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Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

> Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.

That's just not true. I will never be an Alan Turing or a John von Neumann, and I dare say neither will you, dear reader. The reason isn't that we're just too lazy.

See also the legend (myth?) of Antonio Salieri's jealousy of Mozart's natural talent:

When confronted with the limitations of his own mediocre talent, Antonio Salieri, Mozart's nemesis, believes God has cheated him, while a vulgar, undeserving brat seems to possess divinely inspired musical gifts.

(Taken from https://www.oakpark.com/News/Articles/2-17-2009/Mozart-vs.-S... )

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> > Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.

> That's just not true. I will never be an Alan Turing or a John von Neumann, and I dare say neither will you, dear reader.

The author doesn't claim this either. I believe he means that you shouldn't discount how much you can improve yourself.

Which would be solid advice, but he put there is no limit. That's the part I'm questioning.

You'll never get anywhere without self-improvement, of course, but there's no sense pretending we can all be a prodigy like von Neumann - whose natural intelligence was shocking even to the top professors of his day - if we just work hard enough.

There very much is a limit, but one need not be deluded to be motivated or successful.

edit Perhaps the point is meant to be read as 'you can always improve yourself further', rather than 'there is no ceiling on your abilities'. Which seems far more reasonable.

There is no limit on your ability to improve yourself, but the effect can be described as a log function.

A sublinear function seems like the way to model it, but even log(x) will eventually reach a very high value. Even if I could live forever, I'd never reach von Neumann's intelligence.

Better to use a function that tends toward an asymptote, such as 1 - 1/(x+1)

> Even if I could live forever, I'd never reach von Neumann's intelligence

Forever is a long time ...

I mean, things rather fall down in the extreme case. If my brain is spared the ravages of time, we could say I'm guaranteed to continue to close the gap as time passes, but I don't think this is a helpful way to look at things.

In reality, there are limits to what you can do with a trained ape. An usually long-lived ape doesn't much help you. I suspect the same applies here.

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