> 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.
This 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).
> 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.
You 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%.
It'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.
In 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.
As someone who was not a child prodigy, but still closer to one than to normies, I can say that achieving results easily in childhood leads to not developing good discipline and persistence that are crucial in the adult world.
There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most.
On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.
That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're so smart, keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well.
This observation about discipline is perceptive but I have also seen variations of it dozens and dozens of times on HN.
Tons of former gifted kids on here. The gap between assumed potential and actual reality apparently has to get blamed on someone, and that person is the kid themselves.
All parts seem true to me. Most kids think they were more gifted than they were. Learning to work hard and be persistent was actually more important. A lot of talk about being gifted was an obstacle to that.
I recall being told by an English teacher in high school once that because it was so easy for me to write something passable, I wasn't trying hard enough to write something excellent. Wish he pushed me harder on that.
I admit I haven't read the full study, but I'm extremely skeptical that the takeaway as given in the article is valid.
Take violinists, for example. Essentially every single world renowned soloist was "some sort" of child prodigy. Now, I've heard some soloists argue that they were not, in fact, child prodigies. For example, may favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, has said this. She still debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12, and here she is performing as a soloist at 15: https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI. Nathan Milstein, one of the greatest violinists of all time, said he was "not very good until his teens" - he still started playing at the age of 5, and at the age of 11 Leopold Auer, a great violin teacher, invited him to become one of his students, so he clearly saw his potential.
I have no doubt lots of prodigies burn out. But, at least in the world of violins, essentially every great soloist was playing at an extremely high level by the time they were in middle school.
In contrast, it's rare to find any classical singers who were child prodigies. Whatever skills you may develop as a child there apparently don't transfer well into adulthood. It makes sense to me that there may be fine ear/motorics skills which are far more relevant to violinists, which do transfer.
Natural ability (physical or mental) is not strongly correlated with the personality traits that enable a person to "perform", "succeed", or "achieve" in society the way it is structured. In fact, they may be inversely correlated (consider how often people in leadership positions are not apparently exceptional).
There's a story about, I think, the kickboxer/fighter Alistair Overeem that he was playing Connect 4, and lost, and kept demanding rematches until he had the winning record. Just a refusal to be the loser. That matches every story I've ever heard about Michael Jordan.
I'm not quite a "child prodigy", but I did skip two grades in math in school. It made me feel very special when it was a kid but as a thirty-something software person I don't think I'm smarter than most of my coworkers now.
I think I was better than most kids at math, particularly algebra, but those kids grew up and caught up and I suspect many of them are as good or better at math than I am. I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.
To be fair, in my journey through public school, there was no difference in the math level from one grade to the next. Ok, there was a little, but the teacher was still going through the times tables in grade 7.
I was actually bumped to ninth grade math from seventh grade, so I would have been twelve.
ETA:
Should add that this carried on through high school, and since I finished my math two years early, I took college-level courses for math the last two years.
> I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.
That makes me think back to my elementary school, where a lot of the kids who got into the "gifted" program just happened to be, surprise surprise, some of the oldest kids in their grade.
At that age the better part of a year in brain development can be exactly the "edge" one needs to excel. And then it can become self-reinforcing when kids gravitate toward the areas in which they dominate their peers.
This article is taking some liberties with the word "prodigy" that I disagree with.
If the way you nurture a talented student is via "intense drilling", I would argue that the student is not a prodigy in the traditional sense, but a talented and determined student who may or may not be dealing with parental pressure.
The actual prodigies I've known absorb information and gain skills without significant effort - I knew someone who enrolled in a calculus class, skimmed through the book in a week or so, and then would only show up to class for tests (which they would ace).
So the article conclusion doesn't surprise me - inflict relentless training on a young talented person and yeah maybe they won't want to do that as an adult.
But as far as actual "prodigies"? There is no burn-out because there is no (or minimal) effort. The choice of whether to stick with an area of interest through adulthood is more of a personal preference than anything ingrained.
Fantastic book called Range that talks about this phenomenon. Surprisingly, the child prodigy to adult superstar pipeline is less common than the generalist to adult superstar pipeline.
Tiger Woods is the classic example of a child prodigy, but it turns out his path is unusual for superstars. Roger Federer’s (who played a wide range of sports growing up until he specialized in tennis as a teen) is more common.
