5 ms·

Presenting no significant evidence, I have no idea why this position is more scientific than the opposite position (that most of the time, “talent” is actually

by jchw 6y ago

Presenting no significant evidence, I have no idea why this position is more scientific than the opposite position (that most of the time, “talent” is actually just thousands of hours of work.)

atleta 6y ago
Most of the time, maybe. But it depends on what you are measuring against (even if this is just anecdotic). My guess is that your intuition comes from what you see around yourself or even in the industry in general with accomplished, successful developers: they have worked a lot. But that doesn't mean that they don't have talent, i.e. what GP says, special abilities that they were born with (and/or acquired during early childhood). The fact that what we see is that hard work is required, is just the result of competition and survivorship bias. Those, who are not talented enough will leave the field, or never even get in. If we are talking about 'top' developers at 'top' companies, then it's essentially the same. They all work hard, but you ignore those who work hard but don't get there. Indeed it does seem like, as GP says, at least some mental abilities do have both genetic and environmental factors (and those environmental factors mostly count around being born and in childhood). And by the time you are a grown up professional, those are basically both circumstances you can't do anything about. So you can call them talent. It's enough if you think about intelligence, or to be more specific, IQ. It's demonstrated that it behaves like I described above. It has a hereditary and an environmental component, it stabilizes pretty early (relative to becoming a working professional) and it remains a stable measure during your life relative to your cohort. We also know that higher IQ correlates with better problem solving ability which is an important skill if you want to be successful in the field. Fun fact, the blog post mentions Laszlo Polgar (a fellow Hungarian), father and trainer of Judit Polgar the strongest female chess player (wrt Elo points) so far. He had the idea that given good enough education any child can become a prodigy (and thus 'talent' doesn't exist). And to prove himself he started experimenting with his own children, his three daughters. All of them would become professional and accomplished chess players (this was the field Polgar chose to prove his theory). But of course one can argue that being a psychologist he himself must have had above average intelligence which his children could have inherited. So a sample size of 3 is not a strong argument besides the original claim, but of course it's a strong demonstration that at least early education matters a lot. (His 3 children has all learned and trained chess from a very early childhood, IIRC from around the age of 3, and were all home schooled.) Now why did I say fun fact? Because this at the same time underlies what I said above: that early childhood effects count a lot and that later you can't do much about it. Also, if you asked Judit Polgar why Magnus Carlsen is a better player than she was at her best (2882 vs 2735) I doubt she'd say "well, he just worked harder and put in more hours". See: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliability_and_validity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
- gbh444g 6y ago
  Mr. Polgar would know he's wrong if he tried to make just 100 geniuses out of average children. Most people are unable to hold their attention on the same object for longer than a minute.
  - atleta 6y ago
    Agreed. That's one of the things I was trying to say. (Not the attention thing, because that's, for most people, a learned deficiency for sure.) OTOH, he is probably right if you take a less extreme version of his claim: given a very good education (probably following his method to some extent) most people would end up being a lot more adept than what you see today.
nasalgoat 6y ago
I'm fairly confident that there's more to it than just studying something for a long time. Some people simply never grasp a concept despite years of study.
- frongpik 6y ago
  The most appealing explanation of talent I found in buddhism, that all talent is just many hours of pursued interest, millions of hours sometimes, so when someone is born unusually smart, it's because of prior efforts.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  A key factor is confidence, anecdotally speaking. The difference is leader vs follower. The same psychological principles apply. Tech isn’t special.
Blahah 6y ago
Talent is at least partly the ability and propensity to put in thousands of hours of dedicated work. People differ in complex, often stochastic, ways in their specific learned and genetic propensities to be good at things or motivated to do them.
staticautomatic 6y ago
Because it accounts for the relationship between intelligence and talent.
lazyasciiart 6y ago
Probably because everyone knows people who "show talent" without having put in thousands of hours of work, and aren't aware of anyone who put in that work without having identified as having talent first.

by jchw 6y ago

Presenting no significant evidence, I have no idea why this position is more scientific than the opposite position (that most of the time, “talent” is actually just thousands of hours of work.)

atleta 6y ago

Most of the time, maybe. But it depends on what you are measuring against (even if this is just anecdotic). My guess is that your intuition comes from what you see around yourself or even in the industry in general with accomplished, successful developers: they have worked a lot. But that doesn't mean that they don't have talent, i.e. what GP says, special abilities that they were born with (and/or acquired during early childhood). The fact that what we see is that hard work is required, is just the result of competition and survivorship bias. Those, who are not talented enough will leave the field, or never even get in. If we are talking about 'top' developers at 'top' companies, then it's essentially the same. They all work hard, but you ignore those who work hard but don't get there. Indeed it does seem like, as GP says, at least some mental abilities do have both genetic and environmental factors (and those environmental factors mostly count around being born and in childhood). And by the time you are a grown up professional, those are basically both circumstances you can't do anything about. So you can call them talent. It's enough if you think about intelligence, or to be more specific, IQ. It's demonstrated that it behaves like I described above. It has a hereditary and an environmental component, it stabilizes pretty early (relative to becoming a working professional) and it remains a stable measure during your life relative to your cohort. We also know that higher IQ correlates with better problem solving ability which is an important skill if you want to be successful in the field. Fun fact, the blog post mentions Laszlo Polgar (a fellow Hungarian), father and trainer of Judit Polgar the strongest female chess player (wrt Elo points) so far. He had the idea that given good enough education any child can become a prodigy (and thus 'talent' doesn't exist). And to prove himself he started experimenting with his own children, his three daughters. All of them would become professional and accomplished chess players (this was the field Polgar chose to prove his theory). But of course one can argue that being a psychologist he himself must have had above average intelligence which his children could have inherited. So a sample size of 3 is not a strong argument besides the original claim, but of course it's a strong demonstration that at least early education matters a lot. (His 3 children has all learned and trained chess from a very early childhood, IIRC from around the age of 3, and were all home schooled.) Now why did I say fun fact? Because this at the same time underlies what I said above: that early childhood effects count a lot and that later you can't do much about it. Also, if you asked Judit Polgar why Magnus Carlsen is a better player than she was at her best (2882 vs 2735) I doubt she'd say "well, he just worked harder and put in more hours". See: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliability_and_validity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

gbh444g 6y ago
Mr. Polgar would know he's wrong if he tried to make just 100 geniuses out of average children. Most people are unable to hold their attention on the same object for longer than a minute.
- atleta 6y ago
  Agreed. That's one of the things I was trying to say. (Not the attention thing, because that's, for most people, a learned deficiency for sure.) OTOH, he is probably right if you take a less extreme version of his claim: given a very good education (probably following his method to some extent) most people would end up being a lot more adept than what you see today.

nasalgoat 6y ago

I'm fairly confident that there's more to it than just studying something for a long time. Some people simply never grasp a concept despite years of study.

frongpik 6y ago
The most appealing explanation of talent I found in buddhism, that all talent is just many hours of pursued interest, millions of hours sometimes, so when someone is born unusually smart, it's because of prior efforts.
dkdk8283 6y ago
A key factor is confidence, anecdotally speaking. The difference is leader vs follower. The same psychological principles apply. Tech isn’t special.

Blahah 6y ago

Talent is at least partly the ability and propensity to put in thousands of hours of dedicated work. People differ in complex, often stochastic, ways in their specific learned and genetic propensities to be good at things or motivated to do them.

staticautomatic 6y ago

Because it accounts for the relationship between intelligence and talent.

lazyasciiart 6y ago

Probably because everyone knows people who "show talent" without having put in thousands of hours of work, and aren't aware of anyone who put in that work without having identified as having talent first.