and I just confirmed the hypothesis.
To a fellow programmer I could say: "I played with computers since I was a child; then I participated in programming competitions and won them; then I studied university, which was rather easy for me; and now I just read some tutorial on the web or google a few examples, and I get it; anyway, most of the stuff is easy if you already know a lot". I cannot pretend that one can learn programming magically without learning; but I can still move my magic more meta and pretend that it's not my programming skills per se, but my learning-programming skills which are magical. Yes, I had to learn programming, but the learning was always easy and quick -- I never failed, never got stuck, never had to ask another person for help, never doubted my success for a moment. (Which is psychologically almost as unlikely as being born with magical programming abilities, but I would expect an average programmer to believe this and to feel inferior compared to it.)
If I can take your answer literally, perhaps the word "improvising" had some bad vibe. It contains a possibility of failure, uncertainty. Also, trying is low status, but teaching institutions can have high status, so maybe people expected an answer like: "I had an internship at Google and that's where I learned that".
(Age is context-dependent. If you are 25 in a job, and you are youngest of your colleagues, they see you as a child.)
Yeah, probably that's it. While I'm positive that among musicians just having a decent sense of rhythm and melody and improvising on the E flat minor pentatonic scale (AKA “only playing the black keys”) is lower status than having spent hundreds of hours taking piano lessons and rehearsing, I'm not at all sure whether it'd also be lower status among other people, and indeed now that I think about it, my model of non-musicians says it wouldn't.
I only normally use the word “improvising” about playing an instrument, or occasionally about vernacular dance (just discovered this term, BTW).