4 ms·
Another explanation is simply that, if you reach early adulthood without deciding to devote your life to becoming good at chess, you are unlikely to do it later
by rossdavidh 4y ago
Another explanation is simply that, if you reach early adulthood without deciding to devote your life to becoming good at chess, you are unlikely to do it later. Becoming among the best in the world at anything requires not only natural talent but also focused, almost monomaniacal work, and if you haven't started doing that (for chess) by your mid-teens, it's hard to see why you would start.
If, for some reason, you decided to drop your budding music/engineering/whatever career at age 20 to focus entirely on chess, and you had the natural aptitude to be able to become a GM, perhaps it could happen. But rarely would a person decide to do that, if they had not prior to that point.
- School-Cotton 4y agoBrain plasticity is real. If I dropped everything and devoted my life to studying Chinese I would still never learn to speak it as well as a child who grew up in China. I think both effects have something to do with it.
- rossdavidh 4y agoDefinitely brain plasticity is real, but there are people who learn to speak languages as adults, with native proficiency. I recall hearing on the radio, people in India who (as adults) learned a Midwestern US accent, because they were doing phone support and they could get through each phone call quicker if the old person on the other end of the line wasn't confused by an Indian accent. I am a midwesterner, and I could not detect anything "off" in their midwestern accent, even though I knew they were Indian. In other words, you can only learn a language natively, if you have some good reason to do so, like say money. But, your basic point that both effects have something to do with it, is surely correct.
- School-Cotton 4y agoActually I did something similar - learned to speak French with no perceptible foreign accent at age 17 (unfortunately my abilities have decayed in the intervening years, so I’m sure now I’d sound American, but anyway…) However, accent is only one part of language. I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary, reading speed, writing elegance, etc. of (educated) native speakers.