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> Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough

by Isamu 10y ago

> Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. Actually the claim is the other way around - that the people at the top got there through focused effort of the right kind. Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball. I was one of these kids, I played with geometric objects, with music, etc. Sure I was weird sometimes. I didn't have anybody to share my interests with. Anyway, point is, when people point to "gifted" talent, this is just another cop-out. They don't have an explanation. They are appealing to everybody's shared sense of magical outcomes. But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.

saint_fiasco 10y ago
Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you Gifted children have the gift of being interested in things that are useful, that can give them money or high status like art, math, chess, technology... A child who has an obsessive interest with candy or playing tag or watching TV (or just normal stuff that normal children do) will have to work harder to resist more temptations and focus on schoolwork and useful things. http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinat...
ekianjo 10y ago
> But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. So you believe in the 10 000 hours empirical rule based on "outliers" with very little evidence to support it?
- goshx 10y ago
  Gladwell used someone else's studies and came up with the 10k hours. I recommend you read the original authors' book: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, from Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. They say the 10k rule doesn't exist and explain what they meant, but it does indeed boil down to "deliberate practice".
  - lfx 10y ago
    And 10k hours rule is just catchy name. Almost only purpose is just to be catchy! This[1] episode of freakonomics explains it well. [1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak/
travanx 10y ago
Very similar. I still remember being pulled out of class in the late 80's, I think it was 3rd grade, to take a spatial test by UCLA. Shortly after I was put in GATE, and gently reminded through the years by my Mom, that, that test predicted I would be good at engineering. Started my civil engr. company at the age of 30, in 2008. I scored the highest on the spatial test UCLA had seen at the time. I wonder how many others on here have taken it? I think you are right about laser focus. Doesn't matter too much what I do, I can learn it, but I very much enjoy my line of work. Its no wonder after having a baby a few months ago I got the calculus book out to start reading to him.
Retric 10y ago
Plenty of people spend hours drawing and still suck at it. My sister spent hours with a coloring book as a kid, and now has a growing IMDB page.* Sure, she went to a great art school, but not because of some single minded focus as she had ~10 AP classes and ended up High school Valedictorian. Even this did not take her full attention as she had a wide circle of friends, was very popular, and spent a lot of time on makeup etc. So yes she worked hard really really hard. But, those hours where simply worth more than other peoples. In the end the nature vs. nurture debate is silly as it takes both to succeed. The minimums simply increase as you go up the scale. There are a few short people in the NBA, but nobody is below 5' tall. The top women are vastly better than the average man, but the classic men's vs women's sports has a core basis in biology. *Shorthand for wanted to work for Disney as a kid, now has actual movie credits and words for Disney. That's about as concrete a form of success as you get for such a subjective field.
- yuncun 10y ago
  I dont want to detract from your story, but >has an IMDB page is a funny metric for success.
  - Retric 10y ago
    She wanted to work as an artist for Disney as a kid, realized that would take a lot of effort and put the time in. Considering how many other people try and do the same thing and fail it seems like a reasonable metric for success. It's a surprisingly brutal world. She got into CalArts which has a 27.5% acceptance rate and the application takes a lot of time, so I suspect they scare off a lot of people.
  - jccalhoun 10y ago
    I thought that was kind of a weird evidence of success at art but I guess the person was in animation/special effects?
  - rurban 10y ago
    I like that metric, because I was considered super smart as a kid, and I have two IMDB credits. (one even a Sundance winner) But I failed the other criteria in the article, inventions (even if I invented a certain computer-game-as-artform category in the 90ies), PhD, scientific success, ... Yes, it's a funny metric. And even if e.g. Cannes states that you can attend the festival if you are on IMDB, they never let me in. (Nowadays I wouldn't want to either because of politics) So it's inconsistent also.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. This is my thinking as well. I was a kid like this. I suspect there's a connection between being asocial and being 'gifted.' If you're happy playing with compilers and such and don't feel the need to run out of the house to play ball, then you're just going to soak up a whole lot of stuff other kids aren't. The laser focus is probably optional as well. Although, I suspect there's a connection with being asocial and being easily and deeply focused on things other than socializing. As an adult, I'm still asocial. I also am not introverted, which seems to be a common misconception about this personality type. I can be very loud, outgoing and demanding if need be and feel perfectly natural. I just don't like to socialize very often.
iopq 10y ago