It's not really surprising when it's a few thousand child prodigies competing against 7 billion people for a small handful of slots 10 years in the future. Everyday stuff like depression, changing interests, financial pressures, lack of desire to compete, will knock out more than half of the child prodigies, making room for the other 7 billion people.
It depends on the field, afaik. I know someone who was an exceptional classical pianist, but they told me they knew they'd never make it in that field: They started at age 15, which was much too late to acquire the skills needed. Professional musicians I spoke to agreed.
Tiger woods. I can't think of any tennis player who has been in the top 100 for the past few decades who didn't commit to it totally as a young child. Start tennis at 10? Too old. Swimmers. Has anyone stumbled into sporting greatness from being outside the top 5%? Or 1% when they hit adulthood?
So what is being said? A huge amount of elite success is in the hardware, i.e. the body &/or brain. These go through rather large changes between ages 10 an 18. Puberty. This shakes up the ordering among those who showed enough promise to have already committed to becoming elite.
What am I missing here? Seems like this research is nothing more than "Kids change through puberty, the nature and sizes of the changes are a bit of a lottery for each kid." Much like the the genetic factors are also a lottery so you can't reliably predict who is going to be great from the results of their parents. (But if your parents are both 5ft, the NBA seems an unlikely destination for you).
Basketball is probably not a great example since just being enormous gives you a huge chance of making it to the NBA, which I guess is just another form of being a prodigy.
Sure, and if we keep going back in time to perhaps the greatest American athlete of all time, Jim Thorpe - he'd handily be beaten by elite high schoolers today.
Dennis Rodman grew up overshadowed by his sisters' basketball skills, and then had some unheard of growth spurt of 8" after finishing high school. He hadn't even played much high school ball.
Both Dennis Rodman and Hakeem Olajuwon are not 5ft, they are very tall and athletic. That combination is more important than basketball skill attained at 18 years of age. These attributes differs from tennis, or chess. Being elite at being both tall and athletic probably changes the most over puberty?
Basketball is a general purpose sport. The Claude of it can win. Some other sports such as gymnastics would need something more like the AlphaZero of it to win.
What is being said is not simply that people who engaged in a certain activity since childhood do not become top performing adults. Obviously that happens a lot. But rather that the top child or youth performers are not reliably the ones that turn into top adult performers.
Think of 5 relevant attributes of your body for playing something well.
Guesstimate where they were on the population bell curve when you were 10.
Guesstimate if these would have been on a different spot on the population bell curve for that attribute when you were an adult. Would you have guessed it when you wee 10? Would others have guessed it about you at that age?
Puberty changes you in unpredictable ways. Do we need a study to know that?
Everyone committing to tennis before they are 10 are elite, you wouldn't do it otherwise. Who is the best player of that elite set changes given the great puberty shake up.
That was covered just fine IMO. The reaction seems to be "so what?" I think that's a valid reaction. It's a long article to state something obvious, that the important thing about being on your way to greatness is having great talent and training to win starting at an early age, not winning before reaching a certain age.
I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me.
Unsafe archive site, as it's still DDoSing gyrovague.com. Don't use archive.is until they resolve it. (Not sure if it's really ever safe now, after this shitshow).
Regardless of the basic conceptual point being made (merits of tiger parenting vs. holistic "participation trophy" style parenting), this research doesn't look that convincing.
There's the graphic: "Top 1% cognition aged 12 and top 5% salary mid-30s" which is supposed to be the most dramatic one. So apparently we suddenly just take at face value the criticism "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?
I always think of the Little League World Series when I read about stuff like this; these kids are often peaking early and so rarely make it to the highest levels as an adult. This is either because they quit advancing at the same rate or they've destroyed their bodies before they get to high school.
I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.
> I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.
If the LLWS winners are a sample of N kids, then your statement is even more true for any random sample of N kids. Which is to say, LLWS may give you a big advantage, but not the truly massive advantage that would be required to make you a shoe-in.
It’s also the case that the LLWS kids aren’t elite prospects because it’s a geographic lottery of affiliated leagues. Its more about keeping people watching ESPN5 than actual talent scouting.
