Posted by i7l 2 days 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."
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.
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.
have we forgotten Lake Wobegon?
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%.
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.
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.
You can be the #1 rated player up to your last year of high school but if you don't hit the growth spurt required for your position your career will take a completely different turn. Conversely, it is the only sport I am aware of where you have people playing at the highest level who picked up their first basketball at 16
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.
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.
That relative advantage goes away as people age and specialize.
More than 40% of all synapses are eliminated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As the smartest child in the room you live in a world where the answers always came easy, at least the answers to questions and expectations on above average terms. This sets the elite children up to try less hard on everything because they know in advance they are always going to cross the finish line well before everyone else without effort or preparation.
I can remember being one of these kids myself. My motivation was just wanting to be productively employed and not bored in class, for example employed in a minimum wage high labor job instead of sleeping through honors advanced chemistry. At least then I was challenged.
I also remember leaving visible signs of accomplishment to the attention starved sociopaths. That attention seeking behavior always felt beneath me, infantile even.
I do remember occasionally, very rarely, encountering other elite children who were also not interested in attention seeking behavior. The greatest commonality was excessively low neuroticism. You had no fear, even in very physical terms, which resulted in thrill seeking activities. Many of these people would end up joining the military even after attaining access to elite universities.
These people were never without extended focus or discipline but about half the time were poor performing at academics, as is the case with certain learning disorders like dyslexia.
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.
I think the same concept could generalize: for pursuit X, the impact of childhood skill is inversely related to the impact of adult form.
I had a friend who could play all the Chopin Etudes at age 9. Some of the best art simply requires a virtuoso to bring it to life.
Justin Bieber clearly was that. His youtube videos got him discovered at age 13-14.
Vanessa Paradis made her first public appearance as a singer at age 7.
There are several children prodigies I've seen on YouTube (singers, drummers, guitarists). They clearly have such talent that even at young age they do music better than most people would do with infinite amount of practice.
As to your question, the prodigy is, by definition, extremely rare. They clearly exist (Bieber, Paradis) but, by definition, you can't expect to have a lot of them.
And "why aren't 7 year olds headlining for Taylor Swift" is not a fair bar.
There are reasons 7 year olds don't do world wide tours that have to do with things other than musical talent. Like being in school or not being allowed to take a bus by themselves.
EDIT Also with band music or non-classical music so much of it is to do with platform and distribution, and 7 year old prodigies don't get much interest outside of talent shows or Youtube. Justin Bieber (as mentioned in another reply) though is a good example of someone who did at age 12
One difference is how popular music is produced today. The members of the band are not just performers, and in fact, they're often mediocre instrumentalists and singers. They're expected to create their own material, which probably requires a certain level of social development and experience. The emphasis is on other skills such as creating songs that resonate with the audience, performing on stage, etc.
It just takes many years worth of practice to get from being good by 7 years old standards to being good enough that people buy tickets to see your performance, especially in the classical music culture where skill, or "virtuoso", is everything.
In classical music there is a slightly more "objective" character to performance given the high technical requirement and the audience culturally is more willing to earnestly listen to a child prodigy.
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.
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.
My son is diagnosed with ADHD and high IQ and labeled "gifted". He's very immature, has absolutely no method, is very impulsive and can't maintain focus for more than 20 minutes. He seems very much less mature than his peers in anything.
Yet, he just understands and remembers every single thing at school much better and faster than his peers. So I guess technically that makes him "gifted" but it's not a very useful gift. It just creates problems at school because he gets bored quickly but cannot be given more work to do because he gets exhausted quickly too!
I read recently a title of an article that said "gifted children are special needs children" and that marched my experience.
As a former gifted child who was emotionally immature and gifted, I hope your kid gets the guidance I never did both to understand his adhd and how it impacts him, but also emotional compassion for himself and from parents about how hard adhd can be
Many are more expensive in time and money, but you may find fairly cheap alternatives.
Worth a shot at least.