I don't feel like that's true. I didn't expend any effort on my studies and it just came easily to me. Now, I'm not a genius, but there's a huge difference between my aptitude towards anything and the average person. I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the California high school exit exam. I went to community college at 15 (while still taking some high school courses at first, but upon taking the proficiency exam I stopped taking high school courses), I transferred to a university as a junior at 17. It took me longer to graduate at that point, but it was mostly because I was expected to do work and I never did before. I hated learning in a structured manner and being forced to do things. In fact, my lack of focus is what led me to learn about things on my own. I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old. I struggled with it, but it was fun. Then I'd read some physics instead because I felt like it. Maybe successful people have lazer focus. But not all talented people are focused.
- BatFastard 10y ago
  The Genius bar is not really that high, so I suspect you qualify. I bet there is a bit of ADHD thrown in there, which often accounts for not liking structured learning as much.
- JacobJans 10y ago
  >I didn't expend any effort on my studies >I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old. I suggest that you, indeed, spent effort on your studies.
  - iopq 10y ago
    Those weren't my studies. Those were my hobbies. Give me homework and I'll run away screaming. I used to HATE the language subjects. Now that I'm not being forced to do it, I enjoy linguistics.
    - croon 10y ago
      When you disagreed in your first comment you disagreed to this: > But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. While you then go on to say that that is exactly what you yourself did. That you don't like being forced to learn is besides the point, but also sort of confirms it. You spend time (learning) on things you enjoy. That's how you become "gifted". The trick is having kids be engaged with something productive and not spending time on [insert subjective detrimental activity here]. Whether parents can influence that or it's down to luck is debatable, but I definitely lean towards the former.
ralusek 10y ago
Why is everybody so binary about this? Are we really suggesting that some individuals are not capable of intellectual tasks at a greater capacity, or a greater speed than others? If you understand that a human being has a higher cognitive function than a sea slug, a wasp, a mouse, a dog, a dolphin, an ape, by our genetics alone, then you have to accept that there is a degree of genetic variance between individual humans. It's not like the moment we all qualify as the same species all genetic variance in every regard goes away. Some people are taller than others, some people are better at abstract thought, some people are better at linear calculation. Of course nurturing these talents is incredibly important, nobody is denying that. But the more studies that come out, the more it seems to suggest that the ability to produce exceptional results with the nurturing of specific practices is hugely magnified by genetic predisposition.
- lintiness 10y ago
  apply the same to "sexes" and "races", and you offend our modern pc sensibilities.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - matt-attack 10y ago
    God forbid either of those words imply there's a difference despite the very definitions of those words are to classify and distinguish plainly different groups.
- truth_sentinell 10y ago
  "Genetics" is the new God. Apparently people assign whatever they don't know or understand to genetics. Can't play football? That's genetics!! Knows math? More genetics!! Are actually there studies that claim a special ability is due to genetics only?
  - smnplk 10y ago
    It takes genetics to be interested in something too I believe.
kikishortler 10y ago
Genius = creativity + intelligence You can preserve your creativity (doing things your own way) if you are prepared to pay the social cost but intelligence is largely inherited. And intelligent women are having fewer children nowadays...
pmoriarty 10y ago
In certain areas, hours might be enough, but not always and everywhere. Chess is a good example. I've seen a 12 year old kid at a chess competition wipe the floor with dozens of much older players (people in their 40's, 50's, and up), who've been playing chess -- obsessively -- their whole lives. This 12 year old kid has been playing chess for maybe 6 years (let's say 8 years maximum), but he totally crushes others who've played 40 or 50 years or more. Chess can be very addictive, and a lot of people spend virtually all their waking time playing it, for decades on end, studying, competing, yet that's not enough, and they can be easily beaten by someone much, much younger than them, who's put in only a tiny fraction of the time and effort they have. I've also seen a 10 year old kid, who was really hyperactive and distracted when he played, always looking around him at everything but the chessboard, apparently interested in anything but chess. His mother sat next to him, and had to struggle to get his attention back to the board whenever it was his move. Yet he played at a high level against people much older than him. Again, he really couldn't have put that much time in to it, no matter how interested he was in it.. and he clearly wasn't that interested. Chess is one of those fields where prodigies are relatively common, especially compared to fields like poetry that really do require a lot of life experience to be effective. The kids I've described are not that rare. It happens even at the highest levels, with Bobby Fischer being the archetypical example (becoming the youngest grandmaster at 15 and winning the US championship at 14). These days chess prodigies are even more common than in Fisher's time, thanks to computers and the internet. Still, whatever happens with them is not explained by the hours they put in to the game alone, as many people put in many more hours and much more effort than they do and still fail miserably.
- XparXnoiAx 10y ago
  >In certain areas, hours might be enough, There is no area where hours are enough. How you apply the hours is extremely important.