Maybe this can be explained by drift in what it means to be a "superstar" at different stages in life. In the beginning it's maybe mostly about the skill, later things get more complicated (media, money, negotiations etc) and what made the prodigy becomes relatively less important.
This is a tautology. Child prodigies that are identified often become academics who are railroaded into uselsss irrelevance.
Actual child prodigies like tiger woods or Justin Bieber who were genuinely insanely brilliant at a young age at non academic things went on to be wildly successful.
I saw an interview with an all-time great NBA basketball player. He was a top high school player and described his childhood like this: When you were at the movies, I was practicing. When you were on dates or hanging out with your buddies, I was practicing. When my family went on a cruise, I was dribbling up and down the hallways. ...
Now imagine the prodigy athlete who goes the movies, hangs out, and relaxes on the cruise. How could they hope to compete?
I recently read an interview Jadeveon Clowney, who was the country's top high school American football player and then the number one pick in the NFL draft. He was widely called a 'freak' athlete. Clowney said he didn't really learn how to understand and play the game until the NFL; until then he could dominate with his physical ability, even playing against elite college players.
He's played 11 years so far in the NFL, which is a long career in an extremely competitive job. We can call him truly 'good'; he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times, in those years making him > ~85th percentile for his position, but nobody thinks he's an all-time great.
There's not such a clear story about where these people come from. Maybe the basketball player just wasn't as athletic (relative to the population of elite athletes) as Clowney and had to make up for it. Maybe Clowney would have been an all-time great with more work. Maybe there are many other inputs besides work and talent.
Partially. Being gifted is special needs education. And the average K-12 in the US is not equipped to provide that for that special need, especially in a post No Child Left Behind era.
A lot of adults conflate giftedness with maturity and expect the kid to act like an adult, combined with the pressure to perform and an identity built around being gifted...it fucks with development.
There is a reason why depression and suicide in adults can be correlated with formerly gifted children.
Being smart is not good enough. Being motivated and willing to work at it makes the difference.
I once knew a fellow who was exceptionally smart. He tried all kinds of schemes to make a go of his life, but when the going got tough he'd always quit.
That’s exactly what Vladimir Feltsman said about me when I was like 8 LOL. He is on video here saying it… “I want him to start playing concerts 3-4 years later but be in business 40 years longer!”
Spoiler: I got into computers as a teenager and my piano career took a nosedive, from Carnegie Hall and Juilliard to like… playing for friends at a house party :)
He was also abused in a psychology study at Harvard when he was 17, which may have been part of the CIA’s MK Ultra drug experiments. Maybe he would have done it all the same or not in the absence of that, who knows.
The article is a paradigmatic example of innumeracy.
10% of prodigies becomes 10% of elite, whereas (whoknows)% of (general_population - prodigies) becomes 90% of elite.
How big is elite? How big is prodigies?
Well, for a start, I guess we can assume that size of elite == size of prodigies, because 10% == 10%.
But what is that size compared to general population?
If it's 1%, then 99% of muggles compete for slots in 0.9% of the population, so, hey, a prodigy is 11 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.
If it's 0.1%, then a prodigy is 111 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.
If it's 10% -- well, that's kind of stretching the definition of both prodigy and elite, isn't it?
tl;dr -- article is crap; research probably is, as well.
At least for chess the article mentions that they considered the top 10 players in children and senior categories. This would indicate that prodigy chess players are millions of time more likely to become elite compared to the general population.
> 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.
This 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
> 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.
You 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%.
It'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.
Prodigies 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.
This sounds like Berkson’s paradox.
In 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.
There'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.
This is a story of how one became better golf player by increasing his strength: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr2pgBTRpK4
One can enhance cognitive functions by strength training: 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.
Being smart isn’t enough need resources and need to deal with people
As someone who was not a child prodigy, but still closer to one than to normies, I can say that achieving results easily in childhood leads to not developing good discipline and persistence that are crucial in the adult world.
There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most.
On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.
That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're so smart, keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well.
This observation about discipline is perceptive but I have also seen variations of it dozens and dozens of times on HN.
Tons of former gifted kids on here. The gap between assumed potential and actual reality apparently has to get blamed on someone, and that person is the kid themselves.
FWIW I do it too.
