7 ms·

Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

147 points by colincooke 8mo ago

KittenInABox 8mo ago
This sort of tracks for me. The smartest people I know as adults mostly fucked around a lot and had wide interests that all culminated in them doing a great thing greatly. The smartest people I know as kids spent hours grinding on something and crashed out in college and are mostly average well-to-dos now.
- georgeburdell 8mo ago
  How many of the children in first group didn’t you meet?
  - nkmnz 8mo ago
    The selection bias might not be relevant if the message is not "slack around as kid, it will make you great later!" but "prodigy youth doesn't guarantee greatness later, as well as non-prodigy youth doesn't prevent you from becoming grat later".
- bitwize 8mo ago
  I'm reminded of a meme on Facebook my wife showed me that was a two-dimensional graph of SAT score vs. GPA. The corner with the highest SAT scores but the lowest GPAs was shaded in and labelled "These are the people I want to hang out with."
  - sointeresting 8mo ago
    Graduated with a 1.7 GPA and a 32 on the ACT. My parents were a little dismayed.
  - idiotsecant 8mo ago
    I'm not sure we should romanticize ADHD, which is what you call that region. If those people could be high SAT and high GPA they would prefer it. Signed, someone in that region.
    - esseph 8mo ago
      Who said anything about ADHD?
      - idiotsecant 8mo ago
        That's who lives in that region, almost exclusively.
        irishcoffee 8mo ago
        Sure isn't. I annihilated the SATs. My grades were only good in high school because I was just "gifted" enough to get As without studying. I do not have and never had ADHD. I also never learned how to study. I almost failed out of college. I didn't know how to study. I didn't have the habits. I sure had a lot of fun in high school and college though.
        nradov 8mo ago
        Nah. There are plenty of intelligent students who don't have ADHD but are either lazy or rebellious enough to not care about conventional measures of academic success.
        esseph 8mo ago
        Nah. I think I graduated HS with a 2.7ish and got a 36 on my ACT in 7th grade.
  - tayo42 8mo ago
    What does the reverse imply? High GPA, low SAT?
    - irishcoffee 8mo ago
      Probably the stupid-and-diligent bit. > In 1933, while overseeing the writing of Truppenführung, the manual for leading combined arms formations, Hammerstein-Equord made one of the most historically prescient observations on leadership. During the writing effort, he offered his personal view of officers, classifying them in a way only he could: > “I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.” https://news.clearancejobs.com/2019/10/08/the-four-classes-of-military-officers-or-office-workers-clever-diligent-stupid-and-lazy/ https://news.clearancejobs.com/2019/10/08/the-four-classes-o...
- contubernio 8mo ago
  For most people the set "the smartest people I know as adults" inludes no elite performers in any area.
incognito124 8mo ago
Hardly a recent discovery. This is basically the entire foreword of David Epstein's book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
- pixl97 8mo ago
  The strength of analogy is one of the more powerful tools humans have. You take findings/experience from a totally different field and use it to escape the local maxima that other field is caught in. It's a relatively common theme in sciences that someone comes out of nowhere and solves a long standing problem in a field because they don't have the specialized set of biases that keeps everyone else trapped.
  - hn_acc1 8mo ago
    IMHO, it's MUCH more common in sciences though, that someone that is expert-level in one field comes into another and thinks they CAN solve a long standing problem in that field quite easily, and then repeatedly falls into all the pitfalls / traps that others in that field learned long ago to avoid (aka Dunning-Kruger). You know, "chemistry is just applied physics", "biology is applied chemistry", etc.. Sure, it's true in one sense, but... No one calculates the wave function of an elephant, for example. One of the benefits of generalism / learning multiple fields (IMHO, again) is that you realizes that special abilities / skills don't necessarily translate well from one field to another. For example, learning to play the violin is very different from, say, playing billiards, yet becoming good at either one involves learning subtle manipulations of basically similarly-shaped pieces of wood. By involvement in multiple fields, you learn to be careful NOT to bring your "everything is a nail" mentality with you from one field to the next.
sbsnjsks 8mo ago
[flagged]
pessimizer 8mo ago
A summary, since the paper isn't open access: https://scientificinquirer.com/2025/12/21/the-counterintuitive-path-to-greatness-new-research-challenges-how-we-nurture-talent/ https://scientificinquirer.com/2025/12/21/the-counterintuiti...
- mathfailure 8mo ago
  This source is shit: it doesn't grant open access.
truted2 8mo ago
> For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals. Motivation if you feel like you're young and failing
- Mgtyalx 8mo ago
  The problem being: access to a prestiges career or opportunity is generally predicated on climbing the academics achievement ladder at an increasingly early age. This leaves the more esoteric people out in the cold. If your not a true prodigy whose achievements outshine the highly credentialed you will struggle to get on.
  - nradov 8mo ago
    In the tech industry, some of the people with the most prestigious careers are literally college dropouts. There are many paths to success, not all are linear.
    - heavenlyblue 8mo ago
      Most of these people are not esoteric though and come from privileged families :)
