Is Talent Underrated? Making Sense of a Recent Attack on Practice

The 93% mentioned is far beyond the expectations of most. Prior to the 20th century (at least in the upper class) a child was taught every thing from Greek and Latin to water color painting without regard to 'talent'. Examine the life of Ada Augusta. While there is no doubt that she was talented, her studies were not predicated on that talent. Today most people foreclose on what they might become accomplished at because they say things like 'I can't draw a straight line' or 'whistle a note' or similar such. Again they have no understanding of just how good that 93% level is. I can't teach you to engrave as well as Rembrandt, but I can teach you to engrave as well as the majority of professionals.

Other follow-up articles, previously submitted to HN:

"Sorry, Talented, Striving Matters," by Jonathan Wai, a researcher affiliated with the Study of Exceptional Talent,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3283300

"Talent, Practice, Scientists, and Journalists: Can't We All Just Get Along?" by Scott Barry Kaufman, co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3279085

and

"Is High Ability Necessary for Greatness?" also by Scott Barry Kaufman.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576

Does skill at piano sight reading generalize to other skills?

My experience is that a greater working memory obviously helps with every mental task. I constantly run into the limits of my working memory; problems too complex to grasp.

If I immerse myself in the problem for a while (e.g. 3 days), it often becomes clear. I think that some aspects transfer into long-term memory, until what remains fits into short-term memory. Another deeper effect is when I see a new way of looking at the problem that makes it simpler; a way to divide it into parts, or layers, or aspects that can be dealt with independently.

It's frustrating to have limited working memory, but I console myself with the fundamental truth that everyone has limited working memory. A far more important ability is being able to handle problems that exceed one's working memory - with a few steps, you easily exceed the working memory of anyone. Another benefit is that this division into parts/layers/aspects is a theory of the problem, which can be transfered to others. By finding a simpler, better way to think about this problem, you can save everyone time and effort (including super-geniuses, because it frees up their working memory). Even wrap it up in a product and sell it, which saves even more. And even if a super-genius could effortlessly grasp it in working memory, he/she would have no interest in finding a simplifying theory of something already trivial, would feel no value in it if they did see it, and couldn't believe there's be any value in bringing a "solution to a non-problem" to others. It takes someone like me. And of course, the real super-geniuses end up working at their limits, same as me.

Of course, it would always be nice to have just a little bit more working memory. One reason to get enough sleep, food, exercise.

The article and the conclusions of the underlying study bring up more questions than answers for me. Such as:

1) Does the importance of talent vary by domain?

2) They show working memory matters. Does working memory matter by different amounts in different domains?

3) What other "talent" factors work across different domains?

4) To what extent does having natural talent in an area lead to the development of poor work habits (because things come so easily) and thus long-term underperformance?

I don't have answers, but I believe that drawing firm conclusions about the talent/practice question is premature.

I think the problem is the quality of the deliberation of "deliberate practice." There are metaskills, such as reason, logic, understanding of cause and effect, statistical analysis, etc. that effect the acquisition of all skills, partially through the method of improving the efficiency of memory. If you learn one skill that has five objects, consisting of two transformations of two of those objects into another two of those objects, and three relationships between those two resultant objects that result in the fifth object, you've just learned a complicated skill. But if you've learned how to find potential isomorphisms between those objects, transformations, and relationships and other objects, transformations, and relationships in the world through the use of reason, logic, understanding of cause and effect, and statistics, and how to vet them well, then each further discovery will immediately generate skills that weren't possessed before, and some of them may even be novel. Without the ability to recognize those isomorphisms, each skill would have to be learned separately, and remembered separately. It's like the difference between languages like Old English, where to pluralize a word or to create a possessive would require learning another word, and normalized languages like most of Modern English or the Romance languages where you can just apply a transformation to words that you already know. In the leap from Old English to Modern English, English speakers were given a gift of an expanded memory.

I hope that didn't sound like word salad.

Basically, if I had to get by on sheer memory, I'd be screwed, because mine is miserable. What I can do is reason to the same place under the same conditions often enough that my memory will eventually leap there out of habit. To get good results out of this requires a strong foundation that sadly both isn't formally taught or emphasized in our educational system (outside of mathematics and the hard sciences), just gleaned through the sheer effort of having to memorize an enormous amount of information. I don't deny that some genetically predetermined concentrations of proteins in the brain could give you a leg up on this, but I deny that any brain that has all of its pieces couldn't possibly outperform every other brain on this planet in any particular area.