All parts seem true to me. Most kids think they were more gifted than they were. Learning to work hard and be persistent was actually more important. A lot of talk about being gifted was an obstacle to that.
I recall being told by an English teacher in high school once that because it was so easy for me to write something passable, I wasn't trying hard enough to write something excellent. Wish he pushed me harder on that.
I'd add that in addition to lack of discipline, other factors that might develop are fear of failure, lack of risk-taking, etc
I admit I haven't read the full study, but I'm extremely skeptical that the takeaway as given in the article is valid.
Take violinists, for example. Essentially every single world renowned soloist was "some sort" of child prodigy. Now, I've heard some soloists argue that they were not, in fact, child prodigies. For example, may favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, has said this. She still debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12, and here she is performing as a soloist at 15: https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI. Nathan Milstein, one of the greatest violinists of all time, said he was "not very good until his teens" - he still started playing at the age of 5, and at the age of 11 Leopold Auer, a great violin teacher, invited him to become one of his students, so he clearly saw his potential.
I have no doubt lots of prodigies burn out. But, at least in the world of violins, essentially every great soloist was playing at an extremely high level by the time they were in middle school.
In contrast, it's rare to find any classical singers who were child prodigies. Whatever skills you may develop as a child there apparently don't transfer well into adulthood. It makes sense to me that there may be fine ear/motorics skills which are far more relevant to violinists, which do transfer.
Natural ability (physical or mental) is not strongly correlated with the personality traits that enable a person to "perform", "succeed", or "achieve" in society the way it is structured. In fact, they may be inversely correlated (consider how often people in leadership positions are not apparently exceptional).
There's a story about, I think, the kickboxer/fighter Alistair Overeem that he was playing Connect 4, and lost, and kept demanding rematches until he had the winning record. Just a refusal to be the loser. That matches every story I've ever heard about Michael Jordan.
Miserable way to live, if you ask me.
I'm not quite a "child prodigy", but I did skip two grades in math in school. It made me feel very special when it was a kid but as a thirty-something software person I don't think I'm smarter than most of my coworkers now.
I think I was better than most kids at math, particularly algebra, but those kids grew up and caught up and I suspect many of them are as good or better at math than I am. I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.
To be fair, in my journey through public school, there was no difference in the math level from one grade to the next. Ok, there was a little, but the teacher was still going through the times tables in grade 7.
I was actually bumped to ninth grade math from seventh grade, so I would have been twelve.
ETA:
Should add that this carried on through high school, and since I finished my math two years early, I took college-level courses for math the last two years.
> I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.
That makes me think back to my elementary school, where a lot of the kids who got into the "gifted" program just happened to be, surprise surprise, some of the oldest kids in their grade.
At that age the better part of a year in brain development can be exactly the "edge" one needs to excel. And then it can become self-reinforcing when kids gravitate toward the areas in which they dominate their peers.
FWIW, the test for the gifted program at my elementary school normalized their entrytest results for age.
This article is taking some liberties with the word "prodigy" that I disagree with.
If the way you nurture a talented student is via "intense drilling", I would argue that the student is not a prodigy in the traditional sense, but a talented and determined student who may or may not be dealing with parental pressure.
The actual prodigies I've known absorb information and gain skills without significant effort - I knew someone who enrolled in a calculus class, skimmed through the book in a week or so, and then would only show up to class for tests (which they would ace).
So the article conclusion doesn't surprise me - inflict relentless training on a young talented person and yeah maybe they won't want to do that as an adult.
But as far as actual "prodigies"? There is no burn-out because there is no (or minimal) effort. The choice of whether to stick with an area of interest through adulthood is more of a personal preference than anything ingrained.
Fantastic book called Range that talks about this phenomenon. Surprisingly, the child prodigy to adult superstar pipeline is less common than the generalist to adult superstar pipeline.
Tiger Woods is the classic example of a child prodigy, but it turns out his path is unusual for superstars. Roger Federer’s (who played a wide range of sports growing up until he specialized in tennis as a teen) is more common.
https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/review-range
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733
It's not really surprising when it's a few thousand child prodigies competing against 7 billion people for a small handful of slots 10 years in the future. Everyday stuff like depression, changing interests, financial pressures, lack of desire to compete, will knock out more than half of the child prodigies, making room for the other 7 billion people.
