My intuition is that becoming skillful is difficult, as it would be for most performance skills, but that it’s quite possible to do so without getting worse at intellectual work, as long as you continue to value that work and have a social circle that won’t let you slack off on truthseeking. Many intellectual “performers” who get a bit epistemically lazy may have been prevented from doing so if they’d had friends around to check their worst impulses.
My intuition is that becoming skillful is difficult, as it would be for most performance skills, but that it’s quite possible to do so without getting worse at intellectual work, as long as you continue to value that work and have a social circle that won’t let you slack off on truthseeking. Many intellectual “performers” who get a bit epistemically lazy may have been prevented from doing so if they’d had friends around to check their worst impulses.