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    Learned this the hard way. I spend a lot of hours learning stuff in a bad way—I end up not mastering anything!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
paulpauper 10y ago
sounds like you been reading gladwell books lol Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. Yes, technically no one pops out knowing trig or calculus, but some are born with the cognitive capacity, which later manifests in life, to readily master abstract and complicated stuff, and others aren't born with that ability so they struggle to understand concepts that smart people grasp easily. Although ability can be lopsided (some are better at math than verbal), the less intelligent tend to have no dominant strengths - they are just average. And that's fine. Most people are that way. Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball. Why don't adults play with paste, coloring books, and alphabet letters? Because they are too mentally mature for those activities. Likewise, high-IQ children have a higher mental age, hence they find these tasks tedious and boring, as adults do. Anyway, point is, when people point to "gifted" talent, this is just another cop-out. They don't have an explanation. They are appealing to everybody's shared sense of magical outcomes. But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. Well, there's something called an IQ score, and it does a pretty good job at predicting all sorts of things, such as socioeconomic outcomes, job performance, educational attainment, welfare dependency, and learning ability. The IQ test is one of great achievements of human psychology, is much harder to manipulate than EQ tests, and scores tend to remain stable throughout life.
dorfsmay 10y ago
Paraphrasing Dweck's, but also matching my personal experience: At the end to the day, hard work is what allows one to push the limits. A gift/talent is just a good kickstart that makes the owner's life easier, but people with talent are quickly limited if they don't work hard. the biggest issues are that people counting on their gift are afraid of exposing their limitation and become more and more shy of taking risk, they also often don't get into the habit of working.
vbezhenar 10y ago
Many children from my school spent a lot of time and additional classes to learn math. I never did that. I almost always skipped my homework. Yet I was the best in my class. Things, that other children found confusing and hard to understand, were very obvious to me and when I was asked to solve something from home work, I just did it immediately. That said, I was talking about ordinary children without any selection. After school I went to math faculty in university with similar children. That was cruel, I sometimes felt so stupid. There's definitely talent. And there's hard work. And sometimes it goes hand-to-hand, sometimes it's not. There are untalented people who's working hard and achieve a lot. There are talented people who doesn't give a damn and yet achieve a lot. And there are talented people who word hard and flying in the sky.
jawarner 10y ago
I was going to remark on the very same sentence. I'm not sure whether gifted children have a natural affinity toward math, of if they're just genetically predisposed to be more interested in it. In either case, neuroplasticity means that the final capabilities of our brains are not predetermined, and anyone can reach the performance of a "gifted" student through training.
matthewvincent 10y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The "gift" of the genius seems to be the ability to spend hours and hours ~focusing~ On literally anything. Problem solving ability and comprehension levels will only take one so far if they can't bring themselves to bury their head in a book, or sit in front of a piano, or shoot hoops, for the time necessary to master said subject.
- moridinamael 10y ago
  People keep saying this everywhere in the thread, but it doesn't reflect my lived experience at all. I remember being a kid of about 7 and noticing that a friend was doing some "supplemental" exercises in a workbook. I looked over his shoulder and immediately saw that he was doing them all wrong. The one question I remember showed a racetrack and asked which car would finish first -- the obvious answer was that the car with the inside track would finish first. I hadn't ever heard the phrase "inside track", I could just see, spatially, that the inside track was the shortest, because it was the smallest circle, etc. This ability to just see patterns and connections immediately (or more quickly than others) multiplied by every single new concept or piece of data you see in your life sums up to a net advantage. If you're somebody who just "got" the limit definition of a derivative the first time you saw it, can you appreciate that there are people who won't get it immediately, and won't see as many of the ramifications as you do? Can you appreciate that there are people who can see much more complex mathematical structures that would leave your head scratching, and "get" them just as quickly? To say that: > Problem solving ability and comprehension levels will only take one so far if they can't bring themselves to bury their head in a book, or sit in front of a piano, or shoot hoops, for the time necessary to master said subject. is just not that useful, I'm afraid. If everybody reads the same books and takes the same courses, the more intelligent will more through the material faster and learn it better. The world is not fair and there are not mysterious forces equalizing everyone's performance.
naasking 10y ago
> Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. [...] But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. This is obviously untrue. It's been well established that a significant fraction of intelligence is heritable, which means nurture has little to do with innate ability. Further, there are plenty of examples of true geniuses, like Mozart for music and Ramanujan for mathematics, where they almost immediately grasped their subject and became experts rivaling their contemporaries with very little practice. But genius is clearly not a binary quality, it's a continuum. There exist people slightly less adept than Ramanujan, and so had to put in more work to become experts, but still far less work than an average person would. You didn't have anyone to share your interests because your age group just couldn't naturally see the beauty you saw in your interests. Not wouldn't, couldn't without some serious coaching.