It depends on the field, afaik. I know someone who was an exceptional classical pianist, but they told me they knew they'd never make it in that field: They started at age 15, which was much too late to acquire the skills needed. Professional musicians I spoke to agreed.
Previously discussed (and criticized) at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722853
Tiger woods. I can't think of any tennis player who has been in the top 100 for the past few decades who didn't commit to it totally as a young child. Start tennis at 10? Too old. Swimmers. Has anyone stumbled into sporting greatness from being outside the top 5%? Or 1% when they hit adulthood?
So what is being said? A huge amount of elite success is in the hardware, i.e. the body &/or brain. These go through rather large changes between ages 10 an 18. Puberty. This shakes up the ordering among those who showed enough promise to have already committed to becoming elite.
What am I missing here? Seems like this research is nothing more than "Kids change through puberty, the nature and sizes of the changes are a bit of a lottery for each kid." Much like the the genetic factors are also a lottery so you can't reliably predict who is going to be great from the results of their parents. (But if your parents are both 5ft, the NBA seems an unlikely destination for you).
Definitely uncommon, but not unprecedented:
Hakeem Olajuwon - didn't start basketball until 15 or 16.
Kurt Warner - undrafted, returned to NFL at 28.
Francis Ngannou - started MMA at 26.
Basketball is probably not a great example since just being enormous gives you a huge chance of making it to the NBA, which I guess is just another form of being a prodigy.
Sure, and if we keep going back in time to perhaps the greatest American athlete of all time, Jim Thorpe - he'd handily be beaten by elite high schoolers today.
Dennis Rodman grew up overshadowed by his sisters' basketball skills, and then had some unheard of growth spurt of 8" after finishing high school. He hadn't even played much high school ball.
Both Dennis Rodman and Hakeem Olajuwon are not 5ft, they are very tall and athletic. That combination is more important than basketball skill attained at 18 years of age. These attributes differs from tennis, or chess. Being elite at being both tall and athletic probably changes the most over puberty?
Basketball is a general purpose sport. The Claude of it can win. Some other sports such as gymnastics would need something more like the AlphaZero of it to win.
What is being said is not simply that people who engaged in a certain activity since childhood do not become top performing adults. Obviously that happens a lot. But rather that the top child or youth performers are not reliably the ones that turn into top adult performers.
Let me express it another way.
Think of 5 relevant attributes of your body for playing something well.
Guesstimate where they were on the population bell curve when you were 10.
Guesstimate if these would have been on a different spot on the population bell curve for that attribute when you were an adult. Would you have guessed it when you wee 10? Would others have guessed it about you at that age?
Puberty changes you in unpredictable ways. Do we need a study to know that?
Everyone committing to tennis before they are 10 are elite, you wouldn't do it otherwise. Who is the best player of that elite set changes given the great puberty shake up.
You missed the second word in the title, "prodigies".
That was covered just fine IMO. The reaction seems to be "so what?" I think that's a valid reaction. It's a long article to state something obvious, that the important thing about being on your way to greatness is having great talent and training to win starting at an early age, not winning before reaching a certain age.
I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me.
https://archive.is/dhAJl
Unsafe archive site, as it's still DDoSing gyrovague.com. Don't use archive.is until they resolve it. (Not sure if it's really ever safe now, after this shitshow).
Regardless of the basic conceptual point being made (merits of tiger parenting vs. holistic "participation trophy" style parenting), this research doesn't look that convincing.
There's the graphic: "Top 1% cognition aged 12 and top 5% salary mid-30s" which is supposed to be the most dramatic one. So apparently we suddenly just take at face value the criticism "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?
OTOH, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509261-high-achieving-...
I always think of the Little League World Series when I read about stuff like this; these kids are often peaking early and so rarely make it to the highest levels as an adult. This is either because they quit advancing at the same rate or they've destroyed their bodies before they get to high school.
I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.
> I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.
If the LLWS winners are a sample of N kids, then your statement is even more true for any random sample of N kids. Which is to say, LLWS may give you a big advantage, but not the truly massive advantage that would be required to make you a shoe-in.
It’s also the case that the LLWS kids aren’t elite prospects because it’s a geographic lottery of affiliated leagues. Its more about keeping people watching ESPN5 than actual talent scouting.
