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> Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). I
by FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
> Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich.
Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect."
And describing something that happens 10% of the time as "rare" sounds a bit weird, like referring to left-handedness (also about 1 in 10) as rare.
- nothercastle 8mo agoBeing smart isn’t enough need resources and need to deal with people
- jhallenworld 8mo agoIt's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful. So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on.
- Retric 8mo agoProdigies almost always spend vastly more time doing their thing than the average kid. So it’s not just some random outcome. That relative advantage goes away as people age and specialize.
- ozim 8mo agoAround puberty brain drops loads of connections to become an adult brain. More than 40% of all synapses are eliminated.
- jacinda 8mo agoThis is an excellent point! People often forget that something uncommon out of a much larger pool is still larger than anything that comes from a smaller pool (base rate neglect). https://www.simplypsychology.org/base-rate-fallacy.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/base-rate-fallacy.html > For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a woman as a politician rather than a banker if they heard that she enjoyed social activism at school—even if they knew that she was drawn from a population consisting of 90% bankers and 10% politicians (APA). The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies.
- mac3n 8mo ago> The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies. have we forgotten Lake Wobegon?
- Nition 8mo agoYou also need to know the percentage of children that become prodigies before you can calculate exactly how much more likely they are to become elite adults. e.g. If 1% of children are prodigies, prodigies are around 10x as likely to become elite as non-prodigies. If 0.1% of children are prodigies, prodigies are around 100x as likely to become elite as non-prodigies. Or in the rather unlikely case that 10% of children are prodigies, non-prodigies become elite at exactly the same rate as prodigies - 10%.
- bsder 8mo agoIn addition, there is a vast difference between say tennis, a sport, and chess, a purely mental activity. A child prodigy in tennis may find that their body didn't grow in such a way to be a pro as an adult. If your opponents are taller, stronger, have better VO2Max, etc. than you as an adult, it doesn't matter how good you were as a child--they're going to beat you as an adult. Chess, of course, now provides the stark reverse contrast. If you weren't a child prodigy in chess, you simply will not excel against the competition as an adult.
- paulmooreparks 8mo agoThere's a saying about golf that probably applies to chess: The best way to improve is to go back in time and learn it at an earlier age.
- thesz 8mo agoThis is a story of how one became better golf player by increasing his strength: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr2pgBTRpK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr2pgBTRpK4 One can enhance cognitive functions by strength training: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8534220/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8534220/ Aside from time travel, the best way to improve in very important things is through strength training.
- paulmooreparks 8mo agoThe saying isn't "The only way..." but "The best way...". Of course one may improve with all the things you mention, and it's a tongue-in-cheek statement anyway, but there's a grain of truth to it. I saw it quoted by one of the greatest teachers in golf, Harvey Penick.
- deaux 8mo agoSimilarly, it's probably not a coincidence that the best F1 driver happens to be the one who started driving karts the earliest (4 years old) and spent the most time doing it out of even all those elite ones.
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- 1980phipsi 8mo agoThis sounds like Berkson’s paradox.
- MrSkelter 8mo agoYou are fundamentally misunderstanding the statistics. 10% of top level adults is a smaller percentage of elite performers than should have been represented by the class of hothoused kids. I.e. it should have been 12% or 15%.
- FeteCommuniste 8mo agoI don't think so? If 0.01% of kids are prodigies then the fact that 10% of them go on to become elite adults means that a prodigy has a far better chance at becoming elite than someone taken at random from the general population of kids.
- kjshsh123 8mo agoI don't think you would be using the general population as the control group. You're not going to take elite chess kids and then random kids and compare in 10 years and see anything interesting. Elite chess kids will be better considering most people don't even play chess... Anyway, I understand being skeptical, and I'm not a fan of pop economics stuff like this, but I still imagine the researchers thought of this.
- davidguetta 8mo agoyeah. child prodigies may just change interest after a while
- Balgair 8mo ago--Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect." The way that I read the original study was that only 10% of elite adults were also elite youth. Not that 10% of elite youth become elite adults. That distinction is the key and surprising. Elite level talent and training and dollar spending in the youth is not then well correlated with elite level practice in adults across many disciplines. As in your country's elite youth training centers (science, music, futbol, Olympic sports, etc) are mostly wasting money.
- m463 8mo agosort of reminds me of telling kids "You're smart!" vs "good work!" success for #1 is because of something innate, while for #2 is hard work. meanwhile failure for #1 has no clear path to success, but #2 is more effort.