- soperj 8mo ago
  from sports i know (hockey), generally the next generational player is identified when they're like 12-13 years old (earlier for Gretzky). You look at the top scorers from the Brick Tournament(9-10 year old kids play in that tournament) from 10 years ago (https://www.eliteprospects.com/league/brick-invitational/2015-2016 https://www.eliteprospects.com/league/brick-invitational/201...), 3 of the top 5 scorers were drafted in the first round, and the top goalie was Team Canada's goalie at the world juniors. edit: went back a few more years, lots of NHLers in the top 5 in scoring in the tournament, but some years are more miss than hit.
lostmsu 8mo ago
That could simply be explained by early high achievers being worked hard by their parents or something else while people with innate abilities making progress slower (because most people are not overworked). For the first group they sizzle either because the pressure is removed as they grow up or because they hit their ceiling.
- nick__m 8mo ago
  My experience is almost the inverse of what you describe, I never had to work at all until university, I was a top performer until "physique 1: mécanique newtonienne" it was the first time (and the last) I failed at something academic. That was quite a shock to realize that I had to do the exercises and the homeworks if I wanted to pass. And since I was not use to efforts, I was no longer the top performer in classss where you have to do the exercises to really understand the matter. I was recognized as extremely clever by teachers and other students but let me assure you that over long enough, discipline (witch I don't really have) and consistent efforts beats cleverness.
  - lostmsu 8mo ago
    Not sure how your experience contradicts my point exactly. You're not saying you are in the highest ranks at all, so your experience is irrelevant. If you are, you fit the natural talent with no pressure description.
  - globular-toast 8mo ago
    I was similar except it happened a bit earlier. In the UK the last compulsory school exam, GCSE, seemed like a memory test to me. I could often just figure out stuff in the actual exam even if I'd only briefly overheard something mentioned in a lesson. I didn't do a single piece of homework once I realised there were no real consequences and messed around in lessons. Got top marks in all the subjects I cared about and median in everything else (like art, where I didn't even bother to hang up my final piece). A-level is like the stepping stone to university. It's optional and you only do subjects you like. Suddenly you had to actually understand the stuff. It wasn't just a memory test. The first exams I got B all around. I wasn't happy with this so I started doing homework etc and actually understanding things. Coincidentally, my breakthrough also came with Newtownian mechanics. I was quite good at integration, but I didn't understand why I was doing it. Suddenly the whole thing started to make sense when I realised it was about rates of change etc.
MontyCarloHall 8mo ago
Couldn't this be explained by Berkson's Paradox [0]? [0] https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521 https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521
- efavdb 8mo ago
  Here's the wikipedia on that one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
- lordnacho 8mo ago
  It seems the criticism is indeed Berkson's Paradox, but the example is different to the canonical example of Berkson's paradox. In the canonical example, you have uncorrelated attributes, eg skill and attractiveness in actors, forming a round scatter plot with no correlation. Selecting a subpopulation of top actors who are either skilled or attractive, you get a negative correlation. You can visualize this as chopping the top-right of the round scatter plot off: the chopped off piece is oriented in roughly a line of negative correlation. In this example, if you look in the linked paper inside the post by Dimakis, there is a positively correlated scatter plot: You can tell the shape is correlated positively between youth and adult performance. But in this case, if you condition on the extremes of performance, you end up selecting a cloud of points that has flat to slight negative correlation.
  - MontyCarloHall 8mo ago
    Correlated attributes can still lead to the paradox, so long as the error measured parallel to the cutoff line (the "fuzziness" of the correlation) is greater than the slope of the cutoff line. Here are a couple cartoons to demonstrate. Denote each datapoint with I or E, depending on whether it's included or excluded in the region x + y > z. Uncorrelated attributes: y │ ∙ │ ∙∙ IIIIIII │ E∙∙IIIIIIII │ EEEE∙∙IIIIIII │ EEEEEE∙∙IIIII │ EEEEEEEE∙∙III │ EEEEEEEEE∙∙ │ EEEEEEE ∙∙ │ ∙ └───────────────────x Looking at just the Included points shows clear (spurious) negative correlation. Correlated attributes: y │ ∙ │ ∙∙ IIII │ ∙∙IIIIII │ E∙∙IIIII │ EEEE∙III │ EEEEEE∙∙ │ EEEE ∙∙ │ E ∙∙ │ ∙ └─────────────────x The Included points still have a negative spurious correlation, though it's smaller than for the uncorrelated cartoon.
arjie 8mo ago
Seems very Taleb's Ugly Surgeon / Berkson's Paradox to me. It's like how software engineers who are at Google are worse if they're better competitive programmers. e.g. https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/taleb-surgeon/ https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/taleb-surgeon/
- jongjong 8mo ago
