I disagree. The genetic lottery is unfair; and some people are just better than you no matter what you do, and no matter what they don't do.
This is clearer in some fields than others -- particularly in fields where there are child prodigies, like in chess, music, or mathematics.
In other fields, child prodigies are rare or perhaps even non-existent.
There are, to my knowledge, no child prodigies who've written brilliant novels, or earned the Nobel Prize for Literature (as flawed a measure of talent as it is). There are no children who've composed poems which are considered to be among the greatest in the world.
These fields tend to draw upon a whole life's worth of experience -- something that children obviously lack and can't make up for through "winning the genetic lottery".
On the other hand plenty of great books have been written by people in their 20's which is a long way from a full life.
On the other had there is some IMO great poetry written by kids.
But your broader point: "These fields tend to draw upon a whole life's worth of experience -- something that children obviously lack and can't make up for through "winning the genetic lottery"." Yea, I'd agree with that.
Calling a 19-year-old a "child" is really stretching the definition of a "child", in my view. Compare that to chess and music prodigies, for instance, who are already performing at levels above those of most adults even before their teens.[5][6]
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/27/16208294/handbook-for-mor...
[2] - http://gary-lindberg.com/do-you-trust-the-nyt-bestseller-lis...
[3] - http://www.hughhowey.com/the-nyt-and-wsj-best-seller-lists-m...
[4] - http://www.politicususa.com/2010/12/02/palin-bestseller-frau...
On your point that he was 19 at the time of publication. Sure you can say he was not a kid when he wrote it, but the act of writing it was not something that just happened over night(and certainly not with a piece of work as long as Eragon). I would still argue that he is a prodigy in the sense that he found success as a writer much earlier than most writers usually do. And perhaps this had little to do with his writing talent. Maybe, maybe not.
Sure is a good No True Scotsman you've got there. And I'm not even sure you'd be right ignoring that; recall that sports like boxing and MMA separate people into weight classes that are ten pounds wide. In other words, those sports think that, within the bounds of "professional", there is no amount of innate ability or training that can balance out a 25-pound difference in weight.
But even if you were right about reachable levels of ability, you fail to realize that the problem is less about the maximum reachable level and more about the ease of reaching a competitive level. Sure, most people can train up to run a marathon. But some people will take a year to do that and some people will take three month. And that kind of difference is crippling. Trying to get a degree in a one-year skill will cost you more in time and stress than trying to get a degree in a one-month skill, so much more that you may be out-competed and fail or simply collapse under the increased strain.
Furthermore, when looking at Real Life, it's not just about whether you can Get Good at a single skill that you can't choose. It's about how good you can be overall. It's impressive when a 100lb one-armed boxer beats an untrained 250lb person through pure skill because it indicates just how much time that boxer must have spent training to do that. But do we think that the "untrained person" sat on their ass that whole time? No. They spent that time playing chess. And as a result, while the boxer trains their ass off and has a fantastic day and somehow, against all odds, manages to beat the untrained person in a boxing ring... if they squared off across a chessboard the "untrained person" would casually style all over the boxer in between rounds of candy crush.
So yes. Training >>> innate skill, more so for some skills than others. But don't let that make you think that genetics are fair.
I was more thinking outside the top 1% of any particular skill, for example when you're hiring a designer or sales staff in a normal company (as in, a not-1% company, such as a refrigerator manufacturer or something).
I'm willing to concede that if you're looking exclusively at top 1% or top 0.01% candidates, you may profit best by taking their innate abilities into account, but if you're trying to find a top 80% or top 70% candidate (if you're trying to play moneyball with your organization or something) I personally would weight the depth and breadth of experience most.
I also knew an incredibly good 97lbs (44kg) wrestler. He was technically much, much better than me, but I could throw him around like a rag doll so I always won.
With weight comes strength. Any competition that rewards strength but does not penalize weight will end up dominated by heavyweights. Westling is particularly brutal as weight itself is beneficial for inertia.
Really? This runs counter to what I've heard from BJJ and other martial arts practitioners -- that a trained fighter could beat an untrained fighter in a fair fight (ie. no weapons, eye gouging, etc) using technique any day. You're saying that doesn't hold for wrestling?
The NFL has 32 football teams. Any quarterback outside the top 10 or so is considered 'bad' by most people. Assuming each team has a backup quarterback, out of the 64 'best' people in the world to do that job, only the top ten are so are safe from being called 'bad at their job' on any given Sunday.
There's also a story about a UFC fighter who went 0-3, and people called him a terrible fighter. Someone from his hometown mentioned how he was the toughest guy in town and one day beat up 4 guys and 5 cops at a bar all by himself, and he was only a 155lb fighter.
EDIT: I think I may have uncharitably read your comment as being argumentative instead of informative.
That's actually a bad example. UFC got its start with the spectacle of watching comparatively small Royce Gracie beat fighters with significant weight advantages who didn't know how to grapple.