I operate under the assumption that advances in reason will be made and distributed during millennia to come that will give the average 10 year old the equipment to understand within a day things that would have taken a person in the early 21st century a dozen lifetimes of what counts as "deliberate practice" now.

We invented language to spread information and ways to reason about that information, and it's worked. First we spoke it, then we wrote it, then we manufactured it, now we're almost bathing in it. If we manage not to 'splode ourselves within the next 100,000 years, we should be as advanced in reasoning over our current selves as our current selves are over who we were 20,000 years ago. Why 100,000? I'm assuming diminishing returns because of the discoveries that we sometimes make of walls like quantum physics, where we discover things that are even theoretically unknowable. Probably a primitive assumption:)

At this point in time, we jump to mystical theories of the undetectable secret superiority of the successful, after defining superiority as being successful (at the rate of gaining returns with practice), which is completely circular logic that discounts "deliberate practice" as a skill in itself.

The author shows that actual numbers bear this out.

</rant>

He's got a lot of other interesting articles about the dynamics of deliberate practice. Thanks for the link.

Let's say that there are 100s of unique 'traits' that correlate with talent at a complicated skill, like piano playing. And, the authors have correlated one of those traits, working memory, with better piano playing.

That's great. Does that mean I will be a great pianist if I have awesome working memory? No - I still need to practice and lots of other traits that make up that talent.

I will hypothesize that every complicated skill requires 100s of unique traits to perform that skill well. I will also hypothesize that each of us Humans have 1000s or 10000s of unique traits, and for each of these we fit onto some Normal curve.

Does that mean that we wait around to discover that we are two standard deviations from the mean on every trait that is required to accomplish a complex skill? Hell no. We try to identify the few or several traits for which we excel for that task, we emphasize those traits, and we practice.

Yes - there's no question that we are all made differently. Does that matter? It's hard to say, until we try.

Things like aptitude tests seem to test for a very narrow range of traits. And, all they do is discourage those that score poorly from pursuing skills, even if those who score poorly may have other traits that more than make up the difference.

Isn't fluid intelligence variable and hence working memory? Didn't they say that dual n-back can increase intelligence?

I wish they had an equivalent of dual n-back for motivation. I think I have always said it, people on HN don't need more intelligence; they more need to actually get things done.

The problem with motivation and anything technique related to it is you have to be motivated to execute said technique.

It's amazing the authors of the paper didn't realize they were disproving their own conclusion with their results.

I think he's dismissing the 7% too readily - to me, the conclusion you can draw is that "if you don't have talent, you'll never be the best".

I for one have always known that I am, in an irreducible way, smarter and indeed _better_ than everyone around me. I am gratified to see this empirical reality reflected in scientific literature, and see no reason to question these findings.

Talent is very important. Unfortunately, when you start saying that mere mortals not born with some innate talent for X task are destined to forever be not as good and less successful everyone throws a fit because the reality is that the majority of us just don't have that talent we crave. It implies that those without the talent won't get ahead and that's really upsetting.

I'm still on the fence as to whether to lean on the side this post takes or the original study that it's arguing against but I think this whole discussion has a lot to do with something else entirely. Please try to follow my logic here as I think it's am interesting connection.

The American Dream. The story we're told about America being a meritocracy and if we just work hard enough we'll all make it. This myth is pounded into all US born citizens from the time we're first enrolled in school and maybe earlier. But unfortunately this isn't true. In America, if you work really hard you'll get whatever crumbs your masters decide to give you. Power is inherited and not earned more often than not and it's rare that someone breaks out of the ranks and really shakes up the system.

So when you imply that talent counts more than hard work it shakes you to your core because of the popular belief that you can do anything if you just try hard enough. But what if we're wrong to refute this? What if talent really does matter more? Acknowledging something like this would surely do more to help you overcome that hurdle than trying to disprove it would. It's like the American Dream. Do I bitch about how it isn't fair and try to convince myself it's real or do I accept it and use my newfound understanding to find away around the problem rather than trying to convince myself it doesn't exist.

Again, I'm on the fence here but if I were to play devil's advocate and assume talent matters and practice doesn't, wouldn't that line of thought be more helpful?