  Makes sense. My perspective is that fast learners are fast because they absorb information quickly without the overhead of cross-domain synthesis. They have more logical contradictions in their minds which they haven't resolved or aren't even aware of. Their worldview is not coherent as a whole. In some cases, they don't have a worldview; instead they just rely on expert data to inform their decisions... But the experts themselves are often victim to the same kind of domain-specific tunnel vision. Such people often lack creativity in their work because cross-domain pattern synthesis is precisely how you can solve complex problems that haven't been solved before.
  - gmadsen 8mo ago
    That is a very idealistic perspective. There are certainly fast learners due to the fact they are faster at cross domain synthesis.
    - maxbond 8mo ago
      In my experience when I am able to pick something up quickly it's because I can exploit cross domain knowledge. I have ready-made analogies to things I understand, or I understand the domain which informs the fundamentals of the new domain.
      - WalterBright 8mo ago
        I was surprised in college that the math for electronics circuits, mass-spring-damper systems, stress of materials, etc., was all the same.
      - meetingthrower 8mo ago
atriarch 8mo ago
Exponential growth is the path of longsuffering, and one doesn't always make it. It sucks and looks and feels bad for all involved. This is why advice such as, "Ignore the naysayers." is clutch. And other advice once one starts to rocket shoot like "Stay in your lane." is the absolute worst advice of all time. (IYKYK - Rest in peace Scott Adams) Another thought - Einstein had reviewed thousands of patents when he worked on the train - that's a hell of data set for an LM to start with.
joe_the_user 8mo ago
So consider these quotes: Early exceptional performers and later exceptional performers within a domain are rarely the same individuals but are largely discrete populations over time... and Most top achievers (Nobel laureates and world-class musicians, athletes, and chess players) demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years. Together. A simple explanation: high performance requires quite a bit of specific preparation. But "exceptional" performance is mostly random relative to the larger population of high performers in terms of the underlying training-to-skills-to-achievement "equation". Especially, being at the top tends to get someone more resources than those nearly at the top who don't have visible/certified achievements. I'd that billing your work "the study of the very best" really gives you strong marketing spin and that makes people tempted to find simplistic markers rather than looking at the often random processes involved in visible success. IE, I haven't touched on reversion to mean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean).
hockey 8mo ago
Lower early life performance we with lots of multidisciplinary experience, later life hyperfocus on a specific discipline until world-class levels are reached. Sounds like they're describing ADHD. (Side note after the important ADHD joke: there's an old sport textbook called "Periodization" that mentions focusing on breadth rather than depth of sports experience in early life is a better path to olympic-level performance than just going hard in a single sport from a young age.)
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  It’s amazing how far the pop-culture definition of ADHD has strayed from the medical definition. “Hyperfocus … until world class performance” is in no way consistent with the medical definition of ADHD. I’m well aware that “hyperfocus” is a prominent part of the Reddit and TikTok-ification of ADHD diagnostics, but being able to focus intensely on your job until you perform it at world class levels is decisively not indicative of ADHD. Hyperfocus is not part of official ADHD diagnostic criteria and the only pseudo-studies that have examined it have taken place as self-reported questionnaires with small sample sizes in the era since it became a popular topic on social media, unfortunately. ADHD is not correlated with high career performance, sadly, and represents a real obstacle for those struggling with it. The current social media trend of equating ADHD to a superpower which propels people to focus intensely and excel is really unfortunate.
  - zozbot234 8mo ago
    Hyperfocus is not about "focusing intensely on your job until you perform it at world-class level". The hyperfocus of ADHD is essentially random and driven by the very same inattentive "monkey mind" that's the defining feature of ADHD itself: it's not necessarily targeted to a productive task. Those who face this issue can of course try to "gamify" their upcoming tasks to themselves in a way that will hopefully steer that focus in desirable directions, but that's not always easy. The monkey mind also resists ongoing habit formation, which is the tool most non-ADHD folks would generally resort to in order to effectively manage their overall schedule and just be more on-task.
eudamoniac 8mo ago
This is somewhat related to the application of strength to various sports and physical endeavors. Most sports utilize strength to a large degree, but it's usually in a narrow application, e.g. a golf swing, a sprinter's run, a rock climber's grip. The naive algorithm to improve at these sports is to practice them, and the slightly less naive method is to train for strength in that narrow application, for example you often see rock climbers training by doing rock climbing specific grip exercises. Unintuitively, strength is a general adaptation that applies to all specific movements. A muscle is either strengthened across a range of motion, or it isn't; a muscle cannot be strong swinging a club while not strong lifting a weight, nor can it be strong holding a rock while weak holding a bar. It is optimal for most sports to train for general strength via barbells, and then to practice that strength via the sport. The rock climber should do heavy deadlifts and chinups to train his grip (and everything else), not special rock grip exercises, for the latter are difficult to progress in small increments and are inefficient in a time sense. A man who can do chinups with 150 pounds hanging from his waist, and who can hold a 550 pound barbell, will not have a problem hanging onto the bouldering wall; he need only practice his technique. To the article's point, you should get "strong" in everything until you decide to practice that strength in one thing.
