Because right now nootropics (pills that make you smarter) don't actually work and performance enhancing drugs shorten your lifespan and damage your health in various different ways. Furthermore based on the way drug discovery goes you're not likely to go off and invent a safe and effective version of either of those.

That means that for now, a philosophically resigned stance combined if you're contributing to research with curiosity to motivate you rather than an expectation of any results, is the most appropriate stance as far as anyone knows.

I suspect that there is some overgeneralization going on with the term "talent". We see something that is hard for us and we immediately throw it in the same bag. Even if there can be some better explanation. There is a lot of micro abilities that goes into any complex thing and if You skip on any of is it can change things from easy to impossible. Just look at any disabled person - and compare how hard is for them to do easy things - I believe that the same is going on with Your comparison to talented people - You just do not see those micro abilities that are compounded to create illusion of talent.

Try any sport and see how some new people come in and start at a level that others won’t achieve even after years. This makes you believe in talent quickly.

With physical abilities this is more accepted but I don’t see a reason why mental capabilities would be any different. Some people just have more powerful brains by birth. You can achieve a lot by exercise and discipline but some people can achieve higher levels than others.

easier to learn as a kid

You don't actually know this. I acknowledge it might be true but it also might not. How do you know what you're calling brilliance isn't a different kind of study, for example? Feynman suggests he got a buzz out of puzzles his whole life from a very early age and sought them out. With his local reputation among family, friends, school others brought them to him as well. He did inter-school stand-up math competitions, if I remember that story correctly, and described how he learned to "relax into the solution" not try to force it but look at it in a different way until it just all falls out and so on.

Then he also studied math and then won the Putnum. How would he have gone without doing all that "non-study" about problem solving and looking at problems from different ways and just doing math quite well? Maybe he was so brilliant he still would have won? I suspect not. How many others sitting for the Putnum had done similar amounts of the same quality work by way of preparation?

Genius? Or learned and honed? Both? In what proportions? Whatever I think about it is "Just like my opinion, man." Right?

Well if you consider him brilliant then perhaps you would believe him when he says that talent isn't nearly as important as studying.

I'm not sure those things have ever been controlled.

I have been around many many many smart people. So many of them seem naturally gifted. It's effortless how easily they solve things. But if you hang around long enough, it's also impressive when they reveal their magic: they just used so-and-so's technique from some discipline I've never heard of. Oh. Of course! How easy, when you put it that way.

How long did it take them to read, digest, and master all those techniques? Hard to say. Nobody followed them around with a stopwatch 24x7x365 for years.

So, lacking data, I fall back to antecdotes. I personally know very intimately a handful of valedictorian smartest person in the room type people. The kind that everyone knows is just naturally smart. I know their family life intimately. I know that none of it came without enormous time and effort.

We have the testimony of the man himself about the price he paid. I'd be interested in anyone at his level in any endevour who claimed they were just born with it.

I do believe that different people are born with different abilities. But I have seen those "smartest person in the room" people fail elementary math, then spend 100s of hours drilling flash cards to master simple arithmetic tables. I have seen them with reading (I hate the word disabilities) challenges spend 10 years reading 100s of books, then get perfect scores on college entrance exams. I have seen in person some poor child spend 3 hours every single night for a year to master 5 spelling words a week. Just to be average. Then have people think they were born knowing the dictionary.

I believe that if you randomly choose any 20 students from any elementary school in the United States and let me select 10 people from that group, then subject them to what I have seen... those students will graduate high school with perfect grades and nearly perfect standardized test scores. I am certain of it. But I do not condone doing such a thing.

Of course, that doesn't make them Feynman. But I believe Feynman when he says that he was once ordinary and that time and effort transformed him.