4 ms·

Talent matters

49 points by sun123 15y ago

ColinWright 15y ago
Single page: http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=5AD0C1E4FC0A984AE4CCD72DF111DBBC.w5?a=870400&single=1&f=28&sub=Sunday http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=5AD0C1E4FC0A984...
tokenadult 15y ago
Previous submission of canonical URL, with comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3257339 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3257339 Response piece to the two authors of the New York Times opinion piece, by a leading researcher on the subject, as submitted to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576
kenjackson 15y ago
i'm curious as to how their "core working memory" theory jibes with work showing that chess grandmasters could remember complex chess configurations if they were configurations that could occur in real chess games, but with random board placement they could do no better than ordinary people. Is it that certain people who look at numbers more are able to construct patterns in digits where others wouldn't, but may not be able to do the same with a sequence of pictures or words. My point, I don't think they've done enough to disentangle potential dependences.
- gwern 15y ago
  Remembering board configurations is not a key competency of chess grandmasters - the board is usually right in front of you, after all. It's perfectly consistent for chess grandmasters to be both above average in working memory and also have long-term memory encodings optimized for meaningful board positions (but not random positions).
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 15y ago
One of the things that I hate about journalists is they often don't see that their commentary has no relation to what the source is saying: "He adds that intellectual ability - the trait that an I.Q. score reflects - turns out not to be that important. 'Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,' he writes, 'having additional I.Q. points doesn't seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.'" Yes, IQ isn't that important. Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work!
- spacemanaki 15y ago
  Nitpicking, but the authors aren't actually journalists, they're professors in psychology and cite their own research in the article. Just goes to show it's not always journalists twisting the scientists' work trying to get a juicy piece, sometimes it's the scientists themselves. I don't know if they are twisting the results of their work or not, but it does seem like this piece was a bit fluffy and does as much jumping to conclusions as the stuff that it aims to take down.
- gwern 15y ago
  I didn't think these were journalists writing; Hambrick and Meinz were involved in some of these studies, if you google for them. > Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work! Did we read the same article? IQ still matters past the top 10%! > The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. That is, a 0.8% difference in percentile ranking increased the specified output by 300-500%. Now what do you think a 10% percentile ranking difference would imply?
  - KeithMajhor 15y ago
    > That is, a 0.8% difference in percentile ranking increased the specified output by 300-500%. Now what do you think a 10% percentile ranking difference would imply? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation The difference in intellectual capacity between the top 10%, 1% and 0.1% (or 90, 99, 99.9 percentile) isn't necessarily proportional to the "percentile ranking difference".
omlette 15y ago
i don't understand the point of articles like this. should students give up because they are not the smartest person they know? id rather give it a shot than spend the rest of my life rationalizing that i just didn't have the inborn ability.
balloot 15y ago
This seems like a deeply flawed study. Their definition of "talent" is "performance on tests of working memory"? That just appears to be totally bunk. I also think that the "spend 10,000 hours" thing is flawed, in the fact that you generally only spend 10,000 hours on something you are very interested and talented in. Basically, it is very hard to separate "hard work" from "talent", because most people only really work hard at things they're talented at.
6ren 15y ago
So, practice accounted for 50% of success; working memory accounted for only 7%. Of course talent matters. Hard work matters more. A hard worker with less talent will beat a talented slacker [tortoise & hare]. But a talented worker beats everyone. No surprises here. However... if you work hard, other talents you do have may eventually find an application/be revealed [ugly duckling], because depending on the situation, a flaw can be a gift (and vice versa). So in hindsight, it may turn out that you were the talented one after all.

49 points by sun123 15y ago

Single page: http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=5AD0C1E4FC0A984AE4CCD72DF111DBBC.w5?a=870400&single=1&f=28&sub=Sunday http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=5AD0C1E4FC0A984...

tokenadult 15y ago

Previous submission of canonical URL, with comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3257339 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3257339 Response piece to the two authors of the New York Times opinion piece, by a leading researcher on the subject, as submitted to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576

kenjackson 15y ago

i'm curious as to how their "core working memory" theory jibes with work showing that chess grandmasters could remember complex chess configurations if they were configurations that could occur in real chess games, but with random board placement they could do no better than ordinary people. Is it that certain people who look at numbers more are able to construct patterns in digits where others wouldn't, but may not be able to do the same with a sequence of pictures or words. My point, I don't think they've done enough to disentangle potential dependences.

gwern 15y ago
Remembering board configurations is not a key competency of chess grandmasters - the board is usually right in front of you, after all. It's perfectly consistent for chess grandmasters to be both above average in working memory and also have long-term memory encodings optimized for meaningful board positions (but not random positions).

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 15y ago

One of the things that I hate about journalists is they often don't see that their commentary has no relation to what the source is saying: "He adds that intellectual ability - the trait that an I.Q. score reflects - turns out not to be that important. 'Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,' he writes, 'having additional I.Q. points doesn't seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.'" Yes, IQ isn't that important. Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work!

spacemanaki 15y ago
Nitpicking, but the authors aren't actually journalists, they're professors in psychology and cite their own research in the article. Just goes to show it's not always journalists twisting the scientists' work trying to get a juicy piece, sometimes it's the scientists themselves. I don't know if they are twisting the results of their work or not, but it does seem like this piece was a bit fluffy and does as much jumping to conclusions as the stuff that it aims to take down.
gwern 15y ago
I didn't think these were journalists writing; Hambrick and Meinz were involved in some of these studies, if you google for them. > Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work! Did we read the same article? IQ still matters past the top 10%! > The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. That is, a 0.8% difference in percentile ranking increased the specified output by 300-500%. Now what do you think a 10% percentile ranking difference would imply?
- KeithMajhor 15y ago
  > That is, a 0.8% difference in percentile ranking increased the specified output by 300-500%. Now what do you think a 10% percentile ranking difference would imply? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation The difference in intellectual capacity between the top 10%, 1% and 0.1% (or 90, 99, 99.9 percentile) isn't necessarily proportional to the "percentile ranking difference".

omlette 15y ago

i don't understand the point of articles like this. should students give up because they are not the smartest person they know? id rather give it a shot than spend the rest of my life rationalizing that i just didn't have the inborn ability.

balloot 15y ago

This seems like a deeply flawed study. Their definition of "talent" is "performance on tests of working memory"? That just appears to be totally bunk. I also think that the "spend 10,000 hours" thing is flawed, in the fact that you generally only spend 10,000 hours on something you are very interested and talented in. Basically, it is very hard to separate "hard work" from "talent", because most people only really work hard at things they're talented at.

6ren 15y ago

So, practice accounted for 50% of success; working memory accounted for only 7%. Of course talent matters. Hard work matters more. A hard worker with less talent will beat a talented slacker [tortoise & hare]. But a talented worker beats everyone. No surprises here. However... if you work hard, other talents you do have may eventually find an application/be revealed [ugly duckling], because depending on the situation, a flaw can be a gift (and vice versa). So in hindsight, it may turn out that you were the talented one after all.