- cindyllm 8mo ago
  [dead]
DataDaoDe 8mo ago
Clicking on this link just reminded me again that science (like all such restricted access journals) is an operation that relies heavily on publicly funded research and unpaid academic labor. And yet their access restriction not only removes the public from consuming the fruits of their labor, but it also systematically harms less well-resourced institutions, independent scholars and impedes the spread of knowledge (particularly in areas of the world that need it most). I wish we could reach a point where we wouldn't allow this anymore.
drivebyhooting 8mo ago
This seems to miss the mark in defining “peak performance”. Magnus Carlsen, Lang Lang, Terence Tao all were precocious and achieved elite performance in their youth.
iainctduncan 8mo ago
One interesting reason this happens, at least in the music field, is the adult disadvantages that often go along with various forms of savantism. I have spoken with a number of fellow music academics about this, and it's not uncommon that the things that make one a young prodigy are the same things that give one real obstacles to making it in the regular world, and this can impose a ceiling on where they get to. For example, many music prodigies have never "really had to work" and once they get to having to shoulder the boring reponsibilities that go with building a career, they instead alienate people, or just can't do things that are hard for them because it's always been easy. Maybe they can't play off charts unless they've heard it, or aren't used to following instructions/cues/being the lead, etc. And unless they are truly, truly rare air, real career gigs have boring work elements too. Savantism can be pretty damned weird. I've known a few, including a couple who will never have an adult career beyond local gigs because of their mental disabilities in other, non-music areas. The Oliver Sacks book "Musicophelia" has fascinating case stories about it.
Strilanc 8mo ago
Wasn't this study immediately debunked due to bad statistical methods? See https://zenodo.org/records/18002186 https://zenodo.org/records/18002186 > Using simple simulations,we show that this pattern arises naturally from collider bias when selection into elitesamples depends on both early and adult performance. Consequently, associationsestimated within elite samples are descriptively accurate for the selected population,but causally misleading, and should not be used to infer developmental mechanisms
- Balgair 8mo ago
  Is that paper in print? I can't seem to find if it was peer reviewed. If the paper is true, then, yeesh! That's a pretty big miss on the part of Güllich et al. Reading through the very short paper there, it seems to not have gone through review yet (typos, mispellings, etc). Also, it's not clear that the data in the tables or the figure are from Güllich's work or are simulations meant to illustrate their idea (" True and estimated covariate effects in the presence of simulated collider bias in the full and selected samples"). Being more clear where the data is coming from may help the argument, but I likely just missed some sentence or something. I'll be interested to see where this goes. That Güllich managed to get the paper into Science in the first place lends credence to them having gone through something as simple as Berkson's Paradox and have accounted for that. It's not everyday you get something as 'soft' as that paper into Science, after all. If not, then wow! standards for review really have slipped!
tbrownaw 8mo ago
...so some people develop their sills using something like RAD* tooling which lets them develop skills quickly, and some don't and end up taking longer but getting better eventual results? Also, the ungated part doesn't say how they're measure "top" high-school vs university students. It doesn't match what I've heard about the persistence and consistency of basically all standardized tests; are they using within-school rankings for this? If so, that would fit perfectly with students being sorted during university selection. . * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development
contubernio 8mo ago
The abstract seems already highly tendentious. It acts like 90% nonoverlap (whatever that means precisely) between sets A and B is very small overlap, when at a population level it is huge overlap. If the set of yough high performers and the set of adult high performers have 10% overlap, it means that youth high performance is a tremendously good indicator for adult high performance.
Selkirk 8mo ago
Sounds like "Old Masters and Young Geniuses" https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133805/old-masters-and-young-geniuses https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133805/ol... That book used artwork valuation as a performance measure and analyzed it over top artist's lifetimes finding two patterns. The "Young Genius" where an artist has a vision and realizes some innovation and their most valuable works center around that with value tapering off over their life. Picasso. (Who had two peaks but still fit the pattern.) Contrast to the "Old Master." This is someone who keeps refining their craft and their most valuable works and innovations are their late life works. Cézanne.