You should have learned roughly what is in this book at grade 7, it includes algebraic expressions, angles, ratios, unit conversions, statistical concepts like mean, mode, bar graphs, probability of dice and coins and so on.
https://archive.org/details/newenjoyingmathe0000jose/page/4/...
Then in grade 8 you'd go on to do those kind of things but a bit more advanced. Most people just forget how much math they learned and think they learned all that in high school.
I remember it very well. I thought it was crazy they were still doing the times tables.
> this book at grade 7
I don't recall any of the grades going all the way through the book. My high school had an impressive course catalog. It looked pretty rigorous! But taking the classes, how sad they were. The textbook is not a reliable indicator of what was taught - it's more like wishful thinking.
I remember taking sophomore geometry. The teacher gave out a test at the beginning of the year, to measure where the kids were. Apparently I got it all right. The teacher asked me if I'd taken geometry before? I said no, the test was just obvious. It was really sad.
Now, before you think I am some kind of genius, nope. When I arrived at college it was a full on disaster for me. I had no idea how to study. I was way, way, way behind my peers. I needed a lot of help, bad. My roommate sighed at how ill-prepared I was, and coached me through a lot of classes, otherwise I would have been flunked out.
Have things gotten any better? I doubt it. Even Harvard was forced to add a bonehead math class to try to get their incoming freshmen up to speed.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed going to school. My friends were there, and we had a great time. Especially in high school, when we worked on each others' cars. I'm still a motorhead.
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.
My mom would have none of that, and demanded I be put back in 4th grade.
And so I was, and it was like I wasn't gone for a single day. The class had not advanced at all.
This was quite unlike university, where I didn't dare miss a single lecture.
Agreed university is much harder though.
I was an air force brat, and so attended many diverse public schools.
I took 2 years of honors physics in high school. College freshman physics blew through that in 2 weeks. And then I was in deep doo-doo.
I am eternally grateful to Prof Ricardo Gomez, who kindly took the time to coach me one on one. I never thanked him for that, one of my many regrets.
When I went to college, it was definitely tougher, but I was able to pass the freshman physics and multi variable calculus courses first time around, without significant tutoring.
My friend's child is profoundly gifted (160+ IQ). He is 12 years old and finishing Calculus and next year will be taking college math courses. His friends are a year younger than him and have qualified for AIME since they were 8 years old.
Giftedness is very real, and it's not just "maturity". Their brains are different. Seeing them squabble over math problems, it's like watching people talk a different language.
Anyway, if that’s the scale, it still can fit with the “doesn’t lead to exceptional outcomes”. I am a perfectly competent software person, and maybe I even understand some of the mathematics behind it better than the average programmer, but I am still basically just an “adequate” worker, and honestly I am afraid that I have more or less peaked career-wise. I am sure that some prodigies do great but the article seems to indicate that they’re rarely exceptional at adulthood.
[1] honestly I think that IQ is stupid and that it’s dumb to try and distill something as complicated and multi-faceted as intelligence to a single dimension or even a couple dimensions is pretty reductive.
I like to think I’m pretty clever, but I almost certainly would not have gotten 160 if I hadn’t gotten the practice test.
I'm in my mid 30's. I'm happy enough where I am now; my biggest issue has historically been focus and apathy more than understanding concepts, much to the frustration of my teachers in high school. I was that frustrating kid who clearly understood the concepts perfectly fine, and was even fairly active during class, but I wouldn't do my homework so the teachers would be forced to give me bad grades.
I obviously don't blame the teachers for this, they're doing what they have to, but I do sometimes think that the system is a bit too one-size-fits-all, even still. I took advanced classes in high school, I got very high ACT scores (36 in English, 34 in math), but I still have always had middling academic performance because the teachers would be stuck giving me crappy grades.
For reasons slightly involving skill but mostly involving luck, I managed to cobble together a successful software career even after dropping out of college the first time around, worked without a degree for almost a decade, and eventually worked as a practicing software engineer at the senior level at BigCos. I have a bachelors now, and even a masters, and some graduate PhD work (though I didn't finish that, too time consuming while working full time), but these all came after I had established a decent career.