- rileymat2 10y ago
  There surely is a natural gift for things, but don't underestimate how much effort [if effort is the right word for something you are drawn to] your two examples put in at an early and impressionable age.
blahblah3 10y ago
you're trying to explain high levels of skill with only one factor: hours of "focused effort of the right kind" in reality, inherent talent clearly plays a very strong role. As a crude illustration, suppose math_skill = hours_worked * beta, and assume the "quality" of hours_worked is standardized. While beta is positive for most people, beta could vary a lot based on talent (obviously the function is not linear and may also peak / approach an asymptote. or for some people the function increases more slowly but reaches a higher peak. point is that it's complex).
nibs 10y ago
"Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius" Two thirds of the world's current math researchers can trace lineage to just 23, 17th century mathematicians. Source: http://www.nature.com/news/majority-of-mathematicians-hail-from-just-24-scientific-families-1.20491 http://www.nature.com/news/majority-of-mathematicians-hail-f...
- scarmig 10y ago
  Really odd misreading. That's a lineage of teacher-pupil relations, not genetic. If anything, it points in the opposite direction of what you're claiming, though in reality it's either just a statement about the clubbiness of mathematics or a statistical likelihood because of how trees work.
aab0 10y ago
"Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball." If you read Ericsson's papers, he does in fact specifically deny any role to talent and genes, by name, unequivocally. It's not a strawman, it's what he really believes. Deliberate practice is also falsified by Hambrick's meta-analyses: it does not explain much of difference in performance compared to talent. They are not gifted with 'a laser focus', they are gifted with things like intelligence.
new_hackers 10y ago
'Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius.' Nature versus Nurture. Nobody pops out a "math" genius. However, it could be supposed that some pop out with a greater ability to quickly recognize and remember patterns of information acquired by their senses. My ad-hoc life experience has shown that some people are good at most things they try to do, and it takes them significantly less time to acquire and use new skills than the norm.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball. Doesn't really match my experience of gifted children, many of which are not gifted "with a laser focus" on anything, and perform very well at things that they don't spend additional time on. > But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. It pretty clearly does not; people don't get the same results out of putting the same hours into the same things.
jknoepfler 10y ago
As someone who was measurably "gifted" as a child, I will say that the idea that I was more tenacious or laser-focused could not be farther from the truth. Instead, I just "got" things very quickly, such that it required very little effort to learn. I also read at a very high level through practice (I read fiction voraciously), which probably helped. I have since levelled off, and confess to struggling to learn through brute force things I don't readily apprehend. That said, I find the frequency of really good, creative ideas that I have is much higher than my peers, which has translated into a lot of success in the dev world (I dropped out of a phd program in philosophy and joined ama-google-softbook as a dev, as a bridge to starting a business). I don't dispute that effort is a variable in long term performance, but it's more of a criterion for long term performance than a predictor of raw talent imo. I will also say that being singled out for special treatment is pretty silly, I think a more constructive use of my time as a child would have been to help peers who were struggling.
jknoepfler 10y ago
As someone who was measurably "gifted" as a child, I will say that the idea that I was more tenacious or laser-focused could not be farther from the truth. Instead, I just "got" things very quickly, such that it required very little effort to learn. I also read at a very high level through practice (I read fiction voraciously), which probably helped. I have since levelled off, and confess to struggling to learn through brute force things I don't readily apprehend. That said, I find the frequency of really good, creative ideas that I have is much higher than my peers, which has translated into a lot of success in the dev world (I dropped out of a phd program in philosophy and joined ama-google-softbook as a dev). I don't dispute that effort is a variable in long term performance, but it's more of a criterion for long term performance than a predictor of raw talent imo. I will also say that being singled out for special treatment is pretty silly, I think a more constructive use of my time as a child would have been to help peers who were struggling.
gmarx 10y ago
How would you know that? Maybe you had a natural aptitude and so enjoyed geometric objects and music more than others?
__pid_t 10y ago
This. I found that I was on a different level than my peers in college in terms of programming ability. I knew I was on a different level because we had group work, and it was very annoying having to explain simple things like how to do a linear search for an element in an array. At that point, I believed that some people with CS degrees actually _can\'t_ do fizzbuzz In the end, I had practiced more and have pretty much programmed everyday for 7 years, while they only did the minimum requirement to pass classes in CS>