Maybe this can be explained by drift in what it means to be a "superstar" at different stages in life. In the beginning it's maybe mostly about the skill, later things get more complicated (media, money, negotiations etc) and what made the prodigy becomes relatively less important.
"Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers" is an equally accurate and less misleading title.
Equally imprecise.
“Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers than they are to become non-elite performers”
Vs
“Child prodigies are more likely than non-child prodigies to become elite performers"
Which is it?
Neither. That's what reading the article is for.
My comment was on the attempted retitling of the article. Agree that neither represent the actual article.
far more likely
I’ll do you one better - elite performers rarely become child prodigies
This is a tautology. Child prodigies that are identified often become academics who are railroaded into uselsss irrelevance.
Actual child prodigies like tiger woods or Justin Bieber who were genuinely insanely brilliant at a young age at non academic things went on to be wildly successful.
I saw an interview with an all-time great NBA basketball player. He was a top high school player and described his childhood like this: When you were at the movies, I was practicing. When you were on dates or hanging out with your buddies, I was practicing. When my family went on a cruise, I was dribbling up and down the hallways. ...
Now imagine the prodigy athlete who goes the movies, hangs out, and relaxes on the cruise. How could they hope to compete?
I recently read an interview Jadeveon Clowney, who was the country's top high school American football player and then the number one pick in the NFL draft. He was widely called a 'freak' athlete. Clowney said he didn't really learn how to understand and play the game until the NFL; until then he could dominate with his physical ability, even playing against elite college players.
He's played 11 years so far in the NFL, which is a long career in an extremely competitive job. We can call him truly 'good'; he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times, in those years making him > ~85th percentile for his position, but nobody thinks he's an all-time great.
There's not such a clear story about where these people come from. Maybe the basketball player just wasn't as athletic (relative to the population of elite athletes) as Clowney and had to make up for it. Maybe Clowney would have been an all-time great with more work. Maybe there are many other inputs besides work and talent.
Is this just a failure in our school system?
Partially. Being gifted is special needs education. And the average K-12 in the US is not equipped to provide that for that special need, especially in a post No Child Left Behind era.
A lot of adults conflate giftedness with maturity and expect the kid to act like an adult, combined with the pressure to perform and an identity built around being gifted...it fucks with development.
There is a reason why depression and suicide in adults can be correlated with formerly gifted children.
Flagging as article is paywalled with no way around, and there doesn't seem to be any way around the paywall now that archive.is is a DDoSer.
Being smart is not good enough. Being motivated and willing to work at it makes the difference.
I once knew a fellow who was exceptionally smart. He tried all kinds of schemes to make a go of his life, but when the going got tough he'd always quit.
That’s exactly what Vladimir Feltsman said about me when I was like 8 LOL. He is on video here saying it… “I want him to start playing concerts 3-4 years later but be in business 40 years longer!”
https://youtu.be/lf2DWzQ-5zk
Spoiler: I got into computers as a teenager and my piano career took a nosedive, from Carnegie Hall and Juilliard to like… playing for friends at a house party :)
What is the ratio of child prodigies to elite performers?
Ted Kaczynki was a child prodigy.
He was also abused in a psychology study at Harvard when he was 17, which may have been part of the CIA’s MK Ultra drug experiments. Maybe he would have done it all the same or not in the absence of that, who knows.
Because most societies and cultures are optimized to snuff that out.
The article is a paradigmatic example of innumeracy.
10% of prodigies becomes 10% of elite, whereas (whoknows)% of (general_population - prodigies) becomes 90% of elite.
How big is elite? How big is prodigies?
Well, for a start, I guess we can assume that size of elite == size of prodigies, because 10% == 10%.
But what is that size compared to general population?
If it's 1%, then 99% of muggles compete for slots in 0.9% of the population, so, hey, a prodigy is 11 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.
If it's 0.1%, then a prodigy is 111 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.
If it's 10% -- well, that's kind of stretching the definition of both prodigy and elite, isn't it?
tl;dr -- article is crap; research probably is, as well.
At least for chess the article mentions that they considered the top 10 players in children and senior categories. This would indicate that prodigy chess players are millions of time more likely to become elite compared to the general population.