> factual

Nope. Just because it says so in a book doesn't make it true. When you make a statement of the form "X does not exist", a single counter-example is sufficient to prove you wrong. Lucky for me, many such counter-examples exist, and many have even been discussed in this thread. I'll add one to the list: tourist (Gennady Korotkevich). He's a competitive coder that's several orders of magnitude (e.g. 1000x) better at coding competitions than the average competitor. And the average competitor is a few orders of magnitude better than the average professional programmer who doesn't have algorithm experience. All of this is measurable (at most we can quibble about whether the skill differences are 100x or 10000x or infinite). If you don't believe me, please go and take a simulated Codeforces competition right now and see how long it will take you to solve some set of problems that tourist solved in under 2 hours (or if you will be able to solve them at all - I certainly won't be able to solve the hardest Codeforces div1 problems no matter how much time I put in).

I have a feeling this mountain of empirical evidence was insufficient to change your mind about this. I would appreciate if you could take the time to explain why? Why is this evidence not enough?

I think you’re missing the point or I was unclear. The point is not that masters at a skill don't exist. The point is that attributing their skill mostly to something innate rather than practice, study, etc is not supported by the body of research they review in the book (the book is written for a general audience, their academic research supports the arguments in the book).

There is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. No matter how much you or I would practice, study, etc. we would never become as good as tourist. Most people reach their plateau in competitive coding within 1 year.

For example, here's my Codeforces profile: https://codeforces.com/profile/baobab

Started in 2015, plateau'd in 2016 and no measurable improvement from subsequent 3 years of practice and study.

is it at all possible that practice and study are insufficient to create further growth? What I think faizshah is talking about is that there is enormous complexity that goes into creating skill.

what sort of community do you leverage for their knowledge? how frequently do you expose yourself to new ideas? do you practice abstraction in places other than code? do you practice effectively and take notes that you review? keep a journal? meditate? are you in good cardiovascular shape?

all of these are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to contributing factors. a plateau is a sign of stagnant processes.

I apologize in advance for what I'm sure is a frustrating tone. I'm sympathetic to your situation.

> is it at all possible that practice and study are insufficient to create further growth? What I think faizshah is talking about is that there is enormous complexity that goes into creating skill.

Sure there is enormous complexity and many factors that go into creating skill, but that's a generic claim, whereas faizsah was making some specific claims. In particular, they were claiming that talent does not exist (or "innate ability" is not a significant contributor to creation of skill, if you want to phrase it more softly). There is a mountain of evidence to show that innate ability is one of the largest differentiating factors between "masters" at a skill compared to "normal people" who practice that skill.

> a plateau is a sign of stagnant processes.

Nope, there are limits to achievable skill. If I practice height jumping, I'm going to plateau pretty quickly and make only incremental improvements even with the best of processes. Same goes for mental pursuits like competitive programming as well.

... And the limits are personal, and can vary immensely, unfair as it might be. Some people high jump 2.45 meter, or design a spaceship that flies to the moon, whilst most people couldn't do this in a thousand lifetimes

Usually, though, people don't do something for long enough to get close to their limits, so, generally in life, all this doesn't matter that much, does it.

And to keep trying and doing what one enjoy is good advice :-)

Chess is another example -- two people, the same amount of practice, can yield vastly different results

Thanks for the Codeforces link :-) didn't know about

> we would never become as good as tourist.

Huh, "tourist"? Typo for "Turing"?

No, not a typo. "tourist" is Gennady Korotkevich, I explained this upthread.

Ah, gotcha, found it now. Sorry, I'd missed that, and was thoroughly confused by the pseudonym.