147 points by colincooke 8mo ago

This sort of tracks for me. The smartest people I know as adults mostly fucked around a lot and had wide interests that all culminated in them doing a great thing greatly. The smartest people I know as kids spent hours grinding on something and crashed out in college and are mostly average well-to-dos now.

georgeburdell 8mo ago
How many of the children in first group didn’t you meet?
- nkmnz 8mo ago
  The selection bias might not be relevant if the message is not "slack around as kid, it will make you great later!" but "prodigy youth doesn't guarantee greatness later, as well as non-prodigy youth doesn't prevent you from becoming grat later".
bitwize 8mo ago
I'm reminded of a meme on Facebook my wife showed me that was a two-dimensional graph of SAT score vs. GPA. The corner with the highest SAT scores but the lowest GPAs was shaded in and labelled "These are the people I want to hang out with."
- sointeresting 8mo ago
  Graduated with a 1.7 GPA and a 32 on the ACT. My parents were a little dismayed.
- idiotsecant 8mo ago
  I'm not sure we should romanticize ADHD, which is what you call that region. If those people could be high SAT and high GPA they would prefer it. Signed, someone in that region.
  - esseph 8mo ago
    Who said anything about ADHD?
    - idiotsecant 8mo ago
      That's who lives in that region, almost exclusively.
      - irishcoffee 8mo ago
        Sure isn't. I annihilated the SATs. My grades were only good in high school because I was just "gifted" enough to get As without studying. I do not have and never had ADHD. I also never learned how to study. I almost failed out of college. I didn't know how to study. I didn't have the habits. I sure had a lot of fun in high school and college though.
      - nradov 8mo ago
        Nah. There are plenty of intelligent students who don't have ADHD but are either lazy or rebellious enough to not care about conventional measures of academic success.
      - esseph 8mo ago
        Nah. I think I graduated HS with a 2.7ish and got a 36 on my ACT in 7th grade.
- tayo42 8mo ago
  What does the reverse imply? High GPA, low SAT?
  - irishcoffee 8mo ago
    Probably the stupid-and-diligent bit. > In 1933, while overseeing the writing of Truppenführung, the manual for leading combined arms formations, Hammerstein-Equord made one of the most historically prescient observations on leadership. During the writing effort, he offered his personal view of officers, classifying them in a way only he could: > “I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.” https://news.clearancejobs.com/2019/10/08/the-four-classes-of-military-officers-or-office-workers-clever-diligent-stupid-and-lazy/ https://news.clearancejobs.com/2019/10/08/the-four-classes-o...
contubernio 8mo ago
For most people the set "the smartest people I know as adults" inludes no elite performers in any area.

incognito124 8mo ago

Hardly a recent discovery. This is basically the entire foreword of David Epstein's book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

pixl97 8mo ago
The strength of analogy is one of the more powerful tools humans have. You take findings/experience from a totally different field and use it to escape the local maxima that other field is caught in. It's a relatively common theme in sciences that someone comes out of nowhere and solves a long standing problem in a field because they don't have the specialized set of biases that keeps everyone else trapped.
- hn_acc1 8mo ago
  IMHO, it's MUCH more common in sciences though, that someone that is expert-level in one field comes into another and thinks they CAN solve a long standing problem in that field quite easily, and then repeatedly falls into all the pitfalls / traps that others in that field learned long ago to avoid (aka Dunning-Kruger). You know, "chemistry is just applied physics", "biology is applied chemistry", etc.. Sure, it's true in one sense, but... No one calculates the wave function of an elephant, for example. One of the benefits of generalism / learning multiple fields (IMHO, again) is that you realizes that special abilities / skills don't necessarily translate well from one field to another. For example, learning to play the violin is very different from, say, playing billiards, yet becoming good at either one involves learning subtle manipulations of basically similarly-shaped pieces of wood. By involvement in multiple fields, you learn to be careful NOT to bring your "everything is a nail" mentality with you from one field to the next.

sbsnjsks 8mo ago

[flagged]

pessimizer 8mo ago

A summary, since the paper isn't open access: https://scientificinquirer.com/2025/12/21/the-counterintuitive-path-to-greatness-new-research-challenges-how-we-nurture-talent/ https://scientificinquirer.com/2025/12/21/the-counterintuiti...

mathfailure 8mo ago
This source is shit: it doesn't grant open access.

truted2 8mo ago

> For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals. Motivation if you feel like you're young and failing

