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Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

science.org

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Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

#41

Post by nradov »

Mgtyalx wrote: post #12
truted2 wrote: post #8

> 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.

In the tech industry, some of the people with the most prestigious careers are literally college dropouts. There are many paths to success, not all are linear.

Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

#42

Post by nradov »

idiotsecant wrote: post #31
esseph wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about ADHD?

That's who lives in that region, almost exclusively.

Nah. There are plenty of intelligent students who don't have ADHD but are either lazy or rebellious enough to not care about conventional measures of academic success.

Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

#43

Post by akoboldfrying »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #11

Couldn't this be explained by Berkson's Paradox [0]? [0] https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521

Berkson's Paradox seems to rely on the selection criteria being a combination of the two traits in question -- in the example I keep reading about, only "famous" actors are selected, and actors can be famous if they are either highly talented or highly attractive. But in TFA, surely the "high performance" selection filter applies only to the adult performance level?

To put it another way: If selection was restricted to people who performed highly in either their youth or in adulthood (or both), Berkson's Paradox explains the result. If selection was restricted to people who performed highly in their youth, or if selection was restricted to people who performed highly in adulthood, Berkson's doesn't explain it.

Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

#44

Post by DataDaoDe »

Clicking on this link just reminded me again that science (like all such restricted access journals) is an operation that relies heavily on publicly funded research and unpaid academic labor.

And yet their access restriction not only removes the public from consuming the fruits of their labor, but it also systematically harms less well-resourced institutions, independent scholars and impedes the spread of knowledge (particularly in areas of the world that need it most).

I wish we could reach a point where we wouldn't allow this anymore.

Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

#46

Post by iainctduncan »

One interesting reason this happens, at least in the music field, is the adult disadvantages that often go along with various forms of savantism. I have spoken with a number of fellow music academics about this, and it's not uncommon that the things that make one a young prodigy are the same things that give one real obstacles to making it in the regular world, and this can impose a ceiling on where they get to. For example, many music prodigies have never "really had to work" and once they get to having to shoulder the boring reponsibilities that go with building a career, they instead alienate people, or just can't do things that are hard for them because it's always been easy. Maybe they can't play off charts unless they've heard it, or aren't used to following instructions/cues/being the lead, etc. And unless they are truly, truly rare air, real career gigs have boring work elements too.

Savantism can be pretty damned weird. I've known a few, including a couple who will never have an adult career beyond local gigs because of their mental disabilities in other, non-music areas. The Oliver Sacks book "Musicophelia" has fascinating case stories about it.

Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

#47

Post by jongjong »

arjie wrote: post #13

Seems 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. e.g. https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/taleb-surgeon/

Makes sense. My perspective is that fast learners are fast because they absorb information quickly without the overhead of cross-domain synthesis. They have more logical contradictions in their minds which they haven't resolved or aren't even aware of. Their worldview is not coherent as a whole. In some cases, they don't have a worldview; instead they just rely on expert data to inform their decisions... But the experts themselves are often victim to the same kind of domain-specific tunnel vision. Such people often lack creativity in their work because cross-domain pattern synthesis is precisely how you can solve complex problems that haven't been solved before.

Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

#48

Post by MontyCarloHall »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #43
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #11

Couldn't this be explained by Berkson's Paradox [0]? [0] https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521

Berkson's Paradox seems to rely on the selection criteria being a combination of the two traits in question -- in the example I keep reading about, only "famous" actors are selected, and actors can be famous if they are either highly talented or highly attractive. But in TFA, surely the "high performance" selection filter applies only to the adult performance level? To put it another way: If selection was restricted…

>Berkson's Paradox seems to rely on the selection criteria being a combination of the two traits in question

100% correct. For traits x and y, selecting for datapoints in the region x + y > z will always yield a spurious negative correlation for sufficiently uncorrelated data, since the boundary of the inequality x + y > z is a negatively sloping line.

>But in TFA, surely the "high performance" selection filter applies only to the adult performance level?

Doesn't seem that way. Reading the full paper [0], they say:

   In sports, several predictor effects on early junior performance and on later senior world-class performance are not only different but are opposite. [...] The different pattern of predictor effects observed among adult world-class athletes is also evident in other domains. For example, Nobel laureates in the sciences had slower progress in terms of publication impact during their early years than Nobel nominees. Similarly, senior world top-3 chess players had slower performance progress during their early years than 4th-to 10th-ranked senior players, and fewer world top-3 than 4th- to 10th-ranked senior chess players earned the grandmaster title of the International Chess Federation (FIDE) by age 14.
It really does seem they took the set of people who were either elite as a kid, elite as an adult, or both, and concluded that this biased selection constitutes a negative correlation.

[0] https://www.kechuang.org/reader/pdf/web/viewer?file=%2Fr%2F3...

Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

#49

Post by Strilanc »

Wasn't this study immediately debunked due to bad statistical methods? See https://zenodo.org/records/18002186

> Using simple simulations,we show that this pattern arises naturally from collider bias when selection into elitesamples depends on both early and adult performance. Consequently, associationsestimated within elite samples are descriptively accurate for the selected population,but causally misleading, and should not be used to infer developmental mechanisms

Re: Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

#50

Post by gmadsen »

jongjong wrote: post #47
arjie wrote: post #13

Seems 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. e.g. https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/taleb-surgeon/

Makes sense. My perspective is that fast learners are fast because they absorb information quickly without the overhead of cross-domain synthesis. They have more logical contradictions in their minds which they haven't resolved or aren't even aware of. Their worldview is not coherent as a whole. In some cases, they don't have a worldview; instead they just rely on expert data to inform their decisions... But the expe…

That is a very idealistic perspective. There are certainly fast learners due to the fact they are faster at cross domain synthesis.
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