There were some really extreme weight mismatches in 90s MMA: http://www.espn.com/extra/mma/news/story?id=3513974
What? Of course there is. Just at that level, the competitors are all training at their absolute maximums. There is no additional training on top of the world-class training they do that will balance out a 25-pound difference in weight.
I guarantee you a 120 pound (I'm ~145) MMA fighter can kill me with a well placed punch faster than I could even tickle them.
It depends on what you are doing but sometimes people are just wired for something better than others. But everyone can almost always get much better with training.
I can't. My money would be on the trained boxer every time. The untrained one will be slow and will leave an opening right off the bat, boom, one punch and he's done.
Most skills are somewhere between the two extremes. If success relative to your peers is the goal, the former type of skill should only be pursued by those with some degree of pre-existing talent, whereas the latter type of skill provides opportunities for talentless but hard-working individuals to outshine their lazier peers.
But if you're just doing it for fun and not to earn a living, you can actually get quite good at any of them with focused training. You might not get professional level good, but you can become objectively quite skilled.
I'll never "catch up" to Musk, but I'm better than most people simply by trying my own business ideas.
What a bizarre statement. This is a generalisation that can easily be shown to be false. If I try and win Gold at the olympics, but fail (only winning silver), I am in a completely different place from you who never tried. There's a million other counter examples.
I think it depends on how you fail though. If you learn something from the experience, your odds of succeeding on the next try increase. Many goals are achieved through a succession of failures.
If you're genetically gifted with a talent and genetically driven to "train" you'll be much better off than someone with only one trait.
Genetics help, sure. But it is just potential. Can you provide an example where one person was so genetically talented that they didn’t train and still were competitive at some semi-professional level?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis)#1...
"Another event dubbed a "Battle of the Sexes" took place during the 1998 Australian Open[51] between Karsten Braasch and the Williams sisters. Venus and Serena Williams had claimed that they could beat any male player ranked outside the world's top 200, so Braasch, then ranked 203rd, challenged them both. Braasch was described by one journalist as "a man whose training regime centered around a pack of cigarettes and more than a couple bottles of ice cold lager".[52][51] The matches took place on court number 12 in Melbourne Park,[53] after Braasch had finished a round of golf and two shandies. He first took on Serena and after leading 5–0, beat her 6–1. Venus then walked on court and again Braasch was victorious, this time winning 6–2.[54] Braasch said afterwards, "500 and above, no chance". He added that he had played like someone ranked 600th in order to keep the game "fun".[55] Braasch said the big difference was that men can chase down shots much easier, and that men put spin on the ball that the women can't handle. The Williams sisters adjusted their claim to beating men outside the top 350.[51]"
He obviously had a fuck ton of training, was just 'retired' when he played the game.
The original question was asking for an example of a "genetically talented that they didn’t train" losing to someone who was a "pro" and this is clearly not an example of it.
That said, I'm not trying to make the argument that there aren't 'genetic' limits.
My point, more broadly, is that the idea that, “I can’t do that....genetics!” is misplaced defeatism.
But, as I suggested earlier, I don't think the issue of athletic performance has much to say about creativity, which is the topic of this article. Indubitable's answer of Ramanujan is a much more relevant reply to your question, but where does that leave us? His example does not give us a reason to give up on creativity, which goes to show that the question doesn't address the issue.
Let me say that I don't disagree in the advantages of genes and sex, but from my own experience competing at a moderately high level and knowing players who competed at the highest levels, you more or less train with an expectation of what your opponents will do in mind.
At least in badminton, the way men and women play the game is completely different, but I would be very surprised if it's merely due to physical differences. I don't think it's due to physical differences because the difference in style shows up across the skill level, and I imagine a professional female player who consistently did weight training should be able to achieve the same level of strength as a male who isn't nearly as serious.
For the mental realm you have people like Srinivasa Ramanujan [1]. He had next to no formal training in mathematics yet would contribute immensely to a wide array of mathematical fields before the end of his brief life, dying at 32.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruki_Murakami#Writing_career
"Murakami began to write fiction when he was 29.[19] "Before that", he said, "I didn't write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn't create anything at all."[20] He was inspired to write his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), while watching a baseball game."
There isn’t a “genetics only helps so much” argument.
These things are bigger than you and me and the person next door and there are far more important things than motivating some random person to train more. That is, frankly, peanuts compared to what is at stake.
You are pushing a highly individualistic philosophy that not everyone even agrees on. We live in societies and we have governments beholden to us and it's very important how these things function, much more important than what you individually do. If these systems and structures do not properly serve us because we overestimate personal agency and underestimate circumstance, that's a major problem.
The investigation to find what is true (why are people creative?) with figuring out how to improve the station of some person (why am I not creative?) is a conflict of interest, do not mix these unless you like believing in things that are just plain wrong.