Mgtyalx 8mo ago
The problem being: access to a prestiges career or opportunity is generally predicated on climbing the academics achievement ladder at an increasingly early age. This leaves the more esoteric people out in the cold. If your not a true prodigy whose achievements outshine the highly credentialed you will struggle to get on.
- nradov 8mo ago
  In the tech industry, some of the people with the most prestigious careers are literally college dropouts. There are many paths to success, not all are linear.
  - heavenlyblue 8mo ago
    Most of these people are not esoteric though and come from privileged families :)
soperj 8mo ago
from sports i know (hockey), generally the next generational player is identified when they're like 12-13 years old (earlier for Gretzky). You look at the top scorers from the Brick Tournament(9-10 year old kids play in that tournament) from 10 years ago (https://www.eliteprospects.com/league/brick-invitational/2015-2016 https://www.eliteprospects.com/league/brick-invitational/201...), 3 of the top 5 scorers were drafted in the first round, and the top goalie was Team Canada's goalie at the world juniors. edit: went back a few more years, lots of NHLers in the top 5 in scoring in the tournament, but some years are more miss than hit.

lostmsu 8mo ago

That could simply be explained by early high achievers being worked hard by their parents or something else while people with innate abilities making progress slower (because most people are not overworked). For the first group they sizzle either because the pressure is removed as they grow up or because they hit their ceiling.

nick__m 8mo ago
My experience is almost the inverse of what you describe, I never had to work at all until university, I was a top performer until "physique 1: mécanique newtonienne" it was the first time (and the last) I failed at something academic. That was quite a shock to realize that I had to do the exercises and the homeworks if I wanted to pass. And since I was not use to efforts, I was no longer the top performer in classss where you have to do the exercises to really understand the matter. I was recognized as extremely clever by teachers and other students but let me assure you that over long enough, discipline (witch I don't really have) and consistent efforts beats cleverness.
- lostmsu 8mo ago
  Not sure how your experience contradicts my point exactly. You're not saying you are in the highest ranks at all, so your experience is irrelevant. If you are, you fit the natural talent with no pressure description.
- globular-toast 8mo ago
  I was similar except it happened a bit earlier. In the UK the last compulsory school exam, GCSE, seemed like a memory test to me. I could often just figure out stuff in the actual exam even if I'd only briefly overheard something mentioned in a lesson. I didn't do a single piece of homework once I realised there were no real consequences and messed around in lessons. Got top marks in all the subjects I cared about and median in everything else (like art, where I didn't even bother to hang up my final piece). A-level is like the stepping stone to university. It's optional and you only do subjects you like. Suddenly you had to actually understand the stuff. It wasn't just a memory test. The first exams I got B all around. I wasn't happy with this so I started doing homework etc and actually understanding things. Coincidentally, my breakthrough also came with Newtownian mechanics. I was quite good at integration, but I didn't understand why I was doing it. Suddenly the whole thing started to make sense when I realised it was about rates of change etc.

MontyCarloHall 8mo ago

Couldn't this be explained by Berkson's Paradox [0]? [0] https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521 https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521

efavdb 8mo ago
Here's the wikipedia on that one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
lordnacho 8mo ago
It seems the criticism is indeed Berkson's Paradox, but the example is different to the canonical example of Berkson's paradox. In the canonical example, you have uncorrelated attributes, eg skill and attractiveness in actors, forming a round scatter plot with no correlation. Selecting a subpopulation of top actors who are either skilled or attractive, you get a negative correlation. You can visualize this as chopping the top-right of the round scatter plot off: the chopped off piece is oriented in roughly a line of negative correlation. In this example, if you look in the linked paper inside the post by Dimakis, there is a positively correlated scatter plot: You can tell the shape is correlated positively between youth and adult performance. But in this case, if you condition on the extremes of performance, you end up selecting a cloud of points that has flat to slight negative correlation.
- MontyCarloHall 8mo ago
  Correlated attributes can still lead to the paradox, so long as the error measured parallel to the cutoff line (the "fuzziness" of the correlation) is greater than the slope of the cutoff line. Here are a couple cartoons to demonstrate. Denote each datapoint with I or E, depending on whether it's included or excluded in the region x + y > z. Uncorrelated attributes: y │ ∙ │ ∙∙ IIIIIII │ E∙∙IIIIIIII │ EEEE∙∙IIIIIII │ EEEEEE∙∙IIIII │ EEEEEEEE∙∙III │ EEEEEEEEE∙∙ │ EEEEEEE ∙∙ │ ∙ └───────────────────x Looking at just the Included points shows clear (spurious) negative correlation. Correlated attributes: y │ ∙ │ ∙∙ IIII │ ∙∙IIIIII │ E∙∙IIIII │ EEEE∙III │ EEEEEE∙∙ │ EEEE ∙∙ │ E ∙∙ │ ∙ └─────────────────x The Included points still have a negative spurious correlation, though it's smaller than for the uncorrelated cartoon.