I think that being a little clever [1] certainly helped me through this, but what I think helped me more than anything was the fact that a) I had a geeky hobby of learning how to program when I was fourteen or fifteen that never really went away and that I was able to fall back on and b) dropping out in 2012, which just happened to be the year that pretty much everyone got a smartphone and consequently there was a huge demand for programmers and they were willing to overlook a lack of credentials.
My life has turned out fine; not perfect but certainly better than most people on this planet or even this country so it's hardly worth complaining over. I do wish I had taken school more seriously as a teenager because then I would likely be able to have move into a more mathy-theory-based role, which I seem to be unable to do as of right now [2]; it feels like I'm playing a game of catchup, which isn't impossible but it definitely is harder than if I were able to focus on school full time.
Dunno why I decided to dump my life story at you. Just one of those days I guess.
[1] Though as I said in the sibling comment, probably not nearly as clever as the tested IQ suggests.
[2] No matter how many I apply to, it seems. It doesn't help that every researchey role now is for AI/ML theory which is cool but pretty far from my expertise or the kinds of math I've studied or have any expertise on.
This kid and his cohorts, they hear a concept for the first time, and they just get it. Then when it comes to doing the problems, he might struggle a little but then he gets it. He is getting 95% in calculus and the only reason he lost marks is because he made sloppy mistakes.
It is not uncommon to hear objectively bright and hard working young people wonder if they have become dumber or if they have been a fraud the entire time, after they leave their high school where they enjoyed being a star student and move to a nice university where they compete with the brightest mind of the entire world. They are not dumb, just not mentally adjusted to an environment where they don't get to be the number one no matter how hard they try.
Nothing to do with prodigies of course.
Your statement might be applicable to jobs that can be performed more than adequately by 20% percentile talent but not to most sports or music, which have brutal odds due to "winner takes most" dynamics.
There are 540 NBA players. There are ~40 million men aged 18-35 in US.
To beat those odds you have to supremely talented and supremely hard working.
Contrast this with estimated 1.6-4.4 million software engineers.
You can be mid but hard working programmer and beat brilliant but otherwise flawed programmer (not as hard working, oblivious to politics etc.), for some definition of "beat" (like better pay or higher position in company).
As to people in leadership position: consider that to succeed as a manager / leader is more about being good at politics than at solving complex equations.
Then again, the outsized successes were created by competent leaders: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos.
Oddly he drifted away from sports (physically he was too small and honestly fragile - 2 or 3 broken bones before he was 12) and into the arts.
I'm very much a proponent of hard work to the best of your ability but I'm also a realist.
I'm pretty good at programming. I doubt Usain Bolt would ever be as good as I am at programming, even if he tried, and I certainly wouldn't be even close to be as good as Usain Bolt in running no matter how hard I tried.
I know how fast I was running in high school compared to 30 of my peers (my class) and there was never a path from there to a world class athlete.
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.
A very intelligent individual can spend decades working on a product doomed to fail. Many bright mathematician might be working right now on a proof of a problem that in the future may be shown to be undecidable. Einstein, according to himself, was almost never the brightest mathematician in the room and yet gave the world a super-extraordinary contribution.
In my opinion, the humbling lesson that child prodigies give us is that we should value as much as possible all the humans involved in the often ungrateful task of trying to advance science. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case and society seems obsessed with trying to discard and disqualify the human factor.
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.
In Kind environments, the feedback is quick and ranking is easy to know. So the evidence says that the optimal strategy is drill ans kill.
In Unkind learning environments, the feedback is slow and ranking is difficult and untimely. So the optimal strategy is to learn as much as you can in as many very different disciplines as possible.
The paper that the Economist talks about extends this and (paraphrasing) says that the very top elite level, even Kind learning environments turn back into Unkind ones again as you try to push the field more.
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.
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 :)
I hope you can still get some joy from playing, that's probably way more important than whether you made a career out of it or not.