by Isamu 10y ago

saint_fiasco 10y ago

Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you Gifted children have the gift of being interested in things that are useful, that can give them money or high status like art, math, chess, technology... A child who has an obsessive interest with candy or playing tag or watching TV (or just normal stuff that normal children do) will have to work harder to resist more temptations and focus on schoolwork and useful things. http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinat...

ekianjo 10y ago

> But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. So you believe in the 10 000 hours empirical rule based on "outliers" with very little evidence to support it?

goshx 10y ago
Gladwell used someone else's studies and came up with the 10k hours. I recommend you read the original authors' book: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, from Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. They say the 10k rule doesn't exist and explain what they meant, but it does indeed boil down to "deliberate practice".
- lfx 10y ago
  And 10k hours rule is just catchy name. Almost only purpose is just to be catchy! This[1] episode of freakonomics explains it well. [1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak/

travanx 10y ago

Very similar. I still remember being pulled out of class in the late 80's, I think it was 3rd grade, to take a spatial test by UCLA. Shortly after I was put in GATE, and gently reminded through the years by my Mom, that, that test predicted I would be good at engineering. Started my civil engr. company at the age of 30, in 2008. I scored the highest on the spatial test UCLA had seen at the time. I wonder how many others on here have taken it? I think you are right about laser focus. Doesn't matter too much what I do, I can learn it, but I very much enjoy my line of work. Its no wonder after having a baby a few months ago I got the calculus book out to start reading to him.

Retric 10y ago

Plenty of people spend hours drawing and still suck at it. My sister spent hours with a coloring book as a kid, and now has a growing IMDB page.* Sure, she went to a great art school, but not because of some single minded focus as she had ~10 AP classes and ended up High school Valedictorian. Even this did not take her full attention as she had a wide circle of friends, was very popular, and spent a lot of time on makeup etc. So yes she worked hard really really hard. But, those hours where simply worth more than other peoples. In the end the nature vs. nurture debate is silly as it takes both to succeed. The minimums simply increase as you go up the scale. There are a few short people in the NBA, but nobody is below 5' tall. The top women are vastly better than the average man, but the classic men's vs women's sports has a core basis in biology. *Shorthand for wanted to work for Disney as a kid, now has actual movie credits and words for Disney. That's about as concrete a form of success as you get for such a subjective field.

yuncun 10y ago
I dont want to detract from your story, but >has an IMDB page is a funny metric for success.
- Retric 10y ago
  She wanted to work as an artist for Disney as a kid, realized that would take a lot of effort and put the time in. Considering how many other people try and do the same thing and fail it seems like a reasonable metric for success. It's a surprisingly brutal world. She got into CalArts which has a 27.5% acceptance rate and the application takes a lot of time, so I suspect they scare off a lot of people.
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  I thought that was kind of a weird evidence of success at art but I guess the person was in animation/special effects?
- rurban 10y ago
  I like that metric, because I was considered super smart as a kid, and I have two IMDB credits. (one even a Sundance winner) But I failed the other criteria in the article, inventions (even if I invented a certain computer-game-as-artform category in the 90ies), PhD, scientific success, ... Yes, it's a funny metric. And even if e.g. Cannes states that you can attend the festival if you are on IMDB, they never let me in. (Nowadays I wouldn't want to either because of politics) So it's inconsistent also.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

>Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. This is my thinking as well. I was a kid like this. I suspect there's a connection between being asocial and being 'gifted.' If you're happy playing with compilers and such and don't feel the need to run out of the house to play ball, then you're just going to soak up a whole lot of stuff other kids aren't. The laser focus is probably optional as well. Although, I suspect there's a connection with being asocial and being easily and deeply focused on things other than socializing. As an adult, I'm still asocial. I also am not introverted, which seems to be a common misconception about this personality type. I can be very loud, outgoing and demanding if need be and feel perfectly natural. I just don't like to socialize very often.

iopq 10y ago

I don't feel like that's true. I didn't expend any effort on my studies and it just came easily to me. Now, I'm not a genius, but there's a huge difference between my aptitude towards anything and the average person. I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the California high school exit exam. I went to community college at 15 (while still taking some high school courses at first, but upon taking the proficiency exam I stopped taking high school courses), I transferred to a university as a junior at 17. It took me longer to graduate at that point, but it was mostly because I was expected to do work and I never did before. I hated learning in a structured manner and being forced to do things. In fact, my lack of focus is what led me to learn about things on my own. I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old. I struggled with it, but it was fun. Then I'd read some physics instead because I felt like it. Maybe successful people have lazer focus. But not all talented people are focused.