arjie 8mo ago

Seems very Taleb's Ugly Surgeon / Berkson's Paradox to me. It's like how software engineers who are at Google are worse if they're better competitive programmers. e.g. https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/taleb-surgeon/ https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/taleb-surgeon/

jongjong 8mo ago
Makes sense. My perspective is that fast learners are fast because they absorb information quickly without the overhead of cross-domain synthesis. They have more logical contradictions in their minds which they haven't resolved or aren't even aware of. Their worldview is not coherent as a whole. In some cases, they don't have a worldview; instead they just rely on expert data to inform their decisions... But the experts themselves are often victim to the same kind of domain-specific tunnel vision. Such people often lack creativity in their work because cross-domain pattern synthesis is precisely how you can solve complex problems that haven't been solved before.
- gmadsen 8mo ago
  That is a very idealistic perspective. There are certainly fast learners due to the fact they are faster at cross domain synthesis.
  - maxbond 8mo ago
    In my experience when I am able to pick something up quickly it's because I can exploit cross domain knowledge. I have ready-made analogies to things I understand, or I understand the domain which informs the fundamentals of the new domain.
    - WalterBright 8mo ago
      I was surprised in college that the math for electronics circuits, mass-spring-damper systems, stress of materials, etc., was all the same.
    - meetingthrower 8mo ago

atriarch 8mo ago

Exponential growth is the path of longsuffering, and one doesn't always make it. It sucks and looks and feels bad for all involved. This is why advice such as, "Ignore the naysayers." is clutch. And other advice once one starts to rocket shoot like "Stay in your lane." is the absolute worst advice of all time. (IYKYK - Rest in peace Scott Adams) Another thought - Einstein had reviewed thousands of patents when he worked on the train - that's a hell of data set for an LM to start with.

joe_the_user 8mo ago

So consider these quotes: Early exceptional performers and later exceptional performers within a domain are rarely the same individuals but are largely discrete populations over time... and Most top achievers (Nobel laureates and world-class musicians, athletes, and chess players) demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years. Together. A simple explanation: high performance requires quite a bit of specific preparation. But "exceptional" performance is mostly random relative to the larger population of high performers in terms of the underlying training-to-skills-to-achievement "equation". Especially, being at the top tends to get someone more resources than those nearly at the top who don't have visible/certified achievements. I'd that billing your work "the study of the very best" really gives you strong marketing spin and that makes people tempted to find simplistic markers rather than looking at the often random processes involved in visible success. IE, I haven't touched on reversion to mean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean).

hockey 8mo ago

Lower early life performance we with lots of multidisciplinary experience, later life hyperfocus on a specific discipline until world-class levels are reached. Sounds like they're describing ADHD. (Side note after the important ADHD joke: there's an old sport textbook called "Periodization" that mentions focusing on breadth rather than depth of sports experience in early life is a better path to olympic-level performance than just going hard in a single sport from a young age.)

Aurornis 8mo ago
It’s amazing how far the pop-culture definition of ADHD has strayed from the medical definition. “Hyperfocus … until world class performance” is in no way consistent with the medical definition of ADHD. I’m well aware that “hyperfocus” is a prominent part of the Reddit and TikTok-ification of ADHD diagnostics, but being able to focus intensely on your job until you perform it at world class levels is decisively not indicative of ADHD. Hyperfocus is not part of official ADHD diagnostic criteria and the only pseudo-studies that have examined it have taken place as self-reported questionnaires with small sample sizes in the era since it became a popular topic on social media, unfortunately. ADHD is not correlated with high career performance, sadly, and represents a real obstacle for those struggling with it. The current social media trend of equating ADHD to a superpower which propels people to focus intensely and excel is really unfortunate.
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  Hyperfocus is not about "focusing intensely on your job until you perform it at world-class level". The hyperfocus of ADHD is essentially random and driven by the very same inattentive "monkey mind" that's the defining feature of ADHD itself: it's not necessarily targeted to a productive task. Those who face this issue can of course try to "gamify" their upcoming tasks to themselves in a way that will hopefully steer that focus in desirable directions, but that's not always easy. The monkey mind also resists ongoing habit formation, which is the tool most non-ADHD folks would generally resort to in order to effectively manage their overall schedule and just be more on-task.

