Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

This is a case where I really doubt that the studies referenced in the article were rigorous/well controlled. There are WAY too many talent "hot zones" (small training clubs that produce an extremely inordinate number of champions) for me to be swayed without iron-clad evidence to the contrary.

The author talks about being motivated, but I don't think she really understands the scale of motivation. Mozart would typically play until his fingers bled, and they grew somewhat deformed from the volume of playing as a youth. When he wasn't playing, I'm willing to bet he was thinking about or somehow otherwise engaged with music. That is the kind of passion that makes a true master.

The author also talks about her teacher being good. Compared to what? How many music teachers did she have? If teaching ability is normally distributed, even if she had 20 teachers (extremely doubtful), the best teacher in the country is probably two standard deviations above anyone she had in skill. That is a freaking huge difference.

Outside of certain things like being a gymnast or a football lineman where body morphology is absolutely critical, I'm pretty sure talent is overrated. The exact amount of influence it exerts certainly depends on the activity, but I doubt in most cases that it exceeds 2-3 percentile point shift in absolute potential. Unfortunately, when you are at the highest level of competition (e.g. olympics) the spread is probably somewhere between 99.9 and 99.999, so someone at 96.9 isn't going to be competitive.

You say the author must be wrong because of lack of compelling evidence, and then you propose the opposite without any evidence. Why does it have to be confirmed either way? Why can't you admit you just don't know?

It seems to me that by going into things with the idea that you know something that you don't is just limiting your own ability to discover new information about it. Reality is a complicated landscape. By simplifying every question into a predefined yes or no, you are providing a disservice to yourself, and by espousing it vehemently enough so that others believe you, you are also providing them with a disservice.

End of rant.

Talent is definitely a thing, morphology of the brain is absolutely relevant. Unfortunately most of us confuse great skill with innate talent, hence these endless articles. There are people out there with whom we simply cannot compete regardless of how much hard work we put in. They have advantages over the rest of us that we won't be able to overcome.

Variability of brain structures is even more dramatic than visible physical variability in human beings. With visible traits, you have people who are 4'5" tall and those who are 7' tall. Within the brain the differences of the areas responsible for different functions are much greater: competing against someone with the right combination of brain structures is like an average person competing with a 60' tall basketball player. IIRC there are something like 50 different areas of the brain that are continuously being permuted in size with each next generation. If you get incredibly lucky and get just the right combination of areas that reinforce each other in a certain task (e.g. hand / eye coordination, spatial visualization etc.) you might be a genius.

What's fascinating is that we are terrible at finding cognitive geniuses because we have no way yet (or desire) to accurately scan one's brain before death. We most likely fail to detect most geniuses that are born by forcing them to do stuff that doesn't leverage their superior internal hardware. The fact is that there are a few incredibly rare specimens out there, the Michael Phelpses, Grigori Perelmans, Ramanujans, George Soroses of their respective mental fields, and no amount of hard work will help one compete against them in whatever area they excel in. However, they're also so rare that it's pointless to optimize "best practices" for their cases, the vast majority of us will need a ton of quality practice to become good.

It appears that these lucky hands are dealt across all races, so IMO the ratial aspect of this is not as important. What's going to be less acceptable to society is being able to know pretty early on (in your later teens actually, when brain development mostly concludes) that someone is not actually that talented. At least early on the elite and the tiger parents will be quite disappointed to find out that their kid is actually not really that gifted or special and might be better off having a very menial career. Sure, you can still try to paint, compose, advance the state of mathematics, but once we're able to consistently identify people who will be naturally 10x better than you at that, you going for it will be a waste of time for society as a whole.

That statement doesn't align with what I'd learned studying physical anthropology. That is, Almost all genetic adaptations that have been observed across Homo Sapiens have been environmental physical adaptations.

I'm not saying that it's wrong - just that I didn't learn it that way (But, I could have went to college too long ago).

Being a "professor at a music conservatory in Russia" does not necessarily say much about how good of a music teacher this person was. Especially in a competitive field like concert piano. There are probably thousands of people who studied piano from a teacher who was a professor at a music conservatory in Russia. They can't all become world-class.

Ericsson's research stresses "deliberate" practice and previous criticisms of his research were based on studies of just practice - but not specifically "deliberate" practice. It's not just 10,000[1] hours of practice... it's 10,000 hours of practice the right way and ideally with an effective teacher. I admit those caveats make it harder to study his claims in a research environment, but it also doesn't mean research based only on total time practicing disprove his research.

[1] And I know it's not really 10,000 hours. Using that metric to make a comparison.