These things are bigger than you and me and the person next door and there are far more important things than motivating some random person to train more. That is, frankly, peanuts compared to what is at stake." Ooh, interesting. Can you elaborate more on what you thing the "whole problem" is? What things are you talking about? What is at stake?
Let me say what my actual opinion on all this is, since you seem to be assuming a lot of intent("You are pushing...") from my 2 sentence original post. Many people ask: "why is X more creative than me?", "why is X better than me at Y?" and often the goal is not really to better understand anything about the nature of creativity but to give some justification for their perceived deficiencies. In these cases, this kind of thinking is unproductive because the explanation(something something brain connections blah blah blah) is out of their control! Exactly what you're saying with this being a "conflict of interest." And to these people I say, IF you care about being more creative, IF you care about being the best in your field: control what you control, and whatever happens happens.
"Poor people deserve to be poor" and "we shouldn't help drug addicts, its their fault" are the classic ones. The problem can be summarized as total responsibility assignment (i.e., the idea that a person is fully responsible for their state)
I'm assuming it because it's a very common problem. Discussions about nature vs nurture very often get redirected into moralism. Like this example here:
> the goal is not really to better understand anything about the nature of creativity but to give some justification for their perceived deficiencies
You're saying this as if these things are not related. If people repeatedly get the message that the only thing stopping them from being a great mathematician is hard work, that message better be correct, or there will be social consequences.
It's actually completely reasonable to question the message, and it's very problematic that in the current climate any attempt at questioning it results in a moralistic response akin to "you're just looking for excuses". This is the very kind of thinking I'm arguing against here.
> this kind of thinking is unproductive
The truth is never unproductive.
> The truth is never unproductive. Yes understanding creativity is important. I am not against the truth. But you perfectly well that I am talking about productivity with respect to these concrete goals of becoming more creative/getting better at X/etc. The "truth" that you discover from studies like this are probabilistic. X% of the study participants showed Y or we observed some correlation of Z with creativity, etc. There is no certainty that these findings apply to a specific individual. Maybe, maybe not.
You can make these statements about social structures, (possible) differences in the connections of brains of creative people(as suggested in the linked paper), etc, etc. But what is actionable out of this "truth" if you are trying to become a great mathematician? There are two responses to this. What can we do as a society? And what can I do as an individual who is toiling on this path towards a higher goal? You're concerned about the former. That is fair. I am talking about the latter.
>It's actually completely reasonable to question the message, and it's very problematic that in the current climate any attempt at questioning it results in a moralistic response akin to "you're just looking for excuses". This is the very kind of thinking I'm arguing against here. I have no way of proving this, but I would bet any amount of money that pieces like this and its like have this exact effect that you are against. I hypothesize that a majority of people reading this will walk away with the conclusion that more creative people have these innate differences in brain connectivity and then go on to surmise that the odds are stacked against them so why bother trying. And THAT is more damaging than any motivational message.
After typing all this up, I now agree with your original thesis: "We should take away from this exactly what is true, not what is motivational." In light of that, I stick to my message that you should still control the things you control in your pursuits of w/e goal it is you're pursuing b/c it is unrealistic to imagine that people will walk away from these pieces with just this "truth" - they will naturally form opinions about it and later on inform their actions with this "truth."
I think the important point is that most people can move themselves up a standard deviation or more with dedicated practice, even in areas like creativity. While they might not become geniuses, they can certainly develop quite a respectable level of talent.
Me, I have no physical talents whatsoever. But I happen to have the inclination and ability to program, so that makes sense for me to do that rather than, say, boxing.
That doesn't mean that you will not have something worth contributing. The difficult thing is to find out what that is of course!
You could be 7 foot with excellent hand-eye coordination, but with no training in basketball, a 5 foot schlub with good training will easily destroy you.
The same applies in the academic setting as well. When I was doing my PhD, I found myself trapped in exactly this kind of paralysis. I was very good at learning things, so everyone expected me to do well, but I had never created anything, and the idea that I ever could was so overwhelming and foreign that I couldn't even get started. It wasn't until a little over a year before graduating that I managed to get it together, and was lucky enough to pull it off in time.
Part of the problem is the romanticization of creativity, at least in my mind, as if it were an act of heroism or exceptional ability. On the contrary, it's mostly a matter of working and thinking and not giving up. Once you get enmeshed deeply enough in something, you stop wondering about if you're any good at it.
Reading is a great way to learn new things from different domains.
I see creativity along the same lines. Many folks are conditioned to memorize, follow processes, follow norms and paths laid by others, it may not occur to them to seek out originality. It is another form of learned helplessness.
Creating is hard, especially when judged in a commercial context. Sure, if I make my own bread it will not win a prize but I made it, it is mine and therefore special to me in ways that are not reflected by the market.
Too often emotional value is dictated by market value, with the logical conclusion being "what's the point of making when I can buy something better" -- and you may respond, that is the correct view but it misunderstands that creativity is a process, a worthy act in its own right but also a journey that may end up in interesting places that are not explored by commercial venture.