eudamoniac 8mo ago

This is somewhat related to the application of strength to various sports and physical endeavors. Most sports utilize strength to a large degree, but it's usually in a narrow application, e.g. a golf swing, a sprinter's run, a rock climber's grip. The naive algorithm to improve at these sports is to practice them, and the slightly less naive method is to train for strength in that narrow application, for example you often see rock climbers training by doing rock climbing specific grip exercises. Unintuitively, strength is a general adaptation that applies to all specific movements. A muscle is either strengthened across a range of motion, or it isn't; a muscle cannot be strong swinging a club while not strong lifting a weight, nor can it be strong holding a rock while weak holding a bar. It is optimal for most sports to train for general strength via barbells, and then to practice that strength via the sport. The rock climber should do heavy deadlifts and chinups to train his grip (and everything else), not special rock grip exercises, for the latter are difficult to progress in small increments and are inefficient in a time sense. A man who can do chinups with 150 pounds hanging from his waist, and who can hold a 550 pound barbell, will not have a problem hanging onto the bouldering wall; he need only practice his technique. To the article's point, you should get "strong" in everything until you decide to practice that strength in one thing.

cindyllm 8mo ago
[dead]

DataDaoDe 8mo ago

Clicking on this link just reminded me again that science (like all such restricted access journals) is an operation that relies heavily on publicly funded research and unpaid academic labor. And yet their access restriction not only removes the public from consuming the fruits of their labor, but it also systematically harms less well-resourced institutions, independent scholars and impedes the spread of knowledge (particularly in areas of the world that need it most). I wish we could reach a point where we wouldn't allow this anymore.

drivebyhooting 8mo ago

This seems to miss the mark in defining “peak performance”. Magnus Carlsen, Lang Lang, Terence Tao all were precocious and achieved elite performance in their youth.

iainctduncan 8mo ago

One interesting reason this happens, at least in the music field, is the adult disadvantages that often go along with various forms of savantism. I have spoken with a number of fellow music academics about this, and it's not uncommon that the things that make one a young prodigy are the same things that give one real obstacles to making it in the regular world, and this can impose a ceiling on where they get to. For example, many music prodigies have never "really had to work" and once they get to having to shoulder the boring reponsibilities that go with building a career, they instead alienate people, or just can't do things that are hard for them because it's always been easy. Maybe they can't play off charts unless they've heard it, or aren't used to following instructions/cues/being the lead, etc. And unless they are truly, truly rare air, real career gigs have boring work elements too. Savantism can be pretty damned weird. I've known a few, including a couple who will never have an adult career beyond local gigs because of their mental disabilities in other, non-music areas. The Oliver Sacks book "Musicophelia" has fascinating case stories about it.

Strilanc 8mo ago

Wasn't this study immediately debunked due to bad statistical methods? See https://zenodo.org/records/18002186 https://zenodo.org/records/18002186 > Using simple simulations,we show that this pattern arises naturally from collider bias when selection into elitesamples depends on both early and adult performance. Consequently, associationsestimated within elite samples are descriptively accurate for the selected population,but causally misleading, and should not be used to infer developmental mechanisms

Balgair 8mo ago
Is that paper in print? I can't seem to find if it was peer reviewed. If the paper is true, then, yeesh! That's a pretty big miss on the part of Güllich et al. Reading through the very short paper there, it seems to not have gone through review yet (typos, mispellings, etc). Also, it's not clear that the data in the tables or the figure are from Güllich's work or are simulations meant to illustrate their idea (" True and estimated covariate effects in the presence of simulated collider bias in the full and selected samples"). Being more clear where the data is coming from may help the argument, but I likely just missed some sentence or something. I'll be interested to see where this goes. That Güllich managed to get the paper into Science in the first place lends credence to them having gone through something as simple as Berkson's Paradox and have accounted for that. It's not everyday you get something as 'soft' as that paper into Science, after all. If not, then wow! standards for review really have slipped!

tbrownaw 8mo ago

...so some people develop their sills using something like RAD* tooling which lets them develop skills quickly, and some don't and end up taking longer but getting better eventual results? Also, the ungated part doesn't say how they're measure "top" high-school vs university students. It doesn't match what I've heard about the persistence and consistency of basically all standardized tests; are they using within-school rankings for this? If so, that would fit perfectly with students being sorted during university selection. . * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development

contubernio 8mo ago

The abstract seems already highly tendentious. It acts like 90% nonoverlap (whatever that means precisely) between sets A and B is very small overlap, when at a population level it is huge overlap. If the set of yough high performers and the set of adult high performers have 10% overlap, it means that youth high performance is a tremendously good indicator for adult high performance.

Selkirk 8mo ago

Sounds like "Old Masters and Young Geniuses" https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133805/old-masters-and-young-geniuses https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133805/ol... That book used artwork valuation as a performance measure and analyzed it over top artist's lifetimes finding two patterns. The "Young Genius" where an artist has a vision and realizes some innovation and their most valuable works center around that with value tapering off over their life. Picasso. (Who had two peaks but still fit the pattern.) Contrast to the "Old Master." This is someone who keeps refining their craft and their most valuable works and innovations are their late life works. Cézanne.