BatFastard 10y ago
The Genius bar is not really that high, so I suspect you qualify. I bet there is a bit of ADHD thrown in there, which often accounts for not liking structured learning as much.
JacobJans 10y ago
>I didn't expend any effort on my studies >I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old. I suggest that you, indeed, spent effort on your studies.
- iopq 10y ago
  Those weren't my studies. Those were my hobbies. Give me homework and I'll run away screaming. I used to HATE the language subjects. Now that I'm not being forced to do it, I enjoy linguistics.
  - croon 10y ago
    When you disagreed in your first comment you disagreed to this: > But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. While you then go on to say that that is exactly what you yourself did. That you don't like being forced to learn is besides the point, but also sort of confirms it. You spend time (learning) on things you enjoy. That's how you become "gifted". The trick is having kids be engaged with something productive and not spending time on [insert subjective detrimental activity here]. Whether parents can influence that or it's down to luck is debatable, but I definitely lean towards the former.

ralusek 10y ago

Why is everybody so binary about this? Are we really suggesting that some individuals are not capable of intellectual tasks at a greater capacity, or a greater speed than others? If you understand that a human being has a higher cognitive function than a sea slug, a wasp, a mouse, a dog, a dolphin, an ape, by our genetics alone, then you have to accept that there is a degree of genetic variance between individual humans. It's not like the moment we all qualify as the same species all genetic variance in every regard goes away. Some people are taller than others, some people are better at abstract thought, some people are better at linear calculation. Of course nurturing these talents is incredibly important, nobody is denying that. But the more studies that come out, the more it seems to suggest that the ability to produce exceptional results with the nurturing of specific practices is hugely magnified by genetic predisposition.

lintiness 10y ago
apply the same to "sexes" and "races", and you offend our modern pc sensibilities.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- matt-attack 10y ago
  God forbid either of those words imply there's a difference despite the very definitions of those words are to classify and distinguish plainly different groups.
truth_sentinell 10y ago
"Genetics" is the new God. Apparently people assign whatever they don't know or understand to genetics. Can't play football? That's genetics!! Knows math? More genetics!! Are actually there studies that claim a special ability is due to genetics only?
- smnplk 10y ago
  It takes genetics to be interested in something too I believe.

kikishortler 10y ago

Genius = creativity + intelligence You can preserve your creativity (doing things your own way) if you are prepared to pay the social cost but intelligence is largely inherited. And intelligent women are having fewer children nowadays...

pmoriarty 10y ago

In certain areas, hours might be enough, but not always and everywhere. Chess is a good example. I've seen a 12 year old kid at a chess competition wipe the floor with dozens of much older players (people in their 40's, 50's, and up), who've been playing chess -- obsessively -- their whole lives. This 12 year old kid has been playing chess for maybe 6 years (let's say 8 years maximum), but he totally crushes others who've played 40 or 50 years or more. Chess can be very addictive, and a lot of people spend virtually all their waking time playing it, for decades on end, studying, competing, yet that's not enough, and they can be easily beaten by someone much, much younger than them, who's put in only a tiny fraction of the time and effort they have. I've also seen a 10 year old kid, who was really hyperactive and distracted when he played, always looking around him at everything but the chessboard, apparently interested in anything but chess. His mother sat next to him, and had to struggle to get his attention back to the board whenever it was his move. Yet he played at a high level against people much older than him. Again, he really couldn't have put that much time in to it, no matter how interested he was in it.. and he clearly wasn't that interested. Chess is one of those fields where prodigies are relatively common, especially compared to fields like poetry that really do require a lot of life experience to be effective. The kids I've described are not that rare. It happens even at the highest levels, with Bobby Fischer being the archetypical example (becoming the youngest grandmaster at 15 and winning the US championship at 14). These days chess prodigies are even more common than in Fisher's time, thanks to computers and the internet. Still, whatever happens with them is not explained by the hours they put in to the game alone, as many people put in many more hours and much more effort than they do and still fail miserably.

