Couldn't this be explained by Berkson's Paradox [0]?
[0] https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521
Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
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Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
#12> For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals. Motivation if you feel like you're young and failing
The problem being: access to a prestiges career or opportunity is generally predicated on climbing the academics achievement ladder at an increasingly early age. This leaves the more esoteric people out in the cold. If your not a true prodigy whose achievements outshine the highly credentialed you will struggle to get on.
Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
#13Seems very Taleb's Ugly Surgeon / Berkson's Paradox to me. It's like how software engineers who are at Google are worse if they're better competitive programmers.
Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
#14This sort of tracks for me. The smartest people I know as adults mostly fucked around a lot and had wide interests that all culminated in them doing a great thing greatly. The smartest people I know as kids spent hours grinding on something and crashed out in college and are mostly average well-to-dos now.
I'm reminded of a meme on Facebook my wife showed me that was a two-dimensional graph of SAT score vs. GPA. The corner with the highest SAT scores but the lowest GPAs was shaded in and labelled "These are the people I want to hang out with."
Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
#15A summary, since the paper isn't open access: https://scientificinquirer.com/2025/12/21/the-counterintuiti...
This source is shit: it doesn't grant open access.
Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
#16This sort of tracks for me. The smartest people I know as adults mostly fucked around a lot and had wide interests that all culminated in them doing a great thing greatly. The smartest people I know as kids spent hours grinding on something and crashed out in college and are mostly average well-to-dos now.
I'm reminded of a meme on Facebook my wife showed me that was a two-dimensional graph of SAT score vs. GPA. The corner with the highest SAT scores but the lowest GPAs was shaded in and labelled "These are the people I want to hang out with."
Graduated with a 1.7 GPA and a 32 on the ACT. My parents were a little dismayed.
Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
#17This sort of tracks for me. The smartest people I know as adults mostly fucked around a lot and had wide interests that all culminated in them doing a great thing greatly. The smartest people I know as kids spent hours grinding on something and crashed out in college and are mostly average well-to-dos now.
I'm reminded of a meme on Facebook my wife showed me that was a two-dimensional graph of SAT score vs. GPA. The corner with the highest SAT scores but the lowest GPAs was shaded in and labelled "These are the people I want to hang out with."
I'm not sure we should romanticize ADHD, which is what you call that region. If those people could be high SAT and high GPA they would prefer it. Signed, someone in that region.
Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
#18> For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals. Motivation if you feel like you're young and failing
from sports i know (hockey), generally the next generational player is identified when they're like 12-13 years old (earlier for Gretzky). You look at the top scorers from the Brick Tournament(9-10 year old kids play in that tournament) from 10 years ago (https://www.eliteprospects.com/league/brick-invitational/201...), 3 of the top 5 scorers were drafted in the first round, and the top goalie was Team Canada's goalie at the world juniors.
edit: went back a few more years, lots of NHLers in the top 5 in scoring in the tournament, but some years are more miss than hit.
Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
#19> For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals. Motivation if you feel like you're young and failing
from sports i know (hockey), generally the next generational player is identified when they're like 12-13 years old (earlier for Gretzky). You look at the top scorers from the Brick Tournament(9-10 year old kids play in that tournament) from 10 years ago ( https://www.eliteprospects.com/league/brick-invitational/201... ), 3 of the top 5 scorers were drafted in the first round, and the top goalie was Team Canada's goa…
Gretzky is well-known for saying he thinks kids should play multiple sports and avoid hockey in the summer, like he did (IIRC) - he mentioned soccer, etc.
Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
#20Hardly a recent discovery. This is basically the entire foreword of David Epstein's book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
The strength of analogy is one of the more powerful tools humans have. You take findings/experience from a totally different field and use it to escape the local maxima that other field is caught in. It's a relatively common theme in sciences that someone comes out of nowhere and solves a long standing problem in a field because they don't have the specialized set of biases that keeps everyone else trapped.
IMHO, it's MUCH more common in sciences though, that someone that is expert-level in one field comes into another and thinks they CAN solve a long standing problem in that field quite easily, and then repeatedly falls into all the pitfalls / traps that others in that field learned long ago to avoid (aka Dunning-Kruger). You know, "chemistry is just applied physics", "biology is applied chemistry", etc.. Sure, it's true in one sense, but... No one calculates the wave function of an elephant, for example.
One of the benefits of generalism / learning multiple fields (IMHO, again) is that you realizes that special abilities / skills don't necessarily translate well from one field to another. For example, learning to play the violin is very different from, say, playing billiards, yet becoming good at either one involves learning subtle manipulations of basically similarly-shaped pieces of wood. By involvement in multiple fields, you learn to be careful NOT to bring your "everything is a nail" mentality with you from one field to the next.