XparXnoiAx 10y ago
>In certain areas, hours might be enough, There is no area where hours are enough. How you apply the hours is extremely important.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Learned this the hard way. I spend a lot of hours learning stuff in a bad way—I end up not mastering anything!

deleted 10y ago

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paulpauper 10y ago

sounds like you been reading gladwell books lol Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. Yes, technically no one pops out knowing trig or calculus, but some are born with the cognitive capacity, which later manifests in life, to readily master abstract and complicated stuff, and others aren't born with that ability so they struggle to understand concepts that smart people grasp easily. Although ability can be lopsided (some are better at math than verbal), the less intelligent tend to have no dominant strengths - they are just average. And that's fine. Most people are that way. Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball. Why don't adults play with paste, coloring books, and alphabet letters? Because they are too mentally mature for those activities. Likewise, high-IQ children have a higher mental age, hence they find these tasks tedious and boring, as adults do. Anyway, point is, when people point to "gifted" talent, this is just another cop-out. They don't have an explanation. They are appealing to everybody's shared sense of magical outcomes. But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. Well, there's something called an IQ score, and it does a pretty good job at predicting all sorts of things, such as socioeconomic outcomes, job performance, educational attainment, welfare dependency, and learning ability. The IQ test is one of great achievements of human psychology, is much harder to manipulate than EQ tests, and scores tend to remain stable throughout life.

dorfsmay 10y ago

Paraphrasing Dweck's, but also matching my personal experience: At the end to the day, hard work is what allows one to push the limits. A gift/talent is just a good kickstart that makes the owner's life easier, but people with talent are quickly limited if they don't work hard. the biggest issues are that people counting on their gift are afraid of exposing their limitation and become more and more shy of taking risk, they also often don't get into the habit of working.

vbezhenar 10y ago

Many children from my school spent a lot of time and additional classes to learn math. I never did that. I almost always skipped my homework. Yet I was the best in my class. Things, that other children found confusing and hard to understand, were very obvious to me and when I was asked to solve something from home work, I just did it immediately. That said, I was talking about ordinary children without any selection. After school I went to math faculty in university with similar children. That was cruel, I sometimes felt so stupid. There's definitely talent. And there's hard work. And sometimes it goes hand-to-hand, sometimes it's not. There are untalented people who's working hard and achieve a lot. There are talented people who doesn't give a damn and yet achieve a lot. And there are talented people who word hard and flying in the sky.

jawarner 10y ago

I was going to remark on the very same sentence. I'm not sure whether gifted children have a natural affinity toward math, of if they're just genetically predisposed to be more interested in it. In either case, neuroplasticity means that the final capabilities of our brains are not predetermined, and anyone can reach the performance of a "gifted" student through training.

matthewvincent 10y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The "gift" of the genius seems to be the ability to spend hours and hours ~focusing~ On literally anything. Problem solving ability and comprehension levels will only take one so far if they can't bring themselves to bury their head in a book, or sit in front of a piano, or shoot hoops, for the time necessary to master said subject.

moridinamael 10y ago
People keep saying this everywhere in the thread, but it doesn't reflect my lived experience at all. I remember being a kid of about 7 and noticing that a friend was doing some "supplemental" exercises in a workbook. I looked over his shoulder and immediately saw that he was doing them all wrong. The one question I remember showed a racetrack and asked which car would finish first -- the obvious answer was that the car with the inside track would finish first. I hadn't ever heard the phrase "inside track", I could just see, spatially, that the inside track was the shortest, because it was the smallest circle, etc. This ability to just see patterns and connections immediately (or more quickly than others) multiplied by every single new concept or piece of data you see in your life sums up to a net advantage. If you're somebody who just "got" the limit definition of a derivative the first time you saw it, can you appreciate that there are people who won't get it immediately, and won't see as many of the ramifications as you do? Can you appreciate that there are people who can see much more complex mathematical structures that would leave your head scratching, and "get" them just as quickly? To say that: > Problem solving ability and comprehension levels will only take one so far if they can't bring themselves to bury their head in a book, or sit in front of a piano, or shoot hoops, for the time necessary to master said subject. is just not that useful, I'm afraid. If everybody reads the same books and takes the same courses, the more intelligent will more through the material faster and learn it better. The world is not fair and there are not mysterious forces equalizing everyone's performance.

naasking 10y ago

> Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. [...] But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. This is obviously untrue. It's been well established that a significant fraction of intelligence is heritable, which means nurture has little to do with innate ability. Further, there are plenty of examples of true geniuses, like Mozart for music and Ramanujan for mathematics, where they almost immediately grasped their subject and became experts rivaling their contemporaries with very little practice. But genius is clearly not a binary quality, it's a continuum. There exist people slightly less adept than Ramanujan, and so had to put in more work to become experts, but still far less work than an average person would. You didn't have anyone to share your interests because your age group just couldn't naturally see the beauty you saw in your interests. Not wouldn't, couldn't without some serious coaching.

rileymat2 10y ago
There surely is a natural gift for things, but don't underestimate how much effort [if effort is the right word for something you are drawn to] your two examples put in at an early and impressionable age.

blahblah3 10y ago

you're trying to explain high levels of skill with only one factor: hours of "focused effort of the right kind" in reality, inherent talent clearly plays a very strong role. As a crude illustration, suppose math_skill = hours_worked * beta, and assume the "quality" of hours_worked is standardized. While beta is positive for most people, beta could vary a lot based on talent (obviously the function is not linear and may also peak / approach an asymptote. or for some people the function increases more slowly but reaches a higher peak. point is that it's complex).

nibs 10y ago

"Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius" Two thirds of the world's current math researchers can trace lineage to just 23, 17th century mathematicians. Source: http://www.nature.com/news/majority-of-mathematicians-hail-from-just-24-scientific-families-1.20491 http://www.nature.com/news/majority-of-mathematicians-hail-f...

scarmig 10y ago
Really odd misreading. That's a lineage of teacher-pupil relations, not genetic. If anything, it points in the opposite direction of what you're claiming, though in reality it's either just a statement about the clubbiness of mathematics or a statistical likelihood because of how trees work.

aab0 10y ago

"Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball." If you read Ericsson's papers, he does in fact specifically deny any role to talent and genes, by name, unequivocally. It's not a strawman, it's what he really believes. Deliberate practice is also falsified by Hambrick's meta-analyses: it does not explain much of difference in performance compared to talent. They are not gifted with 'a laser focus', they are gifted with things like intelligence.

new_hackers 10y ago

'Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius.' Nature versus Nurture. Nobody pops out a "math" genius. However, it could be supposed that some pop out with a greater ability to quickly recognize and remember patterns of information acquired by their senses. My ad-hoc life experience has shown that some people are good at most things they try to do, and it takes them significantly less time to acquire and use new skills than the norm.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball. Doesn't really match my experience of gifted children, many of which are not gifted "with a laser focus" on anything, and perform very well at things that they don't spend additional time on. > But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. It pretty clearly does not; people don't get the same results out of putting the same hours into the same things.

jknoepfler 10y ago

As someone who was measurably "gifted" as a child, I will say that the idea that I was more tenacious or laser-focused could not be farther from the truth. Instead, I just "got" things very quickly, such that it required very little effort to learn. I also read at a very high level through practice (I read fiction voraciously), which probably helped. I have since levelled off, and confess to struggling to learn through brute force things I don't readily apprehend. That said, I find the frequency of really good, creative ideas that I have is much higher than my peers, which has translated into a lot of success in the dev world (I dropped out of a phd program in philosophy and joined ama-google-softbook as a dev, as a bridge to starting a business). I don't dispute that effort is a variable in long term performance, but it's more of a criterion for long term performance than a predictor of raw talent imo. I will also say that being singled out for special treatment is pretty silly, I think a more constructive use of my time as a child would have been to help peers who were struggling.

jknoepfler 10y ago

As someone who was measurably "gifted" as a child, I will say that the idea that I was more tenacious or laser-focused could not be farther from the truth. Instead, I just "got" things very quickly, such that it required very little effort to learn. I also read at a very high level through practice (I read fiction voraciously), which probably helped. I have since levelled off, and confess to struggling to learn through brute force things I don't readily apprehend. That said, I find the frequency of really good, creative ideas that I have is much higher than my peers, which has translated into a lot of success in the dev world (I dropped out of a phd program in philosophy and joined ama-google-softbook as a dev). I don't dispute that effort is a variable in long term performance, but it's more of a criterion for long term performance than a predictor of raw talent imo. I will also say that being singled out for special treatment is pretty silly, I think a more constructive use of my time as a child would have been to help peers who were struggling.

gmarx 10y ago

How would you know that? Maybe you had a natural aptitude and so enjoyed geometric objects and music more than others?

__pid_t 10y ago

This. I found that I was on a different level than my peers in college in terms of programming ability. I knew I was on a different level because we had group work, and it was very annoying having to explain simple things like how to do a linear search for an element in an array. At that point, I believed that some people with CS degrees actually _can\'t_ do fizzbuzz In the end, I had practiced more and have pretty much programmed everyday for 7 years, while they only did the minimum requirement to pass classes in CS>